Rip Music CDs With Audiograbber
Audiograbber is a free program for Microsoft Windows devices that you may use to rip music and audio CDs to the local system.
Ripping music CDs is still something that many computer users do from time to time even with declining music CD sales.
Audiograbber is a CD ripping software for Windows that offers a comparable functionality to all time favorite applications for that task such as CDex or BonkEnc.
It can be used to load audio CDs, lookup information on the online database Freedb so that audio track information are automatically added to the audio tracks, and rip the music to the local computer system in mp3 format.
Audiograbber supports several mp3 encoders including Lame and BladeEnc which are both linked on the program's download page in case they are not installed on the user system.
Audiograbber
The options of the program are pretty extensive. It is possible to edit the CD-ROM access method, naming patterns for the extracted audio tracks and directories, enable automatic deletion of leading and trailing silence, normalization, change the output format to wav, alter quality settings, configure external mp3 encoders and to edit tags directly in the interface.
It is furthermore possible to play audio tracks directly in Audiograbber which can be handy to fine tune the resulting mp3 or wav files.
Audiograbber can be downloaded directly from the developer's website. It is compatible with most Windows operating systems including Windows 7 and 64-bit editions.
Update: Audiograbber is as easy to use as CDex. All you need to do is to insert an audio CD into a CD drive on your PC and wait for the listing to be populated by the program. You may need to click on the Refresh button if that takes to long.
All audio tracks are then displayed in the program interface. You can preview tracks right in the program interface, or extract select ones or all of them to your computer.
The extra features that Audiograbber supports don't need to be configured, but they may improve the output of the ripped audio files.
It is usually only necessary to modify settings once, as they carry over across sessions.
Closing Words
Audiograbber is an easy to use feature-rich CD ripper for Windows. The main issue that you may experience is that you need an mp3 plugin for the ripping. Links are provided to those on the Audiograbber website.
where on my computer does Audiograbber store my ripped cds?
Yeah, I remember the other shareware version ‘audiocatalyst’ which I used a lot before switching to Musicmatch 6.1 because it seemed to have better CD identification or something…
I remember the time when Audiograbber was not freeware yet and without registration the program would only let you rip certain tracks of a CD (randomly chosen), so you had to close and reopen the program multiple times until you were able to rip them all.
Nowadays I also think that EAC is the way to go.
I switched to foobar2000 for mp3, ogg, and flac. I researched the optimal settings, and they were all se to the default on foobar. You need to load the compression apps, but that is easy (except for the nero acc or m4a (whatever) one… I had to hunt that one down).
I second Exact Audio Copy, not for its FLAC compatibility, but for its routines to try to overcome read errors (which are extremely common) and its integration with a AccurateRip (or something like that) that checks CRC’s to make sure you’ve ripped a track exactly.
Wow, this is the first program I used originally to rip my mp3’s, glad to see it’s still around today!
While using Audiograbber for many years, the program has been great. But unfortunately it isn’t updated anymore. I have moved on to Exact Audio Copy, mainly because of its easy support for FLAC, and got tired of having Audiograbber crash on me in the middle of a rip. It could be because i’m running 64-bit, but who knows why, since it only happened randomly.
In other words, Audiograbber is a good old program to do what it says it will do, but I think EAC is much more advanced