Sean Henderson Dot Com

Free Scholarship Guide

Question: What’s an easy way to rip audio CDs into MP3s?
by Shawn Schroeder

Answer:
by Sean Henderson

Use Audiograbber 1.83.  It’s free, and its easy.

Step 1: Install Audiograbber 1.83

Step 2: First Time Preparation

The first time you run Audiograbber, there are some things you should setup first before ripping.  Once you have set up these settings, you will never have to do them again.  In the future, you will just start with Step 3.

First, tick the checkbox by the MP3 button.

Next, click the MP3 button to open up the MP3 Settings dialog. Use the following settings:

• Tick the option Direct Rip and Encode MP3 file
• Tick the checkbox for Use ID3v1Tag
• Tick the checkbox for Internal Encoder
• Select from the dropdown Lame DLL Version…(whatever it says)
• Change the bitrate to Variable Bitrate
• Choose ABR (Average) from the method dropdown
• Drag the bitrate slider over to 192Kbit/s
• Click OK to save the settings.

The MP3 Settings box should look something like this:

Now go to the General Settings dialog by either clicking the settings button, or going to the Settings menu> General Settings. The most important part here is to make sure CD Rom unit is set to the correct drive that you plan on ripping your CDs from.  Other than that, I only changed four things from their defaults:

• Untick the box for Artist name
• Tick the checkboxes for both Artist as directory and Album as directory.
• Change the directory to store files in, to C:Documents and SettingsAdministratorMy DocumentsMy Music, where Administrator is whatever your username is in Windows XP.  If you’re not sure, just leave it as C:audiograbber.

The General Settings box should look something like this:

Step 3: Rip the Audio CD to MP3

Insert an audio CD into your CD-Rom.  Click the Refresh button if the CD doesn’t automatically show the tracks.

Once the tracks show up, you’ll see a list of Track 1, Track 2, Track 3, …, Track n for all the tracks on the audio CD.  Click the Freedb button (has a penguin on it) to connect to the Freedb database which automatically renames all the tracks to their appropriate titles.  In this way, you’ll have real song names instead of a bunch of track1.mp3, track2.mp3, track3.mp3… crap.

If Freedb successfully found the audio CD in its database, then you should have a list of song titles from the album.  In my example, I put in Pantera’s 101 Proof album.

Click the Grab! button to begin ripping!  This is it, and you’re basically done.  Wait for the CD to fully rip.

This is just a quick and easy way to make mp3s.  I’d be interested in hearing other peoples’ ideas regarding this topic for anyone who either disagrees, or has found a superior method.