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CD Ripping
by Alan German
Many newer
vehicle models have the capability of playing music files
from a USB drive plugged into an accessory port. And,
most of us have extensive collections of music CD’s
that we used to play in our vehicle’s CD player. The
problem with the latter process was always how to store
multiple CD’s in the car so that we didn’t get
bored with the same old selection. Today’s
huge-capacity USB drives will solve that problem –
if only we can transfer the files from our CD’s onto
a USB disk.
What we need is a CD ripper – a program to extract
the individual music tracks from a CD, convert them to
MP3 format, and store them on a disk. Enter FairStars CD
Ripper – a simple, yet powerful piece of software to
do precisely that.
Install the
program, put a music CD in the computer’s drive, and
run the CD ripper. Press the “Query” button,
press “OK” in the “Querying Freedb”
dialogue box, and all of the information about the CD and
the tracks it contains is displayed in the program
window. FairStars uses the freeDB.org web site to obtain
the relevant data. All of the CD’s that I have tried
to date have had entries in this database so that the
process of cataloguing the individual tracks is fully
automatic.
There is a built-in help system, but the program’s
operation is pretty well self-explanatory. The output
file type can be set through a drop-down menu, with the
MP3, OGG, VQF, FLAC, APE, WMA, and WAV file types all
being supported. Browse through the computer’s file
system to select a folder for the output files. A variety
of data fields (e.g. track number, track title, etc.) to
be used in the output filenames can be selected through a
drop-down menu. The resulting selection can be further
edited to customize the final filename format. A
“Preview” button displays a list of the
filenames for the tracks on the CD as they will be named
in the output folder. The program even has a set of
playback controls to let you listen to any selected track
from the CD before it is extracted.
Once you are satisfied with the results, press the
‘Extract” button and the program goes in to
action, creating the set of audio files in the specified
coded format. Now it’s simply a matter of copying
the newly-minted tracks to (a folder on) a USB drive.
The beauty of this system is that you can now have dozens
of “CD’s” available in your vehicle and,
if any given track goes south, you still have the
original CD from which you can make a replacement copy.
And – best of all – you can’t scratch
USB’s!
Bottom Line:
Fairstars CD Ripper (Freeware)
FairStars Soft
Version 1.80
http://www.fairstars.com/cdripper/
Originally published: November, 2014
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