2015-05-07
DON'S FREEWARE CORNER 2015-05
FAIRSTARS CD RIPPER
©2015 Donald R. Snow
These Freeware notes are published in TAGGology, our Utah Valley
Technology and Genealogy
Group (UVTAGG) monthly newsletter, and are posted on http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html
where there may be updates, corrections, or additions.
RIPPING CD's
Ripping a CD means copying it digitally. The tracks of most
commercial music CD's are in the file format .cda (CD Audio), which is
only one of several standard CD formats. Commercial CD's are
made by pressing holes in the plastic, whereas "homemade" CD's are done
by burning the holes in the plastic with a laser beam.
Commercial CD's, in general, last much longer than laser-burned
CD's. Sometimes when you own a CD, you want to make a copy to
listen to on an mp3 player or something similar. That's one
reason for ripping your CD's to your computer, so you will have a
digital copy that you can copy to a flashdrive or an mp3 player,
etc. Another reason is so that you can put the CD away and
not get it scratched, but still listen to the music via the ripped
version. It is illegal to copy commercial CD's and sell them
or even give them away.
FAIRSTARS CD RIPPER
There are lots of CD ripper programs, many of them free. A CD
player, that is also a ripper and that I have found works well and is
able to even copy CD's that are badly scratched, is called FAIRSTARS CD
RIPPER. You can download it for free from -- http://www.fairstars.com/cd_ripper/index.html
. There are versions for Windows 7 and 8, both 32 and 64 bit
operating systems, and it has received various awards. It
seems to be able to play and copy CD tracks that other programs can't
due to physical imperfections. It allows ripping in several
formats, e.g. wma, wav, and mp3. I usually rip CD's
to the highest quality copies for archiving, e.g. wav, and then, if I
want it for an mp3 player, I make the mp3 from the good quality
copy. FAIRSTARS queries the online Free CD Database
to get the exact information (artists, track title, length, album name,
etc.) for the CD and includes it in the metadata of the copy.
You can select the order you want for the data in the track titles, so
you can find them the way you are used to looking for them. I
usually put the track number first and include the album name and
artist in the title so they all show up in the searches with the
freeware program EVERYTHING available from http://www.voidtools.com/
. Then searching my computer for the artist or song title
brings up all such songs. Before you rip the CD you can
preview the final result to see if it is the way you want.
USING FAIRSTARS CD RIPPER
On the program itself there are tutorials under the Help
menu. To rip a CD insert it into your CD drive and open
FAIRSTARS. You will see the CD album name, artists, track
titles, length of each track, etc., in the program and you can play any
or all the tracks, if you want. There is a Query
button to click to have it check the website http://www.freedb.org/
for updated information, if needed. This database
has information on a great many CD's and is being updated all the
time. I have found very few CD's not in it. For
those not in it, I have had to type in the album name, artist, track
titles, etc., myself. The options allow you to query other
online CD databases, but I have never used any other CD
database. Even if FAIRSTARS has found the album data, you can
edit any of this data by right clicking on it, should you want
to. Clicking the Preview button will show how the labeling of
the final ripping will appear, so you can decide if you want the
information in the titles to be in a different order or if you don't
want some of it there at all. You can select the type of copy
you want, and I usually use .wma for the archive copy. For
the location of where to put the ripped files click on the Output
folder and select the folder or select New Folder and give it a
name. I file my music CD's by Artist > Album Title
> Tracks, so, for example, all 20 tracks of Benny Goodman's Past
Perfect album Stompin' At The Savoy are in the folder "CD's-wma/Benny
Goodman/Stompin' At The Savoy/". You can edit any of the
track data even after the ripping, if you want. The genre is
selected automatically, e.g. classical, jazz, blues, country-western,
Christmas, etc., but you can select a different one, if you
prefer. When everything, including the location for the copy,
is set the way you want, click on Extract and it starts
ripping. An entire CD only takes a minute or two and then you
have a good quality copy on your machine and all words in the track
titles are searchable, so you can find them easily. The
ripped CD tracks can be played using any sound player that you
want. I usually use the freeware VLC as my default music,
video, and podcast player.
MUSIC FILES
High-quality audio files take up lots of space on your hard drive, but
storage space is very cheap these days, so I don't worry much about the
space taken. For a mobile device I usually convert the wma
file to an mp3 file and those are only about one-tenth the file size of
wma's. But they are smaller at the expense of lowering the
sound quality. That is, it clips off highs and lows and makes
it less "sharp". For most uses mp3 is fine, especially for
mobile devices or poor quality equipment and in noisy
surroundings. But with good equipment and in a quiet room, I
can tell the difference even with my poor hearing, so I usually archive
better quality copies than mp3's.
CONCLUSIONS
The program FAIRSTARS CD RIPPER is only one of many free CD rippers,
but it seems to work better than the others that I have tried and it
will copy CD's that have been scratched so badly that they won't even
play with other CD players. Once you have a good quality rip
you can make yourself a new CD that will play in other
machines. However, remember that you can legally only make
copies for your own use and not to sell nor even give away.