I didn’t rip CDs but I did use StreamRipper, which was created by my officemate at the time, Jon Clegg (not the British comedian). To avoid getting sued into bankruptcy he eventually had to dissociate himself from the software after record industry lawyers sent him C&D letters - which I just now found online, holy crap! We were working together as contractors at Microsoft at the time. He was a very clever and cool guy. Hope you’re out there still kicking ass, Jon!
dMC. it might have been the first one i ‘found’, and just kept using it; up to r9, i think. after that i just used ‘whatever’ a distro had on linux or wmp on windows.
KAudio…something. It was a KDE tool that could rip and encode in parallel.
Windows Media Player did the job for me.
Same until I got an MP3 player and it didn’t know what the fuck a .wma file was. Had to re-rip them to a proper format.
Same. I was a kid. I would get CDs from the library and fill my crappy MP3 player from the files extracted from WMP. My CD collection was mostly burned library CDs. Before my parents got a PC that could burn, I would go to the neighbor’s house and get their dad to do it for me. Simpler times.
I don’t remember what it was called, but it came with a weird spongy thing that was supposed to make it easier to apply sticker labels. I was young and stupid and thought the sponge thing would also copy the label somehow.
Exact Audio Copy. Open source and guaranteed perfect copy. Most fast ones would have single bit errors.
EAC is closed source freeware. Still the best tool back then under Windows
Still is, right? (Open for recommendations)
I don’t know, haven’t been using Windows since a long time ago, but given the fact that ripping CDs isn’t that common nowadays I’d be surprised if a new tool came out that is better than EAC.
Same. EAC + LAME using config guides from NMP3s at the SomethingAwful forums, and then later Oink.
what.cd represent! This is the gold standard and if anyone is coming here for advice an what to use themselves, this is it.
CDex
I couldn’t remember but knew someone would post the name.
never used it to rip discs, but it was the very first windows program i used for recording analog inputs to convert tapes and records to digital.
That’s the one. It would pull data from online so you wouldn’t have to enter all the track names.
I’ve got a white whale album. I routinely bought CDs from a secondhand store and found some half-decent techno labeled Amixiam - Dream Frequencies. Quite possibly just some guy’s personal work, packaged with a modicum of professionalism. No internet search has ever turned up a damn thing, and I no longer live on the same continent as that thrift shop.
But then - a few years ago - I was going through old CDs, ripping them anew for modern codecs and decent bitrates. CDex filled in the track names automatically. A database recognized the disc! Someone out there had this information! And seconds later I realize that someone was me, sending the data to CDDB automatically, when I had ripped it the first time. I played a fifteen-year brick joke on myself.
That’s awesome. I used to manually enter all the info myself too whenever it wouldn’t come up, back in the day
I think I just used the ripper in MusicMatch Jukebox that came with my computer. It was only the “shareware” version, so I was limited to 96 kbps.
I still have many of those in my collection. When I throw on the actual CD or hear it in a higher/lossless format, they sound “wrong” because I’m still so used to the crappy 96kbps rips I had with me on my MP3 player for years.
On the plus side, those smaller files let me fit several more songs onto my 64 MB MP3 player from 2001 or so (it used a parallel port to transfer lol)
Didn’t Nero have this on-the-fly (as if flies could burn anything) copying or am I confusing DVD and audio here?
Yes, I remember this. But if the dvd wasn’t closed properly it would have read issues on other computers.
Audiograbber with the LAME codec. Actually still have it on my computer. I still buy the random CD now and again and rip it to my media server, and then never touch it again.
Winamp
Something about a Sheep? I don’t remember its name. Just the logo was supposed to be Dolly the Sheep (the one that was cloned).
Elby CloneCD… And how am I just realizing that’s why they used a sheep… Doh
Did they change the name eventually or was their some kind of fork of CloneCD? Because I do remember CloneCD but I also remember using another piece of software later on that was literally exactly the same with just 1 or 2 more features, but had a totally different name and used the same logo but in a different color. Could have been the DVD version, maybe… It’s been so long. 🤔
Elby (still) have a few products, with similar names and logos. I still use Virtual Clone drive sometimes to mount BIN/CUE.
Maybe CloneDVD?
That one. Was great. Software used to be fun
Nero and ImgBurn
Whoa. Blast from the past.
My only objection is '00’s
Infants
