I had a CD drive driver that would make windows explorer show CD audio discs as folders for quality levels, and then the tracks as files. Pick the ones you wanted, drag them somewhere, and get PCM wav files of the tracks. Encode them at your leisure. I miss that utility.
Something command line based on Linux that produced mp3. I don’t remember the name.
Alcohol 120%
Nice, that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time!
I remember using CDParanoia on Linux and some GUI for it (Sound Juicer?), CDex and Exact Audio Copy.
Whoa. Blast from the past.
My only objection is '00’s
Infants
CloneCD
Every time I think back I picture Winamp. And sure enough I looked it up and Winamp could rip tracks and the UI is exactly what I remember
So: Winamp
Nero(n) burning ROM(e)
Later K3B.
Oh my god, how could I not have seen that. Now the icon makes sense too.
I had this kind of revelation like 2days ago when I woke up to go to the toilet, drink some water and sleep again. I don’t even know exactly why this thought came to me, it was a big discovery. Wanted to make a showerthought or til post, but never made. What a cool fun fact.
(Also it’s even more amazing the fact that someone made a post about cd rippers here (on an already obscure platform) and both you and I read this post. Wow.)
Edit: I recently found K3B as I’m in the process of moving to NixOS from win10. Seems like a good program.
Same
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.
Winamp. Still do.
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!
CDex
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
That’s the one. It would pull data from online so you wouldn’t have to enter all the track names.
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.
Fooobar2000
Still have so many flac files from that.
Foob is the best audio player/tagger/ripper/converter ever
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?
Ah. I think I was thinking of the Elby name.
cdparanoia. Still do.
