[RAQemUP]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Earwax /img/forum/go_quote.gif I was hoping there was one clear consensus choice...

HAH, This is HEADFI! The whole point is to make everyone feel overwhelmed with just 2 or 3 choices. And when it is narrowed down to those 2 or 3 choices, you see the fanboy supportors for each one show up praising them to no end, and usually with no faults too. Thus making the person pick 1 of the choices and becoming a fanboy themselves, or they eventually buy all the narrowed down choices in a fit of welcome-to-headfi-sorry-about-your-wallet-syndrome that happens to everyone here usually at one point.

Too be fair though, most people in this thread did mention CDex as the prefered freebie Windows program. It really is simple to use once you have it set up the ripping options.

 

[Earwax]

Quote:

Originally Posted by RAQemUP /img/forum/go_quote.gif Too be fair though, most people in this thread did mention CDex as the prefered freebie Windows program. It really is simple to use once you have it set up the ripping options.

I used CDEX years ago. It doesn't look like much has been updated since then. I may as well stick with EAC in that case, it works and I know how to set it up, whereas I've forgotten how to set up CDEX and it's not immediately obvious.

J. River and Media Monkey were more of what I had in mind, with file management and syncing thrown in, in addition to ripping.

 

[elmohut]

If she's never had an MP3 player, and I'm assuming she's using the stock buds, I'll also assume she's not an audiophile. In this case Windows Media Player will be fine, and will not introduce the "hassle" of installing and learning additional software.

 

[Snake]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Earwax /img/forum/go_quote.gif Media Monkey looks pretty cool. I know DbPowerAmp was a good product years ago, I'll have to take a fresh look at it.

I'm using it, after using iTunes (on a friend's system) and Samsung's. Media Monkey is very good with two exceptions: managing tags and deleting tracks. Sometimes tags are not correctly updated from Yahoo and correcting them is a royal pain, sometimes bloody impossible, and many times deleting albums to rerip does not correctly remove the album links from other parts of the database (removing it from the "Album Artists" database sometimes does not delete it from "Album" database, for example), making the re-rep pretty much impossible to correct accomplish until you remove all old database references and, sometimes, compact. But now that I am used to this bug I simply keep an eye out for it.

 

[walkingman]

dbpoweramp, so easy even my 70-year old grand aunt can use it.

 

[ARwCoco]

I still use the software that came with my Creative Zen Nano.

Easy, fast, variable bit rate, etc

I stay away from Windows Media Player

YMMV

 

[linuxworks]

I'm curious - anyone here use the actual real fraunhofer mp3 encoder? I mean 'mp3enc31'.

I had a chance to buy a copy in 1998 or so and I've been nursing it thru all my o/s upgrades (its actually a linux 'a.out' style binary!) all these years.

I have not found a better 128k encoder yet. shame they stopped selling to end users about 10 yrs ago ;( the command line version (that I use) is batchable and I can deploy it on clusters for parallel work, no problem.

slow as molasses, though. but it really encodes as good as you can get for 128k (still matters for portables with limited memory/disk/flash).