Ripping CD's with Audiograbber and Lame.exe MP3 Encoder (Part One)

Introduction

This guide is for beginners looking to use Audiograbber for the first time with the external version of the lame mp3 encoder.

First Steps

  1. Download Audiograbber from this list of sites (TUCOWS recommended) to your desktop or another directory.
  2. Download the lame.exe from here. The latest version is 3.96.1

The Next Steps

  1. Install Audiograbber (agsetup.exe) from the location to saved it to. I suggest, if the setup does not default to it, installing in C:\Audiograbber.
  2. Using a Zip compression utility such as Winzip or Izarc (recommended) extract the lame.exe to the Audiograbber directory. You can, of course, extract the whole zip file to the directory which also includes the dll version of lame which is used as an internal encoder plus comprehensive html help. Note that you can extract the lame.exe to anywhere on your hard drive and browse to it when selecting it as an external enocder. I only recoomend extracting it into the Audiograbber directory for ease of use for beginners.
  3. You then need to adjust the settings before you can rip. These are:

Setting Up Audiograbber - Main Window

Run Audiograbber from the desktop shortcut. You will be presented with the following screen.

The screen has four menus and eight shortcut buttons.

General Settings

In the first instance we will use the Settings menu. Click on Settings>General Settings and the following dialog box will appear.

The General settings tab concerns items as the naming scheme for your files, where Audiograbber will store them and the CD Drive used for ripping. It laso covers many misc settings. This is also the place to visit should you be experiencing any major problems with Audiograbber.

Directory To Store Files In: The default is the drive where you installed Audiograbber too. Use the browse button to choose another directory such as My Music etc.

Create Filenames From: I would make your choices from the checkboxes available or use the default settings in the first instance. Once you have got used to Audiograbber and how files are named you can move to the Advanced settings.

Sub Directories: Make your selection. For example selecting all the choices ripping XTC's White Music will give you the following:

C:\Audiograbber\XTC > White Music> XTC - 01 - Radio's In Motion

CD Access Method: On most modern computers ASPI will be selected. We will ignore MSCEX and Analog for this guide. The Call Drive will default depending on your operating system. Windows 9X (95/98/ME) will default to ASPI Manager whilst Windows NT (NT4/2000/XP) will default to Win NT calls.

What is ASPI? ASPI stands for Advanced SCSI Programming Interface. Originally developed by Adaptec. It is a software layer that enables programs to communicate with SCSI (and ATAPI) devices.

According to the Audiograbber forums ASPI related issues seem to cause more problems than any other. If you have problems, such as ASPI being greyed out and only the analog access method being selected under general settings, these sites are useful to visit.

Barts Guide To ASPI

Radified's ASPI Guide

Force Aspi 1.8 (this is aspi version 4.71 - recommended for ME/2000/XP)

Force Aspi 1.7 (this is aspi version 4.60 - recommended for (95/98)

CD-ROM Unit: Select your CD Drive from the drop down list or use the default choice. The CD Unit type should also be detected i.e IDE, SCSI  etc. use the detect problems if there are any problems with your drive being detected by Audiograbber.

Rip Method: Keep the default settings. However if you find that your drive is ripping slower/faster than expected to can change the settings here.

DAE Speed: Stick with the default. Should you wish to slow down your drive whilst it is ripping you can set another speed here.

Rip as Much to RAM as Possible: This is a setting to make your rips faster. It means that there is less access time to your hard drive and more to ram which equals less total time. Use the default MB setting until you are ready to experiment.

Other Tabs

Apart from naming there are five other tabs concerning various other settings. All the default settings should be ideal but should you have any problems check General Settings under Audiograbbers help file. (I will expand this section to cover the other tabs in the future)

MP3 Settings

This is the tab where you need to select your encoding options. Select Settings>MP3 Settings or click on the toolbars MP3 icon and select External Encoder.

Grab To: There are four choices here. A Wav file will give you an identical copy of your CD track but as these are quite large you will need an encoder to compress them. Do not select this option. I personally would select "MP3 file via intermediate wav file. Delete The wav file" .

Use ID3v1 Tag: Audiograbber uses ID3 v2 tags by default which derive from the information from the titles you have entered or used freedb to enter (see freedb below). If you want to insert ID3v1 tags into your files select this option and use edit to amend your information. I would leave the default values.

What are ID3 v1 and 2 tags? ID3v2 is a tagging system that lets you put information about your audio files (name, artist, genre, title etc) within them. ID3v1 was an earlier version which does not contain as much information. However there are known problems with ID3v2 and certain mp3 decoders. I personally use ID3v1 and 1.1 just to be on the safe side after turning ID3V2 off from under the settings menu. Visit id3org for more information.

Append ID3 info to Wav File (For Future Use). You may wish to rip to wav and then use those files to convert to mp3 at a later date. Select this if you want tag information to be available for such conversions.

Rip All Tracks Before Encoding: Audiograbber rips to wav and then to mp3 one file at a time. if you wish to rip all the files to wav and then to mp3 select this option. It may be slighty faster.

Then do the following steps:

You should have a mp3 settings dialog box looking like the one below. When you're happy all is well press OK.

Normalizing

If you rip several tracks from different CD's you may have a problem with how loud each track is. For example CD's today are recorded much louder than they were five - ten years ago and when playing the resulting mp3's from these CD's you will need to adjust the volume button on playback. To bring these tracks to the same level you can normalize the files. Audiograbber has normalize functions to do this and you need to select Settings>Normalize Settings and the following dialog box will appear.

Note that we will only be concentrating on the basic functions and not the advanced normalizing options.

Select Use Normalizing and then check the but only if the track is check box. You can amend the settings in either box but the default settings should suit most users. Press OK.

Note: For mp3 files (and most other formats) I personally would not use Normalizing as this makes permanent changes to your files. I only mention Normalizing here as an introduction. I would recommend using MP3 Gain to bring your mp3 files to an average sound level. MP3 Gain applies the principles of Replay Gain and further information can be found at:

MP3 Gain

Replaygain

FreeDB

What is Freedb? Freedb is used for retrieving disc title and track names from an internet database instead of you manually enetering all the tracks for your CD. The only thing you need to do (and once only) is to specify an e-mail address which is needed when you retrieve data from Freedb. Select settings>freedb settings and enter your e-mail address in the field provided.

That's it - you are ready to rip!