I've got the Ministry of Sound 2003 Annual and I want to convert it to MP3's as it saves me getting my CD out of the rack every time I want to listen to it.

Any good program to do this for free?

Darren

 

Try CDex

 

Try CD DA

http://www.poikosoft.com/easycdda.html

Steve

 

Another vote for CDex

 

Exact Audio Copy is the best I have found, and I'm fairly certain that I've tried 'em all...

 

CDex is my weapon of choice too.

The problem will be more with choosing a good player that will handle the gaps between mixed MP3 tracks. You tend to get a slight delay between tracks which ruins the mixes.

 

On a side note...

I'm busy ripping a lot of my CDs into MP3s ready to burn as MP3 Data CDs for stereo going into my new car.

Whilst sites like FreeDB are great for doing ID3 tags, the downside is the huge variety of naming conventions for mix albums.

Some people do it 'properly' and fill out the artist name and track name. Other's put 'various' into the artist name and have the track field as the arist + track.

End up having to spend five minutes with Dr Tag hacking the ID3 details so my head unit will scroll the info I want.

 

I had a DVD player which played mp3's, I don't know if was just that one, but it didn't like playing variable rate encoded mp3s.
128bps seems to be the standard. As for encoding, I have found a prog called Gamut98 to be very good, but I have had it for a few years.

 

I use Fast CD Ripper

It also has an option to download the Track info / tiles straight off the net which is cool!!

 

AudioGrabber is the weapon of choice.
You have to pay for it (wow! like about £6) to do all tracks at once (the trial vers only does half the tracks at a time) but it got very good options and I've never had a problem with it.
Get the Frauhoffer codec as well and you're laughing.