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Have you thought of a collection of your favourite songs on your PC recently? And - noticed something? No? So what format do you consider for saving the songs on your computer? WAV!? This task is crying for grip - the CD grabber and MP3 encoder interface... |
As we already reported, user friendly MP3 IDEs do exist. This article will inform you about the development of grip, one of the best IDEs, and show you some helpful tricks.
Like some time ago, grip is just an application that uses other programs and presents a better interface to the user. Usually grip uses:
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Grip presents itself dignified when started - just a few buttons for playing a CD and an empty box:
At the top you may read "No Disc". But you can change this very quickly:
Mysteriously - somehow grip has recognized that this is the Eminem-CD. Right. Oh, there is this server on the internet which has stored all song and CD names. Grip queries this server (standard: freedb.freedb.org) for the CD. The server knows this CD and returns the song titles. That is quite handy if you should have lost the CD cover and it also helps naming the MP3 files later on.
You can select a song for ripping by right-clicking on its title. If you do not know if it is the right song, you can select it and use the play button at the bottom of grip.
Now the song is being played.
For example if you want to rip the first and the third song, the "Rip" column looks like the following:
Go create MP3s: Because oggenc is used normally, this must be changed first. Click on "Config" then "MP3" and change oggenc to bladeenc.
Now grip creates MP3 files. Ogg(-vorbis) also is a popular file format but it cannot (yet) be used on all platforms.
Beneath "Rip" you can find "Rip+Encode". When using this button grip does everthing automatically: saving the songs to your harddisk, creating the MP3s and sorting the songs by album and artist.
If you just want to copy the songs to your harddisk, you should use "Rip only".
Now it starts: The CD-ROM drive reads the songs and the harddisk stores everything. After a song is saved, it is encoded to MP3. While doing this, grip already reads the next song to get finished more quickly.
The upper progress bar shows how much of the song has been stored to the harddisk. It also shows the speed. It is relative to normal playing (1x). So a 4.5 minute long song will be saved to the harddisk in one minute.
The lower bar shows the progress of encoding - how far the song was encoded to MP3.
Surely grip is not far from being perfect. It is easy to use and stable.
The future and further features will strongly depend on underlying programs like cdparanoia and bladeenc.
One could think of a "DVD-to-DivX;-)-4" version, but for this, huge parts of grip would need to be rewritten. One thing is sure:
This program will accompany you reliably in the future.
Grip Homepage: http://www.nostatic.org/grip/