Wouldn’t it be great if you could convert all the songs on the CDs you own to mp3 format and be able to play them on your mp3 player?. Store them on your computer for safe keeping, place them in a usb flash drive and listen to them at work, Make an mp3 CD and store 100 songs and more in one single CD, etc. The procedure is fairly simple and can be accomplished using free software. The procedure is called ripping and for this tutorial we are going to be using software which has been around since the Internet became popular in the early 1990’s. Audiograbber, is an excellent CD ripper. It can rip and convert CD audio into a variety of formats all in one step.

Audiograbber does not natively rip to mp3 format. However, this is a plus; let me explain why. MP3 audio quality varies greatly among encoders, with many of them having less than desirable quality. Audiograbber uses the LAME encoder which is the best free encoder available, and it is very easy to install.

Instructions

Download and install Audiograbber. There is nothing special about the installation. Just make sure you read what you are installing; don’t just keep on clicking next and do not install any unnecessary or undesired extra programs that come attached to the installation.

Download and install the Mp3 plugin for Audiograbber. Again, there is nothing special you should know about the installation; just be sure to install it after installing Audiograbber. Once this plugin is installed, Audiograbber will be able to convert any audio CD into mp3 files.

Start Audiograbber and on the top toolbar, click on “Freedb“. This will grab the song titles automatically from the CDDB database, a free web based service which has almost all CDs ever made. This will serve to automatically populate the tags for each song. This is critical for mp3 players, since they display the name of the song based on the tags and not on the file name.

After Audiograbber gets all the song names from the CDDB online database, it will display a list of possible CD names. Select the name that most closely matches your CD’s name. Now, all the songs’ names will be automatically populated.

Next, on the top toolbar click on the “Mp3 icon“.

This will display the mp3 settings. Make sure “LAMEenc” is selected as the mp3 encoder.

Next, place a check mark at the bottom of the mp3 icon on the toolbar. Then, click on the “Grab” icon to start ripping the songs and convert then to mp3 files automatically.

Audiograbber will start ripping the files from the CD, converting them to mp3 format in the process.

That’s it!, as simple as that. All your new mp3 files will be stored under “\My Documents\My Music” folder.

It is worth mentioning that this is completely legal as long as you make mp3 files out of CDs you own and do not share them with anybody.