This month’s pick goes out to an absolutely fantastic audio file converter, CD ripper, and meta-tag editor (sorry Mac users – this one is Windows-only). I’m talking about dBpoweramp. There are a 5 things that make it extra-special, and my personal tool of choice for ripping CDs and converting audio files:
- Secure ripping with error correction. As good as, or better than, EAC. Plus, dBpoweramp supports specific optimizations when using higher-end optical drives, such as the excellent Plextor models.
- “PerfectMeta™ using 4 providers: AMG, GD3, MusicBrainz and freedb simultaneously, including high resolution Album Art”. This meta-data lookup service is the best I’ve every used. Better than iTunes, Windows Media Player, or Zune. This saves you hours and hours of time.
- Right-click tag editing.
- Superb batch conversions. You can rip everything to FLAC and then easily make another copy for portable music players or networked media devices.
- Tons of codec support (e.g., AAC, MP3, WMA, FLAC, FLAC, WAV, etc.), and lots of helpful information about each audio format supported. The default options for each codec are quite well thought-out (quality/disk-space wise).
dBpoweramp is useful, modestly-priced at $36, and well worth the money. Here are a couple of gotchas to watch out for, though:
- The default folder layout structure is pretty lame. I would recommend changing it to something like “[album artist]\[album]\[track]. [title]“
- When ripping classical music or compilations, PerfectMeta™ doesn’t always set the album artist. Be sure to check that, and put in “Various Artists” or something similar. If you don’t, many media players won’t group the songs together correctly.
- After purchasing, don’t forget to activate PerfectMeta at the bottom of the download page – otherwise you will get warnings about your AMG subscription having expired:
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