"Markeau" wrote in message
...
Have you looked at Media Jukebox? You can rip+encode in many
different formats, including some that are lossless. Plus it will
automatically download cover art, and there are auto-ripping
capabilities where you just keep feeding the audio cd's with no
interaction needed except to push the cd eject button. And check out
the mini-me gui under View mini-me for a simplified interface
(otherwise because it is very powerful and flexible it can be
intimidating to a beginner/novice, but at my mid-advance level I love
it ... There is a free version to try.

http://www.musicex.com/mediacenter/




sounds like an Audiograbber clone

Internal encoders
Audiograbber does not come with any MP3 encoder of its own but it can use
some other encoders. It is recommended that you download and install LAME's
freeware MP3 encoder dll and use that one with Audiograbber. LAME is fast
and gives very good sounding MP3 files.
Download LAME's MP3 dll from
http://www.audiograbber.com-us.net/download.html or http://mitiok.cjb.net.
Unzip the lame_enc.dll to the same directory as audiograbber.exe and you
will have an internal MP3 encoder that goes all the way up to 320 Kbit/s in
Audiograbber.

LAME's official homepage is at http://www.mp3dev.org

Another good encoder that works good with Audiograbber is BladeEnc. This
encoder is also freeware so it won't cost you a dime. It is far from as fast
as Xing's encoder but many people thinks this encoder produces better sound
quality.
http://bladeenc.mp3.no

Other encoders that are supported internally by Audiograbber are Fraunhofers
MP3 acm codecs and Qdesigns MP2 acm codec. Audiograbber is distributed with
LibVorbis.dll so it can make OGG files for you. Microsofts Windows Media
Audio V2 is also supported (which gets installed if you install Winamp).
Finally and last SONY's ATRAC3 acm codec is supported and you can get that
one from http://www.minidisc.org/atrac3.zip. Info on ATRAC3 can be found at
http://www.minidisc.org.

External encoders

Xing technology has made a very fast MP3 encoder that works good as external
codec in Audiograbber. You must have their registered version and use
x3enc.exe as external encoder (x3enc.exe does currently not come with their
trial version). It cost however only $19.95 to register (27 September 2000).
http://www.xingtech.com/products/mp3encoder/

GOGO MP3 encoder (freeware): This one is based on LAME's sourcecode and it
has been optimized for speed. Homepage
http://homepage1.nifty.com/herumi/gogo_e.html Download:
http://homepage1.nifty.com/herumi/so...35-win-con.zip

MP3Enc: Fraunhofers new standalone encoder, slow and expensive ($199!) but
with good sound quality. http://www.opticom.de
.. Download a demo version from
http://www.sonicspot.com/mp3enc/mp3e..._3_1_win32.zip

Fraunhofers L3enc was previously used to create MP3's. It can no longer be
downloaded from http://www.iis.fhg.de/audio but I keep the link here for
nostalgic reasons.

Monkey's Audio (freeware). This is another interesting format that differs
from the others in the way that it is lossless compression. Lossless means
that a file can be encoded and decoded back without losing quality, just
like the .zip format. MP3 is lossy compression which means that some data is
lost during encoding and it can never be fully restored. Lossless will of
course not compress as much as lossy but Monkey's Audio compress the file by
around 50%. And with Monkey's Audio you will not have to worry/listen for
artifacts in the song. There are simply no artifacts since what you hear is
identical to the original wav file. You can encode and decode as much as you
want without losing quality! http://www.monkeysaudio.com. (Set to Mac.exe as
external encoder in Audiograbber).

FAAC (freeware). This encoder makes AAC (Advanced Audio Compression) files.
http://faac.sourceforge.net.

MPG+. http://www.stud.uni-hannover.de/user...coder_eng.html.

There has also been a general Encoder plugin released by Alexander von
Gostomski. With his plugin you can use both AAC, VQF and a Real Audio
encoder! The homepage has unfortunately vanished but the plugin can still be
found he

http://www.audiogalaxy.com/software/...ep_plugins.zip

You can also check out http://www.audiograbber.com-us.net and see if there
are any new encoders available.

Miscellaneous

Cool Edit is one of the best programs for general editing of audio files and
it can be found he http://www.syntrillium.com/

Winamp is a good MP3 player. http://www.winamp.com/

MuzicMan is a good MP3 player and organizer. http://www.muzicman.com/

Helium is a good ID3 tagger program which lets you edit and view ID3 tags.
http://www.intermedia.st/helium/

DR. Tag is another good ID3 tagger. http://www.asterius.org/

You will find some useful karaoke links on the karaoke page in this
helpfile.