Smart CD Ripper 5.5 is a CD Ripper product from smartcdripper.com, get 4 Stars SoftSea Rating, Smart CD Ripper is one of the quickest and easiest to use tools of its kind. The software extracts audio CD tracks to audio formats MP3, WAV, and OGG in seconds. This program offers rich options for your special audio requirements: Bit rate; Maximal bit rate;Channel mode; Emphasis; Variable bit rate(VBR) quality; Use variable bit rate(VBR); Use low pass filter; Use psycho-acoustics analysis. Besides his ease of use it has some additional advanced features like using Free CDDB(CD database). This feature enables you to automatically receive the name of the artist, the name of the album, the genre the year of the album and the names of all the songs in the album through the Internet. The software works on all Windows systems.

Smart CD Ripper FeaturesEase of use
You can leave the default MP3/OGG settings because they are chosen carefully for your needs.

High speed
The software uses gogo encoder - based on the "recent" lame 3.88 and offers a very good quality. It is also the quickest mp3 encoder (approximately 2-4 times quicker than the lame - the second best choice).

Excellent output quality
The Variable Bitrate (VBR) offers better quality than Constant Bitrate (CBR). This is due to the optimization of the used bitrate with the complexity of the audio signal to encode. "Simple" signals could be encoded with less bitrate, when higher bitrate is user to encode more difficult signals.

Free CDDB(CD database)
This feature enables your automatically to receive the name of the artist, the name of the album, the genre and the year of the album and the names of all the songs in the album through Internet. Smart CD Ripper also allows you to edit the fields for the artist, the album, the genre and the year and automatically writes them in the ID3 tag of the MP3 file.

More FeaturesIf you choose the recommended PRO version you will be able to covert your existing WAV files to MP3 format and vice-versa. Also you can play your song from the CD before choosing which tracks to rip and which to skip. Another advantage of the PRO version is the normalizing - all the result music files will have the same volume level.

Variety of Settings
The first setting is the conversion output format - MP3 or OGG. By default it is MP3. Depending on this setting the other settings differ. First we will discuss the General Settings.

General Settings:
Output format. The possible options are MP3, WAV and OGG. We recommend you to use MP3 for this setting because it is with high compression ratio and is most supported by the different audio players. This setting is also shown on the main window because of his high importance.

Output folder. It represents the root folder where the ripped songs will be stored. Because of its high importance it is also shown in the main window.

Filename format. This is a tagged expression where the tags are replaced with their concrete values. After the replacement is done the result is concatenated to the output folder. In this way the actual output full filename is formed. The possible tags are <artist>, <album>, <genre>, <year>, <number> and <title>.

Playlist format. It is similar to the previous setting but concerns the full filename of the playlist. Here the same tags are used except <number> and <title>.

MP3 settings:
Bit rate. The higher the bit rate, the higher the quality of the MP3 and the file size is bigger. We recommend the rate of 256 kbps. At this rate the quality is similar to a studio record and the compression is about ten times.

Maximal bit rate. Used when a variable bit rate conversion is selected. The upper setting acts as the minimal bit rate. For maximal bit rate we recommend you 320 kbps.

Channel mode. Here you can choose from Mono, Stereo, Joint Stereo, MsStereo and Dual channel. If you choose Joint Stereo the encoder will use the correlation between two channels to reduce the size of the output file. Dual channel files are made of two independent mono channel. Each one uses exactly half of the file bit rate. For example if two different languages are carried in the same bitstream, an appropriate decoder will decode only the chosen language. We recommend the use of the Stereo channel mode setting.

Emphasis. Re-equalizes the sound after a Dolby-like noise suppression. This is not used very often and will probably never be. The following noise suppression models are used: none, 50/15ms, and CCITT j.17. We recommend you to choose 'none'.

Variable bit rate (VBR) quality. This parameter is used when a variable bit rate is selected. The higher the VBR, the higher the quality of the output MP3 and the files size is bigger. We recommend you to use an average value of 5(min is 0 and max is 9).

Use of variable bit rate (VBR). This setting lets the encoder code every frame (piece) of the MP3 file by a different bit rate. It estimates the bit rate in such a way that the given quality (the previous parameter) is achieved for every single frame of the Mp3 file using a minimal bit rate. Thus the file size gets smaller in comparison to the constant bit rate encoding. So we recommend you to use a VBR.

Use of low pass filter. This filter attenuates the high frequencies in the output. So we recommend you to use it only when you have selected 128 kbps or lower bit rate output (which means a low quality output).

Use psycho-acoustics analysis. This setting lets the encoder to dynamically choose which frequencies to suppress or amplify in order to produce a more pleasant sound for the human ear according to the scientific researches of the human perception of sound. We recommend you to use this feature.

OGG settings:
OGG Quality. This is the only one OGG setting. It specifies the quality of the output OGG file. The higher the quality, the bigger the size of the file. We recommend you an average value of 5 (min. is 0, max. is 9)

FreeDB Settings:
FreeDB Server. This is a list of Free CDDB servers. So you have to choose one of them to which we will direct our queries about the name of the artist, the name of the album, the year, the genre and the names of all tracks. Initially there is only one server in the list. If you wish to receive all the other please press the button "Refresh servers".

Use proxy. This setting indicates whether we use or not proxy server while connecting to our FreeDB server (the previous parameter).

Proxy server. This is the address of the proxy server in case that we use proxy server.

Port. This is the port of the proxy server in case that we use proxy server.

Authentication. This setting indicates whether the proxy server (if we use one) requires authentication or not.

User Name. This is the user name which identifies us to the proxy server in case that we use proxy and it requires identification.

Password. This is the corresponding password to the User Name (previous parameter). The license of this audio & mp3 software is Free Trial Software, the price is $19.90, you can free download and get a free trial before you buy. If you want to get a full or nolimited version of Smart CD Ripper, you can buy this audio & mp3 software.