Ripping Your CD's to MP3 Using AudioGrabber

Naming tab under General Settings:

We have created a folder called MP3 on our D drive, and have created a subfolder under that called WAVIN. This is where we will store the intermediate WAV files. You can name your directory whatever you choose, and place it on whatever drive you choose using Window's Explorer.

We have set the filename to be Track name, followed by Artist name, which is simply a matter of preference. Putting in any more than that is usually not necessary, and also makes for very long filenames. We choose track name first, because that is how we most often look for our tracks.

Sub Directories entries are all checked, this will have the effect of putting all the ripped WAV files into one folder to make it easier to encode later, and when encoding happens, the songs will then be placed in subfolders under that with Artist\Album as the organizational structure.

Silence tab under General Settings:

Click on the Silence tab, and you will see the following settings:

We want to check both items here, so that AudioGrabber will remove the dead air at the beginning and end of the song. This will be very important for a properly ripped file for DJ use, as it will keep you from having to cue up to the beginning of a song, and also allow your automixes to run together better.

We set them for .5 seconds, which seems to work very well.

MP3 Settings:

Click the MP3 button on the toolbar, and you will see the following settings:

We set the Grab to option to Wav file.

Here we tell AudioGrabber to rip to WAV file format. Appending the ID3 tag info, which it will use when it does the encode to MP3 later.

We are setup to use the LAME encoder when we actually do the encoding. We use a Constant Bitrate, as almost all DJ software will decode these with no problems. We use 192 kbps bitrate, as this is the minimum you should use for DJ work, although if you have plenty of disk space, you can use higher if you like. 320 is recommended.

Quality is set to Stereo and High, although you can use Joint Stereo as well, and in fact, it usually goes that way anyway :)

You can leave the rest of the settings as is, and click OK to continue.