15-Minute Reviews :: Handy CD Ripper v1.3.1

Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is Handy CD Ripper version 1.3.1 by HandyCDApps – An application to simplify the process of ripping from audio CD to your computer.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Handy CD Ripper is an easy to use yet powerful Audio CD Ripper that lets you rip music from Audio CDs easily and quickly. It supports the following audio file formats: mp3, ogg vorbis, wma, aac and wav.

FreeDB (free compact disk database) is supported. You can find disk info in one click! You will enjoy the easy-to-use and flexible interface of Handy CD Ripper”

Quick Pros

• Interface easy to use and looks decent
• Supports the most common formats
• FreeDB interface relatively easy but could improve

Quick Cons

• Having to enter the Options to change the audio settings a bit awkward
• Limited file naming options
• Crashes immediately upon clicking ‘Grab!’ or ‘Rip CD’

Expansion

Upon your first launch of this application, you are greeted by a simple interface. Along the top of the window, you will find all the buttons you will need for a day-to-day use of this application, including Grab!, FreeDB, Refresh, Options, Format (A drop-down box), About and Exit, as well as a selection box for which drive to use in your computer. Directly below that you will see a table; When an audio CD is inserted, it will display the track list here, including all the common information. Each item has a check box so you can choose which tracks you’d like to rip as well. Underneath the table you will find a Rip CD button (Does the same as Grab!) as well as playback buttons for previewing the CD and an eject button.

Overall this application offers much of what you would expect from a ripping application. You can choose between MP3, Ogg, WMA, WAV and AAC formats. To change the bitrate and stereo settings, you need to enter the Options on the Audio tab; Not too bad, but a bit awkward to enter but for many is not something that is changed often.

The FreeDB functionality is fairly easy to use; Click on FreeDB, click on Lookup, and if it finds the information you would click on Apply. Granted, this is fairly simple and I do like the idea that it does not automatically do it (instead allowing you to thumbs-up it by clicking Apply), the text box is too small and does not auto-scroll, causing you to scroll down to view the results. Maybe make the window larger or possibly include a table to preview the results would be in order.

A feature I do feel does need some work is on the file name formatting. Currently, there are only three options: Track – Title, Artist – Track – Title and Artist – Album – Track – Title. Unfortunately the author of the application seems to have overlooked the most common one: Artist – Title, but instead of the current output folder/file name system, I would like to see the masking system that has become very popular amongst other titles. Granted, it is a hair more difficult, but allows a file system organization the way the end user wants.

During testing, I did run into a rather large snag; Every time I would go to click on Grab! or Rip CD, the CD drive would begin to spin up, and promptly crash the application with no error messages at all. I tried changing a lot of settings, trying different discs, and for some reason I can not rip audio. The system requirements for this application does not indicate Vista as being compatible, I could not test to see if it was my test system, but appears it might be.

Final Verdict

Overall, while the interface is simple, I was fairly discouraged by both the lack of power with the naming functionality and the fact that I couldn’t run an actual rip process. I do hope the ripping process is isolated to my testing system (I just browsed the comments at Giveaway and do not see anyone else having the same issue, so a good sign I’m assuming). For free, if you don’t get the crash scenario like I have, this may be a decent application to try out if you are looking for an application of this type. As for paying $19.95, I could not justify paying for this title with the weakness in naming convention and lack of advanced options considering there are plenty of freeware and open source alternatives on the market, such as AudioGrabber (Freeware).

Posted by BladedThoth on Tuesday, November 06, 2007