Had music match ... dropped it, ripping CD's took for ever on my system. I would have dug into it to find out why but then I also found out it works really bad with the firewalls and proxies at work (i.e. no cddb connectivity). That kind of discouraged me. Mind you I did not dig in because the overal look of Music Match imho (very subjective) was way to confusing and annoying. Yesterday I downloaded Audiograbber from http://www.audiograbber.com-us.net (just checked it and it is up and running perfectly by the way, but note that it is NOT audiograbber.com like someone in the thread said. Audiograbber.com does not exist.) and purchased it (hell only 25 bucks) immediatly. It works like a charm for me and on my system got (with no tweaking from me) about 3.6 x normal speed encoding. Compared to MusicMatch who got less then 1.0 x speed. These numbers are a little slow (I think others here prolly get far more) because I use a Laptop with a laptop-DVD and not a normal size CD-drive. More importantly CDDB works both at work and home (both NAT environments and one having firewalls and proxies too). The lame encoder seems to be working nicely but as some said Audiograbber is not picky about what encoder to use. Even external programs can be used (as opposed to the 'classic' DLL's) ...

Overall, this program is neat, has plenty of options to tweak your ripping but runs happily out of the box (so to speak) on my setup which is more then I can say for others. I like the fact that it does not DEMAND intermediate wav files, finally a ripper that makes use of the fact that I have 256 Mb ram.

I also used AltoMP3 maker, not bad, works fine too, but Audiograbber felt even better.

Cheers,
Hans


Mk2 - Blue - 080000431