FreeRIP

Extracting all or selected tracks from your audio CDs will allow you to enjoy your favorite music in a wide range of devices other than standard CD players.

FreeRIP will let you perform that audio extraction task in a simple and effective way, and convert the resulting tracks into any of the formats selected. Besides, its built-in tag editor will let you add useful metadata to your music files.

Despite its not-so-attractive user interface, its functionality is overall very easy to use, making it a suitable tool for nearly all kinds of users. As soon as a CD is inserted on one of your drives, the program will read its contents and will display all its tracks in the program’s main window. Here you can check selected tracks or rip the entire disk, as well as the desired output format among WAV, MP3, Ogg, WMA, and FLAC. Another option is to open the “Multi Track Rip” dialog and select a sequential range of tracks to rip (i.e., from track 5 to 15), an alternate extraction option whose usefulness is beyond me, as it doesn’t seem to add any new functionality and clearly lacks the flexibility offered by the main interface.

When selecting the desired output format, you’ll be allowed to tweak some of the most common encoding settings, and thus make sure that the resulting files fit your device’s requirements. Likewise, you can rename your tracks using (or customizing) any of the existing file name templates, and add to them on the fly those ID3 tags that are common to all the tracks selected (album name, genre, year, artist, etc.). You can complete or edit later any of the tags in a given track using the program’s tag editor.

Though the list of output formats supported is not exhaustive, it covers the most commonly used lossless and lossy audio codecs. This guarantees the compatibility of the extracted tracks with the vast majority of media players out there. FreeRIP can also be used to convert tracks extracted in one of the supported formats into another easily. Despite the name, FreeRIP also has a commercial PRO edition, which will essentially let you rip more tracks faster if you happen to have a multi-core processor. Both versions are equally easy to use, and both home and professional users alike will find it to be highly useful.