EAC - Exact Audio Copy Rips from audio CD to WAV, or a few other formats if their encoders are installed. Can copy a range of audio data, independent of track boundaries, including a whole CD's audio continuum. This is great when the CD was burned wrong, and the track marks don't line up with the data, and other rippers can't get it right... at least you can get the data, and use Audacity or something to resplit the tracks in the right spots. |
EAC home page |
FreeRip Rips from CD to WAV, MP3, or Ogg Vorbis formats. Does conversions between WAV files and MP3 or Ogg Vorbis. Seems to do the job, simply and easily. Not sure Ogg Vorbis will make it as a replacement for MP3 files, but I'm glad it is out there. |
FreeRIP home page |
Mp3Tag ID3 tag editor -- handy for setting the track name to the filename, and other ID3 tag manipulations... one file at a time, or whole directories at a time. |
MP3Tag download page |
Audacity Sound file editing. Haven't used it much, but it looks good. For .mp3 creation or editing, you also need the "LAME MP3 encoder" found on the Audacity download page, or, an alternate site for downloading LAME is also listed. |
Audacity home page Audacity download page download page for LAME MP3 Encoder |
UltraPlayer A great little playlist player for CD Audio, MP3 and WAV files, at least. I really don't use any other formats at the moment. It claims to handle MIDI, WMA, RealAudio, Internet Radio and a variety of video formats. |
UltraPlayer home page |
Zoom
Player Another great little playlist player for CD Audio, MP3 and WAV, at least. This one also supports multiple audio device selection, which is kind of a hard feature to find in an audio player. Further, if it is not already running, you can play one file one time with the syntax "zplayer file /play /q". For this reason it is the audio player supported by drc. |
Zoom Player home page Zoom Player download page |
Irfan View I think of Irfan View primarily as a digital picture viewer, but it does video and (you guessed it, why else would it be in this category) sound files also. It is actually my first choice for playing a single audio file... I have all the default Windows associations that it will grab owned by Irfan View, and it handles them well. Since its playlist capability seems a bit more cumbersome than UltraPlayer's, I don't generally use it for more than one file at a time (except for picture files, where it excels for slide shows). |
Irfan View home page |
WavPack A custom compression program for .wav files. ZIP isn't quite the right tool for compressing .wav files, but WavPack is! |
WavPack
home page WavPack download page |