Uncorking the Past: The Quest for Wine, Beer, and Other Alcoholic Beverages

AnyDVD (and AnyDVD HD) - Ask any hardcore (Windows-based) HTPC aficionado what software deserves their MVP award and nine out of ten will say AnyDVD. This venerable suite of applications is under constant development and until recently one could acquire a lifetime of updates for a very reasonable price.  Not only will AnyDVD allow you to rip a DVD with one (right) click, it also works tirelessly to break copy protection on-the-fly, meaning you never have to worry about the HDCP gremlins that plague a lot of users. Another must-have features is AnyDVD’s ability to skip all adverts and FBI warnings and jump straight to the movie. It can also slow down your DVD drive to reduce noise and the HD version can even copy BluRay disks. Using a computer as your main video source can sometimes prove a minefield of configuration woes. AnyDVD stomps through that bomb zone with admirable aplomb.

DVDFab - One tricky thing about DVD ripping, especially for those who plan to make a hard-copy backup, is the fact that most DVDs are larger in size than the 4.7GB available on a standard, single-layer blank disc. No doubt this was a deliberate agreement between the MPAA and the manufacturers. For several years now, consumers have had the option to buy dual-layer burners and dual-layer blank discs that have the capacity to duplicate every DVD on the market, but the blanks are significantly more expensive and never really caught on like their single-layer counterparts. In steps DVDFab. Picking up where DVDShrink left off, DVDFab not only cracks the copy protection on most any DVD available, it can also compress the resultant files so that they fit on a standard blank. The relatively minor effect of this compression on overall video quality is a trade-off that most users will be willing to make. Recent versions of DVDFAb also offer the ability to rip DVDs to various handheld player formats, and DVDFab HD can also rip  BluRays and HD DVDs. Just this week, a new but somewhat limited version of DVDFab HD is now available for free.

Handbrake - One of two open-source entries on this list (MactheRipper is the other), and the only cross-platform option, Handbrake is mainly a transcoder, meaning is specializes in ripping DVDs to another compression format, primarily x264. Like most open-source apps, Handbrake has a fairly active team of developers and an avid community of fans.  Definitely worth the look for those who dig the open source scene.

MactheRipper - As its name implies, MtR is the only option on this list specifically for Apple-eaters. Also open source and much ballyhooed. Somewhat mysteriously, its main domain appears to be down, but pod people can still grab it at the provided link.

DVDShrink - Any survey of DVD rippers would be incomplete without mention of DVDShrink, one of the first and most popular free rippers ever coded. Unfortunately, development was halted when its makers received a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notice. As such, its official site no longer offers it for download, but follow the link above and you will fine that which you seek, grasshopper. Or just click here.

Ripping DVDs in the U.S. is a tricky question, legally speaking. As with audio, judges have ruled it Fair Use to make a copy of a movie you own. However, in most cases the only way to do so is to break the copyright protection schemes implemented on the DVD or BluRay disc. There are a number of applications available to help you do just that (and we’ll be discussing them in a future post), but if you search for the software designer’s base of operations you will no doubt notice that they work out of some Caribbean island or Eastern bloc country. Why? Because Congress has ruled it illegal to circumvent copyright protection on video media. Hence the scary red FBI warnings that linger overlong on your screen like a scarlet indictment.

In practice, however, it’s more or less a matter of don’t ask, don’t tell. So long as you are not ripping the movie for duplication and sale in some Chinese flea market, or electronic distribution via bittorrent, you are not likely to run afoul of the law. If the FBI were to prosecute every individual who ripped one of their kids’ DVDs to watch on an iPod or to make a copy so that the original doesn’t get scratched up, the courts would be tied up for centuries. The truth is that not a single case has been filed against anyone for Fair Use practices.

Bad metaphors aside, tagging is absolutely critical for maintaining a tidy and smoothly running digital music archive. Not every music format includes tags, so make sure you choose one that does. MP3s have the most robust tagging support. If you go lossless, FLAC support tags, to a certain extent.

The best rippers rip and tag in one step. Programs like iTunes and Windows Media Player can do both and for most people, they will suffice. Problems can arise, however, when you don’t like the choices those programs have made. Sometimes a tagger is inconsistent: one album gets tagged by “Medeski, Martin, and Wood” and the next one is tagged by “Medeski Martin & Wood.” When you go to sort your music, those albums are not listed as by the same artist. It’s not always easy to figure out how to change the tags they have added and once you have, some apps (like iTunes) have a nasty habit of changing them back without your permission (* see below). That is why I recommend a dedicated tagging program. I use Tag & Rename — it has great features, is easy to use,  and only costs $29.95. But if you want something free, go with Mp3tag, which offers 90% of the functionality of Tag & Rename. Despite its name, Mp3tag can handle a plethora of formats.

That’s probably enough about tags for now, but one last tip: one of the most important tags is often the least consistently implemented: and that’s the genre tag. Many tagging programs come with their own subset of genre tags and they don’t all match. The result is a scattered mish-mash of genres, so that (for example) when you go to make a cool mix of all your World Music artists, you have to search through multiple genres like World, World Beat, Latin, International, and Mongol Throat Singing. So just like you should choose a single file format, you should also create a set number of genres (the fewer the better) and consistently stick to them. Otherwise, you loose the very utility that tags were created to provide.

( * You can prevent this from happening by tagging the files properly and then changing their setting to “Read Only,” which prevents any further changes. In Windows you can do that by selecting the files in question, right-click, properties, and check the “Read Only” box. Just remember that you’ll need to uncheck it if you ever want to make any further changes yourself. )

There are literally dozens of digital music formats. This article could be ten thousand words long and still not cover all the options. I’m going to save everyone a lot of boring reading and cut to the chase. Only two formats make sense: FLAC and MP3. Choose the former if you are an audiophile purist and want a perfect duplicate of your CDs, utterly and objectively indistinguishable from the original. You’ll need more hard drive space, but space is cheap these days. Choose the latter if your hi-fi gear cost less than $2,000, you are humble enough to admit that you do not have golden ears, or are willing to take a simple test to tell whether you can hear the difference. You may also want to opt for mp3 if you have an mp3 player, as maintaining two separate music archives is a huge pain in the butt.

I can hear a lot of you Pod people screaming at me, but what about Apple Lossless? What about AAC? Sure, that’s what Apple wants you to use, but why? How many other pieces of gear can you name that support Apple Lossless? (And if you have an iPod Nano, even that won’t support it.) You think your next car will come with a built-in AAC player? FLAC and MP3 are open source, more or less (MP3-compression is a patented, technically speaking, but licensing is loosely policed). Which means manufacturers don’t have to pay anyone to build compatibility into their gear. Which means a heck of a lot more hardware on the market capable of handling those formats than the narrowly defined ones Apple promotes. With respect to all the hard work that went into developing Ogg-Vorbis, Monkey’s Audio, Real Audio, WMA, Musepack, and all the rest — the same Occam’s Razor applies. FLAC support is far from universal, but it’s a lot more common than any other open-source, lossless option, and FLAC supports tagging — a critical difference (see tomorrow’s article for why).

The truth is I used to be a lossless snob. I saved everything in FLAC and made the hardline decision that any compression was evil and mp3s were not sophisticated enough to feed my cultivated ear. It took me a few years before I realized the prejudice I had against mp3s was based on the few, low bitrate examples I had heard. By that time, I had also acquired an mp3 player and hated the inherent inefficiency of maintaining all my music in two different formats. So I took a simple A/B test, easily conducted with the excellent, free, and very low-overhead player Foobar2000. The results proved that I simply could not reliably hear the different between a lossless FLAC file and one encoded in VBR (variable bit-rate) mp3. To err on the side of caution, I opted to use a constant bitrate of 320 kpbs — the highest setting available. The end result? Over a thousand albums, comprising about 140GB of space, and an archive that is as easily accessible by my mp3 player(s) as it is by my whole house audio system.

Now, a few disclaimers: If your needs dictate a possible future conversion to another format, or are approaching CD ripping as an archiving process, and are saving this music for posterity, do not use mp3. There’s no going back without degradation.  But for most of us, mp3 is the right choice.

Now that the legal issue is out of the way, how should you go about freeing your music from its physical confines and condemning all those scratch-happy circles of silver and gold to 20th-century obsolescence? Well, the options are endless, actually. There may be more CD ripping applications available than any other type of program. In addition to which program to use, you also need to decide what bitrate files you want to create and how you want to go about tagging the resultant files (both will be the subject of future articles) . Today I’ll focus on three free choices and tell you why one or another may be more apt for your particular set of needs and preferences.

Exact Audio Copy : One of the most venerable and well-respected cd rippers ever coded, and an easy choice for my Free Windows Apps Hall of Fame. The product of one obsessive German for whom accuracy is paramount, EAC is one of the few (only?) rippers that double checks its own work and insures your rips are bit-for-bit accurate. If a perfect copy is not possible, due to scratches or other flaws in the disc, EAC will tell you so but not before doing its absolute best to squeeze every possible 1 and 0 from the original. As a result, some rips can take a long while to complete, so EAC is not for those who want quick results. EAC also requires a fair amount of initial configuration. Guides and tutorials abound for tackling this once-and-done step. Here are two: EAC Setup Guide , Exact Audio Copy Guide.

CDex : Easier to use than EAC, due to fewer initial configuration options. Open-source, which unfortunately doesn’t always translate into frequent updates and robust support. Apparently does not play well with Windows 2000. All that being said, CDex is simple, intuitive, requires low system resources, and is a good choice for the average user who is not hyper concerned with perfection.

FreeRip: The newest entry on the list, FreeRip looks to be a strong competitor. Also very easy to use and configure, has built in tagging, and supports a decent number of formats. So far, though, FreeRip has yet to really distinguish itself and apparently has a nag screen and some add-ons you should be sure to opt out on at the time of installation.

Update: Unfortunately, this deal is no longer available, but following the link will still save you lots of money over retail.

In this case, acquiring an iPod was not by choice. I actually had a 30gb Zune that I quite liked, despite the naysayers. Sure, it came in a color most accurately described as “turd.” Sure, it carried no cache and quite a bit of stigma. But it could do just about everything a comparable iPod could, costs half as much (I got it refurbed on Woot), and best of all did not come saddled with the overblown monstrosity that is iTunes.

Well, I made the mistake of taking said Zune to a reunion of college buddies at a lake house where all we do for three days is drink canned beer, float on truck tire tubes, and listen to classic rock ad nauseum. Well, that particular Zune now sleeps with the fishes. Nobody knows how it ended up at the bottom of the lake, but the most likely suspect had the decency to send me his old video iPod as a replacement. So I reformatted it for Windows, named it iTryd (to not get an iPod, get it?), and set about learning the ins and outs of this little cultural iCon.

Truth be told, I quite liked the thing. Enough so that I bought one of those handy dandy docks that would allow me to play tunes or output My Little Pony movies to a TV for my kids while it was still charging. Which made it all the more annoying when I discovered that it wasn’t actually charging while playing. At first I suspected the dock. Then I suspected the cable. But the iPod displayed other strangeness, like confusion over its level of charge and whether it was even connected to a power source at all.

To make a long story short, I decided to try replacing the battery. Now, cracking open an iPod might seem like a scary proposition to most folk, but it’s really not that bad. There are quite a few guides on how to do so out there on the Internets, so I’m not going to duplicate them here. For those who like textual step-by-steps with images, I found this one to be complete enough to get the job done. There are also video guides on  YouTube and elsewhere.  I definitely recommend buying a battery on eBay (much cheaper) and getting one that comes with a plastic tool for opening the case. Small metal screwdrivers, knives, etc. are likely to mar the iPod’s case and you certainly wouldn’t want to diminish yourself in the i’s of your fellow podmates.

p.s. the new battery appears to have fixed my issues. So now I can charge and use the iPod at the same time. Now to figure out how to do the same for my gray matter…