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MARS: Mindawn Audio Ripper Software

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MARS (Mindawn Audio Ripping Software) is a freely available (but not GPL) program for easily and conveniently ripping CDs into either FLAC or the Ogg Vorbis format. If you are not familiar with these formats, they available from Xiph.

Ogg Vorbis compresses smaller and creates higher fidelity files than MP3. Ogg Vorbis also doesn't have any license time bombs or restrictions associated with it as MP3 does. You can look here to see what we mean. MP3 royalties will cost you either directly as a producer or indirectly as a consumer. The FLAC format provides CD quality audio. There is no loss in the compression used, and FLAC can easily be uncompressed back out to a WAV or AIFF file.

We here at theKompany.com are huge music lovers -- as a matter of fact we run the entirely Ogg Vorbis-based internet radio station ProgRock.com. MARS itself was written specifically to support our new electronic music distribution service Mindawn, which supports both Ogg and FLAC files. We do not believe in pirating music, while we do think the artists should get as much of the money as possible. To that end, we are supporting free standards such as Ogg Vorbis and FLAC and helping to spread lesser-known artists through our radio station. We wrote an Ogg Vorbis player for the Sharp Zaurus PDA called tkcPlayer as well.

One problem with both FLAC and Ogg Vorbis has been a lack of easy to use tools for ripping CDs into those formats -- they were confusing or command line based. This led us to write tkcOggRipper, which couldn't be more easy to use. Pop in a CD, pick an output directory, a format type and select a "Quality" setting if applicable, and go. That program led to what we now call MARS.

MARS is currently available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

Features

• Uses FreeDB (not CDDB) to to both submit and retrieve track information


• Variables for file output naming


• Can use WAV or CD as input


• Can create directories for the Album or not, uses the same variables


• Specify "Quality" or bit rate settings for ripping Ogg format


• Specify the compression rating for ripping FLAC format


• Easy to use and intuitive user interface

You can download the software and manual from here. The manual is filled with screenshots as well.

Introduction

MARS Download

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Mindawn uses MARS for its great quality sound. Check out Mindawn's site for its great selection of independent artists online, in full CD-quality sound!

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Programming from Grantham Design and Alessandro Praduroux.