I remember using Audiograbber at one point and was surprised to see it was still maintained.
I think I just used the ripper in MusicMatch Jukebox that came with my computer. It was only the “shareware” version, so I was limited to 96 kbps.
I still have many of those in my collection. When I throw on the actual CD or hear it in a higher/lossless format, they sound “wrong” because I’m still so used to the crappy 96kbps rips I had with me on my MP3 player for years.
On the plus side, those smaller files let me fit several more songs onto my 64 MB MP3 player from 2001 or so (it used a parallel port to transfer lol)
KAudio…something. It was a KDE tool that could rip and encode in parallel.
dMC. it might have been the first one i ‘found’, and just kept using it; up to r9, i think. after that i just used ‘whatever’ a distro had on linux or wmp on windows.
I don’t remember what it was called, but it came with a weird spongy thing that was supposed to make it easier to apply sticker labels. I was young and stupid and thought the sponge thing would also copy the label somehow.
CDex
I’ve got a white whale album. I routinely bought CDs from a secondhand store and found some half-decent techno labeled Amixiam - Dream Frequencies. Quite possibly just some guy’s personal work, packaged with a modicum of professionalism. No internet search has ever turned up a damn thing, and I no longer live on the same continent as that thrift shop.
But then - a few years ago - I was going through old CDs, ripping them anew for modern codecs and decent bitrates. CDex filled in the track names automatically. A database recognized the disc! Someone out there had this information! And seconds later I realize that someone was me, sending the data to CDDB automatically, when I had ripped it the first time. I played a fifteen-year brick joke on myself.