BonkEnc – Free cd ripper and audio MP3 encoder

Posted on October 7, 2008 at 5:38 am

Looking for a freeware CD ripping program that can also encode your audio files into MP3, MP4, OGG, AAC or FLAC format? The web is littered with audio converters and CD ripping programs, seven of which I wrote about in an earlier post. If you’re looking for strictly an audio encoder with the ability to rip CD’s, then check out BonkEnc.

BonkEnc is kind of a funny name, but it definitely gets the job done quickly and with high quality results. What I like best about BonkEnc is that the quality of the sound does not deteriorate when encoding into a different format, even multiple times.

If you have a large CD collection, you can rip the CDs to your computer very quickly with this program. After that, you can keep them in MP3 format or you can convert them to FLAC, OGG, AAC, WAV or MP4 format. You can also convert audio files that you already have stored on your computer.

Once you download the program, click on File and then Add and choose either Audio Files or Audio CD Contents.

Once you see the list of tracks, you can click on drop down arrow next to the play button to choose which format you want to encode the audio files with.

You can also play any of the songs directly from the program if you want to preview them to decide which ones to convert. Once you choose the encoder, the program will immediately begin encoding the audio files and outputting them in the directory specified for Output Dir.

The program also supports the CDDB/freedb online CD database and CDText and will automatically write song information such as artist name, album name, etc to ID3V2 or Vorbis comment tags.

Once you pop in a CD and add the files to the list box, go ahead and click on Database and choose Query CDDB Database. If the information is in the database, it will automatically be downloaded.

You can also click on Options and change the configuration settings, such as choosing the default audio encoder. By default, it’s MP3 format, but you can rip a CD directly to another format by changing the setting here.

You can also change the name of the audio files and under the CDRip tab, you can tell the program to rip a CD automatically when inserted in case you are doing many at a time.

Overall, it’s a one of the best free audio encoder programs out there in terms of speed and quality. Do you use a different program? If so, post a comment! I know many people like to use Windows Media Player to rip CDs, but you then have to convert the WMA file to MP3 format Enjoy!

» Filed Under Software Reviews