Best Free CD Ripping Tools

While many people enjoy streaming music today. Many of us still have large libraries of CDs. In order to get those CDs onto your PC, laptop, or phone, you need to rip them to a digital file format like MP3.  I recently lost some music files and had to go back to my library of original CDs and rip some of them again. Much to my surprise, there are not a lot of free CD ripping programs out there. An old favorite of mine was CDEX. It still is free. However, the links to the old freedb.org for Artist, Album, and Track information are no longer working. Freedb.org was a database of compact disc track listings, where all the content was under the GNU General Public License. But Freedb and Musicbrainz shut down in 2020. So what is a music collector to do? Below are how to fix this situation. For Windows I use CDEX. For Linux I use Asunder. The fix is similar for both programs. Happy CD ripping !

CDEX available at: https://cdex.mu/




Below are the setups to enable the online meta data lookups:
Select Add Site





For Linux, I use Asunder. It is available in the Synaptic Software Manager.






Source: https://www.gnudb.org/howto.php