AudioGrabber v1.80.03 Retail.rar

Audiograbber 1.80 beta 3, 2001-02-17
Unzip ag180beta.exe and put it in the same directory as a previously installed audiograbber. Run the ag180beta.exe.

What's new in this Audiograbber 1.80?

* ID3v2 support. ID3v1 is the old way of adding text info about a track at the end of an MP3 file which Audiograbber has always supported. ID3v1 is very limited tagging standard and more and more programs are now supporting the much more flexible ID3v2 standard which has several advantages over ID3v1, the most noticeably ones are no 30 character limit of fields and that it has support for a lot of additional info about a song. The ID3v2 tag is also stored in the beginning of the MP3 files which is better than storing it at the end, particularly for streamed audio.

* ID3v2 lyrics! This is something I have longed for to add to Audiograbber. Lyrics. I like to read the lyrics whilst listening to songs since I can otherwise not always hear what they sing. Now it is possible to add lyrics to your MP3 files with Audiograbber, just doubleclick a track and enter the lyrics. (ID3 info is now saved to discs.txt but lyrics are saved to a file named XXXXXXX.lyr where XXXXXXX is the discs CDDB id. The discs.txt would risk to be very large if lyrics were also saved there so I decided to store that in separate files).

* The ID3 genre and year can now be changed directly from the main window. A "Fade" checkbox has also been added to the main window, useful if you record from live cd's.

* I added a function named "Capitalize tracknames" (Shortcut Ctrl + K) under the cd menu.

* Added some checkboxes to the rip progress window. Shut down PC, Create M3U list, Play the songs and Eject disc. Just check the things you want to happen when ripping is finished. A pause button has also been added to that window.

* Added a "Cut" button and a "Start now" button to the line in sampling window. Useful if you occasionally want to manually split up audio when it records. Cuts can be done in two modes, either abrupt or faded. Line in sampling has also got a new function named "Record from file" which can be used if you already have a wave file that you want to split up in separate tracks.

* ID3v2 tags and lyrics can also be entered on the line in sampling window. This was a bit more complicated than the ID3v2 support for CD tracks since the ID3v2 tag is written when MP3 encoding starts. In line in sampling mode it is possible to change track and edit ID3 data while it records which made it complicated with direct recording to MP3. Audiograbber will however go back and rewrite the ID3v2 tag if something has been changed during recording so it shall work just fine.

* Line in sampling has support for a noise reduction dll from Algorithmix http://www.algorithmix.de. This dll is scheduled for release with Algorithmix's Sound Laundry program in the end of February and registered Audiograbber users will get a discount on that. More on that later, it removes scratches and noise very well in my experience. (I tested quite many noise reduction programs and Algorithmix gave the best results in my opinion). This dll works on live audio so it is possible to sample, clean audio and encode to MP3 in one step.

One MP3 player that has ID3v2 support is Winamp 2.72 from http://www.winamp.com. It is quite limited ID3v2 support though. Get Argon ID3v2 plugin for Winamp from http://www.intermedia.st/argon/ .Argon is a nice plugin that displays ID3v2 tag info (including lyrics) in Winamps mini browser. You may also want a good ID3v2 tag editor and I recommend Helium from http://www.intermedia.st. Another good ID3v2 tag editor is DrTAG from http://www.asterius.org. Info about ID3v2 (and ID3v1) can be found at http://www.id3.org.

* New in beta 3 is local CDDB support. It is possible to go to http://www.freedb.org and download their whole disc database to your harddisk and then Audiograbber will not need to go online to locate disc info (tracknames). The database is around 80 MB zipped (and you need to get the zipped version). It expands to almost 300 MB unzipped. I doubt that very many users will use local CDDB but this feature has been frequently requested the past years so now it was time to add it. Freedb's database hold less discs than CDDB's but most common discs are in Freedb's database too. Go to CDDB settings in Audiograbber and specify the directory of your local database if you like to use this function.

* Lyrics was not saved and/or read correctly in the previous beta so that shall also have been fixed now.


Please report if you find any bugs!
Jackie Franck, February 2001.
amiaham@gmail.com

amiaham