A few years ago, when I first started to listen to most of my music on my computer, as opposed to a stereo, I had the unenviable task of having to rip all of my CDs to MP3. This isn’t a difficult process, of course. On the Mac, iTunes is able to rip CDs quite well. The problem has always been – at least from my point of view – that it doesn’t take all that long to rip and convert a CD, but it isn’t a super-fast process either.
If the process took a long time then I’d have no problem putting a CD in the disk drive and starting the ripping/converting, right before I went to bed. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take that long to rip and encode a CD… typically between 8-12 minutes on my computer, depending on the length of the CD. Of course, I don’t really want to sit at my computer for ten minutes, doing nothing but waiting for the CD to finish encoding just so I can start another one.
The problem really boils down to the fact that it actually doesn’t take all that long to do the actual ripping or the converting… it’s the fact that we have to wait for both to be finished before starting the next CD.
With CD Stack, that’s an issue no longer. CD Stack is a shareware utility for Mac that allows users to not only speed up the ripping/encoding process, but to use the LAME library. LAME is an implementation of the MP3 algorithm, often viewed as being better than any other ripper. I’ll leave that to your own ears, but for me the biggest feature in CD Stack is how it works.
With most rippers, you put the CD in the drive and start the process. The ripper then rips the first song from the CD, then converts that song to MP3. The program then rips the second song from the CD, then converts that song to MP3. It does this until the CD is finished, at which point it ejects the CD and you insert another.
The problem is that after a song has been ripped, and the encoding starts, the CD drive just sits there – waiting – until it’s time to rip another song. With CD Stack, on the other hand, things are a little different. The two processes – ripping and converting – are treated as two entirely different things. So you can start a CD ripping, and it rips the whole CD. Once there’s enough to start encoding, CD Stack starts, but not at the expense of the ripping.
And when CD Stack is finished ripping (but not yet done encoding), the user doesn’t have to wait! Simply eject the CD, stick another one in, and CD Stack starts ripping that one, all the while continuing to encode the originally-ripped songs. In this way, you can get through one of the processes – the ripping – much quicker than before, because you don’t have to stop and wait for the encoding to finish.
In addition to making the whole rip/encode process a whole lot quicker, CD Stack has a lot of nice features that make it simple to use in conjunction with iTunes. For instance, you can have all the new music you just ripped and encoded added to your iTunes library automatically. If you want, you can even have it added to its own special playlist. And, if you have iTunes set to automatically copy music to a specific location when added to the library, you can have CD Stack erase the music it just ripped (since it now exists in your iTunes library), to avoid having duplicate copies lying around.
And, like any good ripper, CD Stack gives you a lot of options as far as the encoding quality of your music. You can encode to CBR (Constant Bit Rate), ABR (Average Bit Rate), VBR (Variable Bit Rate), in either the old or new form. You can encode to Stereo, Joint Stereo or Mono, or use one of the Lame presets, which are already tweaked for speed, quality or a good combination of the two.
Finally, for those who love CoverFlow or looking at the album art in iTunes or on an iPod, CD Stack lets the user add cover art to the ripped and encoded files, simply by dragging a cover art image into a drop zone in the main window.
All in all, I think CD Stack is a fantastic utility. I don’t have much use for it anymore (I’ve already gone through the process of ripping all my CDs, and hopefully won’t need to repeat the process on a large number of CDs any more), but for those looking to someday doing that same project, CD Stack is an excellent choice. It isn’t free (a full license costs $14.95), and the trial period (up to 10 times of up to 15 minutes apiece is all that’s allowed), really should give you enough time to see if the features and speed are to your liking. You can download the trial copy of CD Stack from its home page, and if you decide to purchase it, can do that from there as well.
