CD Ripping on Win98

On reason people have suggested that P2P took off was that people could not easily rip their own CD’s on to their computer. After trying to rip a CD on a stock Win98 box I believe it. I tried both Audiograbber which didn’t work out of the box (or rather it popped with a warning).

Then I tried CDex, which said it required the “Adaptec’s ASPI”:http://www.adaptec.com/worldwide/support/driverdetail.jsp?cat=%2fProduct%2fASPI-4.70&filekey=aspi_471a2.exe&sess=no driver, which once installed didn’t show the CD drive. Maybe because it isn’t a Adaptec product?

Then after consulting Bart’s page about ASPI I tried the Nero’s ASPI (no installer, you have to copy files into c:\windows yourself, ug!) CDex started, but complained that it wanted the “orignal” wnaspi32.dll. I just ripped a track and it appears to work, just really slow (like 1x speed).

Since I was trying to take a survey of how different programs used the MCDI frame in id3v2 tags, I tried AudioGrabber again, which now sees the Nero ASPI driver and has the exact same dialog warning me that it’s not the “orignal” wnaspi32.dll. Looks like AudioGrabber is based some what on some thing CDex is (CDex is GPL, so that would be a no-no). The option to get it to include a MCDI frame is deep in some config dialog,
not on by default.

What a total pain in the butt. But I did get my two example tracks.

CDex work under WinNT based systems, because M$ added calls to access CDDA in those versions, but it still pops up a warning first.

Given the grief it took to rip my own CD on a Napster Era PC I can totally believe people would get on Napster to just get music they already owned on their computer. Not that I think that’s all they did.