Need CD Ripping Capability

[DanielS]

First, let me say I love the new Beyond Media (as well as BTV 3.5 for that matter) and think Snapstream and the Beta testers who have worked so hard deserve to be congratulated on their great work.

But after all the hard work I have had to go through to get my CDs ripped and ID3 tags properly formatted to weed out all the duplicates and make BM happy, I see one glaring lack of functionality in the product. That is the ability to Rip CDs in an elegant fashion, using the remote control in a format that is acceptable to Beyond Media. BM excels at being a truly easy to setup, out-of-the-box experience, yet an End User would need a Masters in Computer Science to rip a CD into the music library and make it consistent with BM's tagging requirements.

There should be functionality where a novice user could insert a music CD, have BM detect it and ask the user if they want it converted to MP3s (or whatever). The CDDB could then be interrogated to constructed the ID3 tags and the MP3s stored in the music library.

Yes, there are freeware and shareware programs available that do this, but NOT that remain within the GUI of the HTPC environment. Come on now? Beyond Media is tremendous at playing media, shouldn't it help us get the simplist and most common media into the library? Does anyone else see the need for this?

[Brett]

Does this help?
http://kb.snapstream.com/?kbid=233&p_created=1101862733

-Brett

[LinkB]

I use the auto-rip functionality in Windows Media 9 and it works brilliantly for me the way I have my HTPC setup. The one thing that doesn't happen is I don't get a choice of whether I want to rip the disc when I put it in the drive -- but like I said, that works for me.

[Xiadix]

I noticed that there are some plugins to have WMP do mp3 instead of the windows format. Anybody have any experience with these?

I would like to know:
Can to be done withOUT any drm?
Is there a free one?
Is it worth it?

EDIT: After I looked, looks like MS added the feature so WMP10 can rip to mp3 already. I am off to check it out.


KevG