Version 1.20 reviewed by Bob Starrett - 05/11/00

There is nothing fancy or complex about CDex, the CD ripping and compression utility from ALFA Technologies, but there is a lot to like. It is nice to have the current drive displayed on the menu bar rather than buried down on some submenu. If you have more than one drive, it's always a pain to remember which one is the active ripping drive and a pain, too, to have to search about in a program to find out. With CDex, you always know what drive is active and changing from drive to drive is easy.

Many times I can't remember right off which ripping programs have the functionality for a particular task that I want to perform, such as decompressing an MP3 to WAV - with CDex there is no poking around in the menus. On the right side of the screen are four big buttons that not only remind you what functions are available, but also launch those functions. Graphically represented, and at your disposal at all times are, CD to WAV, CD to MPEG, Partial CD track to MPEG, WAV to MPEG and MPEG to WAV. Just select the song you want to rip or convert in the main windows, and press the button. Done.

Also easily accessible with large buttons on the right are CDDB and the CDex Setup screen. In Setup, you have four tabs, General, CD-ROM, Encoder and CDDB. In the General screen, you can change the output file name format, add files to playlists, either PLS or MPU, set normalization parameters and change the output file directories. Under CD-ROM, you can choose your source drive, change the rip offsets, enable or disable jitter correction and auto-detect your CD-ROM drive type. Under the encoder tab, you can choose the encoder that you want to use, set the encoding bitrate, and set the mode to Stereo, Joint Stereo, Forced Stereo or Mono. The CDDB tab has all the usual options for setting up your CDDB connection.

CDex supports the Yamaha VQ format, too, if you are inclined to try it. Although certainly not as popular as MP3, VQ files are small and sound great. If you are using CDex, this is a good opportunity to make some VQ files and compare their quality to MP3, WMA, Liquid audio or a2bmusic. The VQ format is unfortunately proprietary to Yamaha, which is too bad. If they released the spec there probably would be more interest in it, although nobody can compete with MP3 anymore.

As for speed, CDex ties with the Plextor Manager in the ripping speed race, as long as jitter correction is turned off. Ripping a three minute song to WAV from a TDK (Plextor) 8x ATAPI recorder took 17 ½ seconds. And the mp3 compression times are excellent, too, with that same three-minute song coming off the CD and into mp3 format in a little over a minute using the LAME encoder.

There is also a compare feature that will actually work with WAV files, unlike a standard file compare program. CDex ignores the WAV header so you can get a true compare. The internal manual is good, as is the online help at the Product Home Page. CDex can merge tracks by using the Partial Track Copy feature and specifying sector starts and stops that include several songs.

The best features of CDex are that it is free, absolutely, and that it is open source. So if you want to add ripping and conversion functionality to a program, here is the source that will do it. And if you want to build your own ripper, you can do that, too. Or you can modify the look of CDex and add features, if you like. All in all, CDex is a comprehensive ripping and conversion program and the availability of the source code is a big extra for anyone interested in writing their own ripper, or just understanding how ripping and audio conversion functions are done.

Pros

• Easy drive selection
• Easy one-click ripping and conversion
• Fast ripping
• Free Source code available
• Excellent encoder support

Cons

• No Installer