CDex 2.24

Overview

There are many people who have a large collection of CDs and want to rip them using a good CD ripper. There are many tools in the market designed for such a task and CDex is one of them. There are some media players that have this feature built-in but they don’t compare with tools that are dedicated to CD ripping. The data can be extracted directly from an audio CD by CDex and compress it into one of the most popular audio formats you can think of. Let’s take a look at CDex and analyze its features.

Installation

CDex is a lightweight tool and its setup kit barely measures 9MB. The installation is fast and you will have the ripping tool installed in a timely fashion. CDex doesn’t contain any adware and doesn’t come bundled with other programs. Regarding the tool’s specifications, you should know that CDex is supports and works on all versions of the Windows operating system. Let’s move on to the good stuff – the interface!

Interface

The interface of CDex is easy to use, despite its multitude of buttons it's pretty intuitive. It isn’t very cool-looking though. Moreover, it looks Spartan but many people might like such a clean interface. It is certainly practical and it gets the job done without any fuss. The main window can be resized and all the information such as the length, position and name of songs can be easily seen. The nicely-designed icons and the good placements of the controls and buttons make CDex’s interface a winner.

Pros

Let’s talk about the features. CDex is a simple tool so beginners and experienced users alike will find it most enjoyable to work with. The content of the inserted audio CD is automatically read by CDex. Then, you can rename the files or batch-rename them using a selected preset algorithm. In the Options menu, you will find all of the supported formats in which you can convert the files present on the audio CD. All the popular audio formats such as mp3, wav, wma are there along with some obscure ones like APE and Yamaha VQF. The quality and sample rate can be adjusted with relative ease and just about everything you can think of about encoding can be set. A great feature of CDex is the fact that the support for ID-tagging is excellent. A large set of options regarding the CD drive meant for experienced users is also present. Spin times, ripping method and more enter this category.

Cons

There isn’t anything fundamentally wrong with CDex. Just a warning though: don’t expect professional results. It is a tool designed for novice users.

Alternatives

There are a lot of ripping tools out there. Here are some of them: Exact Audio Copy, X Lossless Decoder (Mac), fre:ac, Easy CD-DA Extractor and many more. Some of them are more professional than others and as you already know, CDex is, mostly, for beginners.

Conclusion

All in all, CDex is a decent CD ripping tool that should satisfy the needs of the majority of casual users.