About 8to32

8to32 is a small collection of audio utilities for ripping CDs and converting music between common formats. This site preserves information about the tools for reference.

The tools at a glance

• Easy CD Ripper — extracts audio CD tracks to MP3, WAV, WMA, VQF, OGG or APE, converts between formats, and edits ID3 tags. See the overview for the full feature list.
• MP3 CD Burner — turns MP3, WMA, WAV, OGG, APE, AAC and MP4 files into a standard audio CD that plays in a regular home stereo or car CD player. Details on the MP3 CD Burner page.

The formats, briefly

The same handful of format names appears throughout the site, so here is what each one actually is:

• MP3 — the most widely supported lossy format; small files that play on virtually any device.
• WAV — plain uncompressed audio; an exact copy of the sound, at large file sizes.
• WMA — Windows Media Audio, Microsoft's lossy format, common on Windows players of the era.
• OGG — Ogg Vorbis, a free and open lossy format with quality comparable to MP3 at similar bitrates.
• APE — Monkey's Audio, a lossless compressed format: smaller than WAV yet bit-for-bit identical when played back.
• VQF — TwinVQ, a compact lossy format from the late 1990s that never gained wide support and is rarely seen today.
• AAC / MP4 — the successor to MP3, giving better quality at the same bitrate; AAC audio usually arrives inside MP4 (or M4A) files.

Which format for which job?

The list above says what each format is; this is which one to actually reach for:

• Music to play on a phone, in the car, or anywhere at all — MP3. Nothing else is as universally supported, and at a high bitrate the difference is hard to hear on ordinary equipment.
• An archival copy of a disc — APE. It is lossless, so the copy matches the CD exactly, and it is compressed, so it takes noticeably less room than WAV. Make MP3s from it later, whenever you need a portable version.
• Editing audio, or burning straight back to an audio CD — WAV. Editors and CD writers work from uncompressed audio anyway, so starting there avoids a needless re-encode.
• Smallest file for a given quality on modern gear — AAC/MP4, which does more with the same bitrate than MP3 — provided every player you use handles it.
• Best left alone for new rips — VQF, and WMA outside Windows. Both are tied to their era, so files you create in them today may be awkward to play years from now.

One rule cuts across all of these: every extra trip through a lossy format discards a little more detail, so convert from the original disc or from a lossless copy wherever you can, rather than from an MP3 you made earlier. Bitrate matters as much as the format itself — the FAQ on the home page covers choosing one, and constant versus variable bitrate.

Both tools were built around the same idea: everyday audio jobs — ripping, converting, tagging and burning — should take a few clicks, not a manual. The awards page describes the recognition the software received over the years, and is straightforward about which parts of that page did not survive into this archive.