Ripping Karaoke CDs (free software)
I had reason to rip some Karaoke CDs to a hard disk recently, and knew there must be some free software to do this. It was hard to find, so I’m listing it here. Hope it is useful. These tools are Windows only, and only tested on Windows XP, so I have no idea how they perform on Vista or Windows 7.
The first thing I needed to do was to rip the Karaoke disks to the hard drive. Now, Karaoke disks are not standard audio disks so you cannot use your usual ripping software to extract the data. They do contain an audo track just like a normal “white book” CD, but hidden in a normally-unused channel of the CD are the graphics. The disks are known as “CD+G” or “Compact Disk plus Graphics”.
The only free software I could find to rip these CDs is Audiograbber. Originally released as shareware, this is now freeware.
Once installed, Audiograbber will rip the contents of a CD+G disk into a variety of different formats. I chose the “MP3+G” format, where each track is extracted as an MP3 file and a separate “CDG” graphics file. These files can be joined back together and burned back to disk later, but it is useful to have the MP3 available separately.
Before ripping to MP3, you will need to download lame into the Audiograbber home directory (just the DLL and the EXE is needed). This will let you save the audio at up to 320kbit/S, while Audiograbber only supports 56kbit/S natively. It detects lame automatically and uses it to encode the audio on request.
One thing that is not obvious with Audiograbber is that the command for ripping CD+G disks is under the “CD” menu. It is not available through any of the toolbar icons.
Another thing to bear in mind is that not all CD players are capable of reading the graphics channel. My laptop CD player could not, so I used an external (USB) Panasonic CD writer that worked like a champ.
So, I have my MP3 and matching CDG files. What can I do with them? Easy: play them.
To play the tracks you need a player. The free Karake Builder CD+G Player works well. It will read the CDG files directly, picking up the MP3 files and play them just like a pub Karaoke. In full-screen mode you just get the graphics and the audio.
The Karaoke Builder player will also read “bin” files. These have the audio (in WAV format, so fairly sizeable) and the graphics channels multiplexed into a single file. Most CD writers capable of writing CD+G disks (and again, not all hardware will be capable either) will require the bin files so they do not have to attempt to mulitplex two sources onto the media at the same time as burning the disk.
Another tool work mentioning is Active ASP Software’s MP3+G Toolz. This utility, once installed, is available in the context menu of Explorer, and will convert between various CD+G formats. You can freely convert between WAV+G, MP3+G, and BIN single/multiple track formats. They also have a CD+G player called Troubadour Karaoke Lite Home Edition. I haven’t tried that out though.
When I find what software I used to burn the CD+G disks (several years ago) I’ll report back here. From what I remember, it involved creating a whole-disk bin-format file, then using a special burner – or perhaps a Nero plugin – to burn the disk.