Ahhhhhhh... MP3 Compressor. The first contact I had with an easy to use MP3 encoder. I would "rip" the tracks from audio CDs using that famous CDFS.VXD filesystem driver that showed CDDA tracks as WAV files instead of .cda indexes (yes, this was back in Win98 days) in Windows Explorer. Then I would rename each file with the track name (CDDB? What?), load all of them on MP3 Compressor and hope that Windows would not crash in the hour or so that it took to convert everything. I also avoided using the computer during encoding because I did not know how to use the process priority slider in the interface, the default position was "idle" so anything interfered with speed - Word97 was particularly bothersome...

But enough nostalgia! Only many years later I figured out that MP3 Compressor is not really an encoder, but a frontend to the FhG Professional ACM codec, which is illegally distributed with the installation.

The interface is quite minimal, you can select the tracks from the input folder and choose an output folder. A faster mode is also selectable. Interestingly, bitrate is not a choice: for 44.1kHz stereo audio you get 128kbps and that's it.

Eventually I moved on to CDex + GOGO for my ripping needs (and kept moving), and I guess with time most people abandoned MP3 Compressor as well. The web site has been gone for decades and I could not even find archives of it.


Date: 1997-07-18
Version: 0.9f
Interface: Graphical
Platform: Win32
Download: mp3comp.exe - 1.117kB