This morning a thing I keep writing about as I tell you about various converters and audio CD rippers has actually happened: last night, at a metal gig, I bought some CDs with bands that are dear to me and I have waited for the morning to get to work and listen to them as I was writing something. But then I decided it would be far more easy and convenient to rip them and load them all in a player, so I wouldn’t have to interrupt my work to change the discs. And since I am at the heart of Softpedia, I obviously looked there for a freeware CD ripper which would inspire reliability and "solidity" only by looking at the screenshots.

I must admit that the name of the one I chose was more than intriguing in the first place and - as I saw the screenshots - I said to myself that this one could very well be exactly what I was looking for. And believe me or not, it really was as I supposed: FairStars really rocks! Let's see why...

The Looks

FairStars looks by far much better than almost all ripping softwares and, if I just think a bit, I really can't remember now one that looks better. It has a truly "aired" GUI, with a scalable window which can go from fullscreen down to a minimal functionally-accepted size. Here is one cool thing about this program's GUI: the designers have noticed that, as you minimize the main window just to free some desktop space, you won't be able to easily read its contents; therefore, they have limited the minimal size to a proportion which allows perfect visibility for all elements. Which is very good!

Multiple skins are available for FairStars and they range from XP-ish to Mac-ish; the skins which come by default with the program have been designed in such a manner that they would fit almost any OS theme and coloring.

The general impression FairStars has made as I saw it for the first time was order and functionality; the tracklist is large indeed, much larger than anything; generic commands have been placed in the upper region while output commands and settings are in the rightmost side. The preview player is on the right side as well, but lower, and besides the playback controls it sports very visible and handy seek- and volume-bars.

The menus are very readable and, due to the abundance of text-on-buttons, it is really easy to move around in FairStars. The Options menu is the most complex (even though it is quite simple in itself) of all the settings present in FairStars, but anyone who has even the faintest idea on what MP3 or Sample Frequency is will be able to tweak things in no time, just because the dropdown menus really ARE easy to both use and understand.

Overall, the GUI of FairStars has a very professional appearance and the very good functionality (we're about to discuss next) and the freeware attribute has not impeded the drawing of such fine shapes and the neat, "aired" appearance, usually met in professional or "big-bucks software".

The Works

It's pretty obvious (I guess) why I was looking for free software. If the choice I have finally made is not that obvious, let me explain it further on. FairStars turned out to be a very reliable software, which offered me the chance to rip my CDs in more than the usual "4 horsemen" (as I like to call the 4 popular formats WAV, WMA, MP3 and OGG). FairStars would easily let me make digital tracks on my PC in the VQF, FLAC and APE formats without me needing to install other codecs, which is very convenient.

If someone thinks that having more than the "classic" 4 file formats means additional trouble deciding which one to use and even worse, what settings must be made and how they are to be applied, I'll just cool him/her down: setting up the quality for the output formats is a child's play; for each of the formats I have mentioned, all the tweaks are accessible by means of very intuitive and easy dropdown menus which ensure that you won't spend more than seconds to prepare the processing parameters, even if you aren't a sound professional.

As you insert the CD and press the Query button Freedb data is automatically downloaded and prepared for tagging the files: you just have to choose the output format (from a drop-menu as well) and then set the filename format. You have a preview for this last operation, so you won't have to encode first just to see that you made a mistake and have to rename all resulting songs again...

Another cool feature in FairStars is that it works with shortcuts; technically, you can access almost every feature and command by using shortcuts and this is not such a commonly-met thing, especially in what freeware code is concerned. Speed is one of the FairStars' strong points as well: I asked of it to encode a big 19 tracks album to 320Kbps MP3 and it didn't take much time to pop up the "Done" window. It runs hard on PC resources but it runs well!

Needless to say that in MP3-mode you can choose either CBR or VBR, Original, Copyright or Private attributes, while for the rest of the output file formats the whole extent of additional settings are available. The resulting files sound very good: I haven't tried low-bitrate encoding, because I was looking for quality and not for noise-experiments, ha-ha! Therefore, I can definitely say at the end of this article that FairStars is truly part of the rippers' world elite.

The Good

First of all, it's totally free; then (not necessarily in this order) come the very good GUI and skins and the additional formats (FLAC, APE and VQF).

The Bad

I really can't say bad things about FairStars, therefore I’ll end this section :) here.

The Truth

In my humble opinion, FairStars is a must. I am very sure that I will use it for a long time from now on and I dare assume many of you will do the same after giving it a spin… which spin I warmly recommend!

Screenshots, if you care for some pictures of this lovely piece of code: