Grip Reviews

I've used good 'ol Grip for many years. Its just the right tool for what I need, basic ripping with archival-quality mp3 encoding through Lame. MANY THANKS for supporting this project and fixing the database lookup issue when freedb went dark recently.

I used to use audex for ripping my CD collection but for some reason this is not as reliable as grip. I'm really happy with it and it's now my go-to program for ripping. It - uses cdparanoia and guarantees for a reliable reading of of the source CD - retrieves track information from freedb and tags the resulting files - it can encode (among others) to flac - naming of the resulting files is configurable; e.g. tracks can be sorted into folders (e.g. artist/album/number - track name.flac)

I've been using Grip for at least a decade straight now, and I have to give a big word of thanks to the team who took over the project after it hadn't been maintained for several years. I've used it to rip scores of CDs now, and it always works right out of the box, with the type of configuration options that I doubt most commercial programs can begin to compete with, especially the ability to have a consistent file naming system, which is particularly important to me. Having file name consistency makes it significantly easier to know which artist, album, track number, and song I have on my drive with an instant look, with each file name formatted as ARTIST - ALBUM - TRACK_NUMBER - SONG_NAME.mp3. Love this program, and having an open source solution that smokes the commercial versions is just the icing on the cake.

Grip had been stagnant for quite some time, but it was still a pretty good & easy to use ripper. Since the project has been re-started by Johnny Solbu there have been some good cleanup/fixup releases and Grip now seems to work better than ever. Downloaded the 3.6.3 tar.gz onto my Suse Leap 42.3 system, did the configure/make/make install routine, and Grip was installed & working better than ever. Very happy to have Grip back in the land of the living. Thanks Johnny !

Still my go-to CD ripper and encoder front-end. Install Date: Sat Aug 30 11:44:02 2008

Fast, small and simple or powerful according to your needs. I never use anything else.

Works fantastically, easy to use, a good complete package for cd-ripping and encoding

A very complete tool, that supports cdparanoia (3) plugin (the best and only one) But this software is no more supported by Ubuntu... why... don't know... so for me, it's dead

Grip is an configurable GUI to encode CDDA.

I use this tool since many years and just like it because it is easy to handle and powerful to configure. It is faster than k3b and other tools and it is small. What a pity that it seems not to be maintained anymore. For there would be no extensions needed except for a nicer dialog with presets for the naming of the files.