Update! It’s been brought to our attention by our great readers that Wildfire is actually a re-skinned version of the open-source CDex software. We’ve updated the link at the bottom to point to the truly free version. Sorry for the trouble!

Installation

The install process for WildFire CD Ripper is simple with a total of five install screens to navigate. On the third install screen, there is something that you do need to watch out for. Make certain to deselect the “P2P Energy – torrent toolbar” unless you want to have it installed on your computer.

Note: Once the installation process has finished, the WildFire CD Ripper homepage will automatically open in your default browser.

Here is what WildFire CD Ripper looks like when started up. The interface is nicely laid out and easy to navigate (very nice!).

Menus and Options

WildFire CD Ripper has a nice set of menus to give you quick and easy access to settings and adjustments. Here is a good look at all of the available menus.

The Settings Window looks very similar to the Main Window and is the same size. Here you can make personal adjustments for Generic Settings, Filenames, CD Drive, Encoder (this is the default tab), Local CDDB, and Remote CDDB. Going through the tabbed interface will show the nice amount of options/settings available for WildFire CD Ripper.

WildFire CD Ripper in Action

On our example system we decided to rip the newest Hannah Montana CD to mp3 format. The CD was easily detected, but with this still being such a new release we had to individually rename each audio track and fill in the information at the top.

Note: WildFire CD Ripper does allow you to check online for album information with a single click on the appropriate button on the Right Side Toolbar.

To begin ripping a CD, click on the tracks that you want to work with to select them and then click on the appropriate Right Side Toolbar button (based on the particular action that you are wanting to perform). Here you can see our choice to rip and convert the tracks to mp3 format.

This is the Progress Window that you will see while ripping your CDs. The window displays the progress only for the track that it is working on at that time…

One slightly unusual thing we noticed after WildFire CD Ripper finished with our example CD was the “Save Architecture” for the songs. You can see the architecture in the following screenshot. Notice that each song was placed in a separate subfolder underneath the particular track number.

Conclusion

Once you have the options and settings adjusted to suit your personal preferences, WildFire CD Ripper does a very nice job of ripping and converting CDs. WildFire CD Ripper makes a very nice primary or secondary ripping software to have on any computer.

Links

Download CDex from sourceforge.net)