Let's start at the beginning. KonaKoder reads the raw audio data right off of the CD and sends it directly to the encoder. Many of the encoder solutions available require you to save the raw audio in a temporary file, wasting a lot of disk space. The space needed for these temporary files could be used to save another five or ten CD's full of MP3's. Sure, disks are cheap, but why waste space if you don't have to? KonaKoder also takes some extra steps to make sure that the audio data is skip free. Experience has shown that some damaged CD's are not read in a skip free manner with other tools.
KonaKoder uses a derivative of the 8Hz MP3 encoder to do the real work. This is certainly not the best encoder available, but it's what I could get my hands on during the development. A future release may be based on the excellent BladeEnc that is now available. If anyone is willing to contribute $10K or $20K for licensing, I would be glad to make use of the top-quality Fraunhofer encoder. Although KonaKoder is not the fastest encoder, it will automatically make use of multiple processors if they are available.
If you have Internet access, KonaKoder will make use of a CDDB database to download the artist, title, and track names for the CD's you are encoding. For offline use, you are free to specify your own data. KonaKoder also lets you specify the year and a genre to be attached to your MP3 files. Unlike some other solutions, the genre menu is sorted for easy use, and customizable to suit your tastes.
As each song is encoded KonaKoder adds all the information about the song, along with the track number, as attributes for the file. This provides access to some of the most useful aspects of the BeOS. While other encoder solutions add these attributes to your MP3 files, KonaKoder takes a few extra steps to make the attributes as useful as possible. Specifically, it teaches the Tracker about the attributes so that you get access to more functionality. After running KonaKoder, you will be able to use the full power of the BeOS "Find..." panel to search your MP3 files. You say you want to find all of your jazz songs from the 1960's? No problem! All of your dance songs with "sex" in the title? No Problem! Tracks 3 thru 8 of all Disco albums from 1976 whose artist had "the" in their name? Probably not, but you could!
One downside to using "Find..." to sort out your songs is that there are not any MP3 players that make good use of this feature. The BeOS allows you to save each query you perform into a file. This allows you to keep all of more common queries around for easy use. Hopefully soon we will have a player that will accept these queries as playlists. Check out the Sample Queries folder for the examples above.
KonaKoder also teaches the Tracker how to display the attributes in it's regular directory windows. Do you really want to view your MP3 files listed by name, size, or modification date? KonaKoder stores each album in it's own directory, and lets you view the title, album, artist, or whatever else you want. As an extra touch, KonaKoder can make use of a template directory to help simplify the setup of your directory windows. While you could go and adjust the view of each directory window by hand, KonaKoder will copy the layout of your template directory over to each new CD it encodes. Set the layout up once, and let KonaKoder take care of it from then on.
Although I do love to praise the virtues of KonaKoder, it is not perfect. Here is a quick list of the things that are wrong with it. It includes it's own CD ripper and MP3 encoder. These features should really be incorporated into MediaKit Nodes. But, until that happens, KonaKoder does it all. I'm also pretty sure that it leaks memory, but not very much. It generates a lot of warnings when it compiles. There isn't a "Stop" button, so you'll just have to quit instead. It doesn't handle multiple CD players, although I tried to design it in a way to make this fairly easy to add. You have to encode a whole CD at once, it won't let you select which songs to encode. I'm sure there are more, but you get the idea. And the source code is included, so feel free to play around with it!
Copyright 1999 David Mitchell