While there are several encoders available for the BeOS, KonaKoder has combines the best features of the others along with a few of it's own to make encoding your CD's as easy as possible. KonaKoder pipes the music right from the CD to the encoder, avoiding wasted disk space containing uncompressed music. It interfaces with a CDDB database to find out artist, album, and track information for the CD. Finally, it adds these as attributes to the MP3 files so that you can easily view and search your music.
Although KonaKoder is an excellent encoder, it is not perfect. It is a pain to put together, since licensing issues prevent me from including the actual MPEG encoder. Moreover, the encoder it does work with is not the best in terms of either speed or quality. On the plus side, it is free and includes the source code.
KonaKoder is far from being a solitary effort. As much as I would like to take full credit for it, there are many other people who had a hand in it's creation. These include the folks at 8Hz who did their best to provide a freeware MP3 encoder to the world, somebody for creating the CDDB database, Chip Paul who provided the excellent CDDBLooper class, Marco Nelissen for his PrefServer utilities, and last but not least, the folks at Be Inc. for providing an OS with the features to make this all worthwhile. Check out the Credits page for more information on who helped out with KonaKoder and links to their web pages.
Copyright 1999 David Mitchell