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Audio Portable Apps
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CoolPlayer A tiny, super-fast audio player. |
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Audacity An open-source, simple and powerful audio editor. |
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CDex Extract audio from CDs reliably. |
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SharePod Manage an iPod with no iTunes from any Windows computer with this portable app. |
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foobar2000 A classic audio player for Windows, great for playlists. |
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RadioSure The best way to listen to radio by desktop or laptop. |
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Songr The best way to search for and download or stream MP3s. |
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Hokrain Listen to your music in a lightweight, minimalist way. |
Communication Portable Apps
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Email Stripper A free portable app that cleans up long email threads. |
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Pidgin A multi-protocol IM client. Packaged by PortableApps.com. |
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Miranda IM Another multi-protocol IM client, with a ton of plugins. |
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Skype Not an official installer, but from PortableApps.com. |
Image Editors and Viewers
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Easy Image Modifier A tool for resizing, flipping, converting, watermarking and renaming images. |
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Inkscape Portable An open-source vector editor. Think “Illustrator” or “CorelDRAW” — not as powerful, but free. |
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GIMP Think “free Photoshop” with a cluttered interface. Powerful, but an acquired taste. Packaged by PortableApps.com. |
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AndreaMosaic A freeportable app for creating photomosaics (pictures made up of tiled pictures). |
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Fotografix A tiny image editor aimed at photograpers and designers. |
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IrfanView Portable A fast and powerful image viewer that can also apply effects. |
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XnView Portable Convenient for viewing, organizing, and converting your photos. |
Miscellaneous Portable Apps
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sWeather Check the weather and get alerts all from your Windows system tray. |
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YTWatcher Enjoy your YouTube favorites and subscriptions right from your desktop. |
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BSNES An all-in-one emulator that supports all Classic Nintendo consoles. |
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Brain Workshop A dual n-back game scientifically proven to make you smarter. |
Productivity Apps
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WriteMonkey A fantastic full-screen text editor for distraction-free editing. I use it all the time. |
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Abiword A free, open-source word processor. This is a portable app packaged by PortableApps.com. |
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Notepad2 A text editor with programmer-friendly features. |
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FocusWriter Another full-screen editor for a Zen-like writing experience. Download | Full review |
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OpenOffice Not as slick as MS Office, but it will do in a pinch. Packaged by PortableApps.com. |
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XAMPP The Apache Web server, MySQL, PHP, and Perl, all bundled together in one portable ZIP. |
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TreePad Lite A personal information manager for notes and other information. |
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Stickies A fantastic sticky-note application, packaged by PortableApps.com. |
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DropboxPortableAHK Lets you take Dropbox on a stick and use it without admin rights. |
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Calibre A tool for managing your ebook collection and converting book formats. Download | Full review | eBook |
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Notepad++ A powerful, customizable programmer’s text editor. |
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Foxit Reader Portable A PDF document reader. |
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CintaNotes A slimmed down version of Evernote designed more towards jotting quick notes and thoughts. |
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PNotes Bring sticky notes to your desktop and help remember all of those important things. |
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AutoHotKey Automate keystrokes, mouse gestures, and other actions with one of the most extensive macro engines. |
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BBCeditor Format and save your forum posts even while offline. |
Security and Privacy
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ClamWin A portable, powerful and free antivirus. Packaged by PortableApps.com. |
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LicenseCrawler Crawls a computer for software serial licenses. |
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TrueCrypt Create encrypted virtual hard drives. Link leads to portable mode documentation. |
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KeePass The golden standard when it comes to securely managing passwords and logins. |
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PeerBlock Allows you to block IP ranges of anti-P2P organizations, ad servers, spyware, and more. |
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Password Agent An interesting, local way to save your passwords and other sensitive text data. |
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AdwCleaner A small portable app tool that will help cleanse your system quickly and easily. |
Portable App Suites
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PortableApps.com Suite A launcher interface for all apps from PortableApps.com. |
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SysInternals Suite For administrators and technicians: All SysInternals troubleshooting utilities rolled into one ZIP file. |
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NirLauncher A collection of over 100 portable freeware Windows system tools, all by NirSoft. |
System Tools
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7-Zip A file archiver supporting ZIP, as well as the powerful 7z format and more. Packaged by PortableApps.com. |
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Zscreen A screenshot portable app with numerous file handling options. No portable download, see link for instructions. |
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Zip2Fix A tool for extracting undamaged files from a corrupted ZIP file. |
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Recuva A tool for undeleting files, from makes of Ccleaner. |
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SpaceSniffer A tool for visualizing disk usage. Find out what’s hogging all that space. |
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Everything An ultra-fast search utility — searches filenames only, does not index content. |
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CCleaner Cleans up any system by getting rid of unneeded files and other junk. |
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TeamViewer The golden standard for remote control. |
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Portable Keyboard Layout Use an alternative keyboard layout (Colemak, Dvorak)? Take it with you. |
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GetFolderSize Used for determining the size of folders and subfolders on a drive. |
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Process Explorer Windows Task Manager, on steroids. Made by Sysinternals, now a part of Microsoft. |
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Camstudio Screen-recording software, packaged by PortableApps.com. |
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Snaptimer A keyboard-friendly countdown timer. |
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Clipcube A tiny clipboard history monitor. |
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BareTail A tool for system admins, used for viewing logfiles, like tail on Linux. |
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CPU-Z Helps you take a glance at your system specifications with ease. |
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HijackThis The best Windows tool portable app for generating reports for and removing registry and startup entries. Recommended for experienced users. |
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Soft2Base Helps you keep some of the most popular Windows applications up to date. |
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Unassoc The easiest way to remove filetype associations in Windows. |
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Universal Extractor A tool that helps you make other applications run portably. |
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Defraggler Another excellent portable defragmentation tool. |
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Speccy An advanced system information tool for your PC to help you find out what’s inside your computer. |
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ClipTrap Automatically monitor and log the contents of your clipboard. |
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CrystalDiskMark Portable One of the simplest ways to benchmark your disk for read/write speeds. |
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GeekUninstaller Have a sticky application that won’t uninstall? Let GeekUninstaller portable app remove it for you. |
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Linux Live USB Creator Easily create a bootable Live USB with tons of Linux distrubutions available. |
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Xleaner Clean out your Windows system and free yourself of temporary and other junk files. |
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namebench Find the fastest DNS server with point-and-click ease. |
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Xinorbis Easy way to visualize and analyze any disk under Windows. |
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xpy Allows you to tweak Windows and change settings that are completely under the hood. |
Video Portable Apps
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VLC Player A “do-it-all” free, open-source video player. This portable app can also play audio. |
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VirtualDub A tool for editing and encoding videos, with support for batch-processing. |
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Splayer A visually striking, multi-format video player, with subtitle auto-download. Tiny link for portable version. |
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Avidemux A video editor designed for simple tasks such as cutting, filtering, and encoding. |
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Media Player Classic Very lightweight, an all-around media player for comes bundled with popular codec packages. |
Web and FTP
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Filezilla A powerful, open-source FTP client. |
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Opera Portable An awesome browser that gets too little love. Official installer supports portable option. |
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Google Chrome Google’s Web browser, packaged by PortableApps.com. |
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Firefox If you don’t use Chrome, you are probably using Firefox. Packaged by PortableApps.com. |
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Tor Browser A bundle of Tor and Vidalia to help you browse anonymously and explore “deep web” onions with the look and feel of Firefox. |
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uTorrent Portable Simply the best torrent client out there. |
Disclaimer: All portable apps listed were thoroughly reviewed. MakeUseOf is not responsible for any damage and/or data loss
that might result from use of any of the above mentioned apps.
Hide 94 Comments
Awesome collection of apps , thx for sharing
I’m glad you like it!
this is a great list, but I was wondering where Calibre fits in. You can get it off the Calibre site, It will keep your books and the reader all on a thumb drive.
Awesome !
Why are you listing OpenOffice when there is portable LibreOffice???
No Irfanview? Great list though.
yeah irfanview is the only app i’m missing on linux. would be great to get it working..
Irfanview installs using Wine
Great List. I find Liberkey a better suite of Apps than Nirsoft.
Also for those who like to track finances, gnucash is available in portable form. For GNU software its incredibly powerful
with Liberkey you can integrate with other app portable… to bad you can not have an account and update in the web site
Do you have an exclusively Mac collection?
Nowhere either Liberkey,PApps, etc.I don’t think most here know that
I was thinking the same thing, but I haven’t tried to porta-app my MBP yet… and had no idea that (or if) Macs even had the capability.
Can u give us any recommendations from personal experience? Cost-Free is always my preference, especially when it’s Bug-Free!
Thanks!
qPDF Notes is a PDF viewer/markup/form filler that’s great on Android! There’s a free demo version, as well as the $9.99 commercial copy. Both let me read, write notes on, fill in forms, and then send the PDFs in email.
neu pdf is totally free and better
Okay a really wonderful list… but I think you can add more items like “Spybot S&D Portable”, “uTorrent Portable”, “Eraser Portable”, “WinWGate Portable”, and it’d be nice to see a “Portable Games” section… Although suites like “portableapps” covers a bulk of items, some more items could be listed to make it a little more detailed !!
What are you defining as portable hardware to use these apps? A PC thumb drive? Windows? Linux? Mac? Ipod? Android? Hard to tell without downloading an app on PC to try to figure it out. These little details matter.
Rick_S Hello – I have to agree with you Rick – I am a little confused on this issue too.
It would also be useful to show, as Android Market does, some screen shoots before downloading……..before I can make use of!
Usually “Portable” refers to apps you can run in Windows from a USB drive without installation. I think that’s what they mean here.
But yeah would be cool to have the same for other OSes!
In Mac you can already run most application from anywhere without a classical installation. iOS definitely requires installation.
Not sure about Linux and Android, tbh.
Agree about thumbnails though.
hi i was wondering if there is one bundle that can be downloaded that includes all the above portable apps?
If you go to the “PortableApps” site you can pick and choose what you wish to use, very easy.
So you are not just a cheapskate, but a lazy cheapskate!
I would add a portable version of Total Commander to the list.
Well, it’s time-limited shareware (even though Christian Ghistler doesn’t really limit it), so that’s why I didn’t put it.
thanks for sharing.
we can alwayz makeuseofyou
You’ve missed out on a must have applicaiton for many delivery consultants and system admins: This is called “baretail”; and it is like a GUI version of the UNIX “tail” utility that runs on Windows. It is really a great and free tool that helps you to monitor log files of your choosing, with multiple filtering and highlighting capabilities.
Check it out…
Thank you! Added.
GREAT collection
great!!!!
Unbelievable collections. Awesome. Whatever I couldn’t find out in google is now available here. Enjoy
Good List of apps.
Great collection of Apps
I would add a great app for anyone who wants to prepare, practice, and present all types of speeches, or talks – from a podium or for creating a podcast. Its iQPrompter on the iPad and iPod. It can become your own personal teleprompter with the ability to store a large number of scripts. It has all the power of a large commercial teleprompter, but its portable. It offers Cue pointers and a timer to manage your speech. There are an incredible number of amazing features. I suggest that you do a search in the iTunes store for: iQPrompter. YOu will be excited to know that you have so much power in a mobile venue. iQPrompter is so affordable and we would love for you to take advantage of this amazing new product available in the iTunes Store.
how about notepad ++ ?
I agree. It is a powerful programmer’s text editor and is available in portable. I believe it is PortableApps.com packaged, but I may be wrong. Please add it to the list.
Yup! Added.
Liberkey is, without a doubt, the best suite of portable apps I’ve ever used. Comes with more programs than any other suite I’ve seen, totally customizeable and easy to add more apps that arent standard with the default suites offered.
I would have to also add Hirens Boot Disk, which functions both as a boot disk, AND as a customizable suite of portable programs, meant to be run as a stand-alone operating system or as a portable program suite.
this will not work on the HP touch, why nog
thanks for sharing. makeuseof is great
I say WOW. I have just glanced the app list and have already downloaded and used 3 apps. thanks for this list and i hope that it wil be updated frequently.
I think that MakeuseOf is the most comprehensive and helpful site with a wide variety of multi platform documents and programs.
Thank you for this very helpful service.
thanks for the kind words)
Thanks
My antivirus (mcafee) detect a harmful virus when downloading the NirLauncher in Suites.
Timon, this is a known false alert. NirLauncher is safe. See this article: http://blog.nirsoft.net/2009/05/17/antivirus-companies-cause-a-big-headache-to-small-developers/
great list, I use most of these…
great collection of apps to suite every need….
PDF-X-Change viewer is also a good portable PDF reader.There’s no mention of PDF reader in the list.
Thanks! Added Foxit.
As I was downloading the links, I was noticing that the name “Zscreen” is deprecated and now called “ZUploader”.
Thanks for sharing this update!
Actually, they are separate applications, but both are listed on the Zscreen website.
.. And they’re looking for a new name for ZUploader.
badass!! nirlauncher! ima use these on my library’s computers!!
Love u for sharing and this is very helpful
Thank you all http://www.makeuseof.com team members to facilitate and increase work efficiency for every kind of professionals. I really appreciate this.
I would like to add a portable RSS reader in the list
http://www.pendriveapps.com/royal-rss-feed-reader
its a very small app and it works very well.
I think instead of notepad2 you can replace it with Notepad++ which is much better.
But notepad++ is not officially released portable version.
(however we can use the Installed notepad++ as portable..)
I am sorry .. notepad++ portable is available .. just now checked ..!
reallllllllllllllllllyyy nice
Only a handful of these portable apps aren’t already on portableapps.com’s app page. You need to go back through your page and really start putting portableapps in a lot more descriptions because you obviously haven’t been to pa’s website in a while.
Actually, wherever possible, I tried to avoid PortableApps. Nothing against the suite, I just prefer to point to the source.
Please add a section for bootable environments
A foreign machine might not be trustworthy. BYOK
Bring Your Own Kernel
True! That’s why we created the Best Linux Distros page, with several bootable distros showcased.
http://www.makeuseof.com/pages/best-linux-distributions
Nice array. Thank you!
is it possible to put all 50 programs in a zipped archive for downloading?
Liberkey is very nice too… show it @ http://www.liberkey.com
Liberkey should not get a mention, They just ripped off PortableApps and Pegtop software. I was using this combo for years… I was just never churlish enough to package it and act like it was my own.
If you like the Liberkey launcher, it’s called “Pstart” and is developed by Pegtop.
Also, you can store this in your dropbox to have it available anywhere. When I build a new PC, I have all of my tools, settings, etc…
nice information…good collection
nice list.
You should check out Tor Browser as well for the browsers list.
https://www.torproject.org/download/download-easy.html.en
Trillian works great as a portable messaging application.
very useful collection- will definitely use this for my usb drive!
I am using Ccleaner, VLC, Chrome, TeamViewer and Skype from this list.
is not ultrasurf here
Portableapps.com is always the site to find more
Great collection of portable apps, thank you for making these available.
WordWeb
Now I can finally make use of my thumb drive.
You guys are the best, thanx a bunches…
good one. some are useful for me
The portable apps is best …contains many portable apps ..
I have used almost 99% of software listed.. it will help me to list in my website (http://www.easydownloads.us) which I have really forgot ..
Erez,
You might consider StripFile. It removes redundant information often contained in GIF, JPEG, PNG and HTML files to allow faster loading of websites. I am not sure it is portable though.
Very good list. Thanks
Great collection of portable apps. Always unique and best.
Portable dictionaries and games???
Sweet choices!
Huge selection, very well laid out. Well done.
where is portable games??
Great suggestion. We do have iPhone and Android games. But I guess you are referring to games installed on a flash drive or external hard drive. We should definitely consider that.
thanks for putting up the portable apps list relly great
I wanted a small good security app which I got here ….
amazing portable apps!!
is there any portable antivirus apps ???
I’m assuming the majority of these are not compatible with Mac computers.
Unfortunately, not all of them are. As a workaround you can use one of these Wine-like tools to make non-compatible apps work on your Mac: http://winebottler.kronenberg.org/wine/ and http://www.playonmac.com/en
Of course that would require that you can install software on the Mac.
Hello, thanks for the collection,
How ever I’m looking for a TANGO alternative to be used with:
Iphone – Blackberry – Android – Windows Phone,
Tango works great but not available for WP and BB
Skype works great but can call with BB
Any Suggestions?
thanks
Tatiana,
In case you are not receiving any suggestions here (sorry, don’t know of any), try to ask on MakeUseOf Answers.
How about freac for a cd ripper? I can’t remember the last time CDex was updated and my experience has not been great.