I’ve been looking at music servers and music ripping software, and came across Ripfactory Micro, a fast and easy to use solution.

Unfortunately when I ran it on Vista it came up with this message:

Then it exits. I looked at the support pages and found that this is a documented problem:

If you are trying to run our software on Vista and get an "Unable to enable autorun" message, you have to turn off the User Account Control (UAC) as the program requires access to a registry key to determine autoinsert status.

It’s true. I checked using Systernals Process Monitor. The app asks for access to HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\cdrom\autorun. If it finds it disabled, it throws up this dialog:

This is such nonsense.

First, if the app finds autorun enabled it doesn’t need write access; and read access comes by default, so why break the app on Vista for this?

Second, there is no need to disable User Account Control to run the app. You can either set it to run as administrator (right-click the shortcut, compatibility tab); or else grant the current user read-write access to that specific registry key – not ideal, but either of these would be better than disabling UAC.

Third, a support note like this should at least hint at the implications of disabling Vista’s primary security feature.

Otherwise the app seems to work well, faster then iTunes, and downloads cover art. I still prefer dbPowerAmp though, because it links to AccurateRip to check the integrity of your rip.