[clug] Ripping CDs

[Ian Munsie]

On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 4:27 PM, Nemo Thorx <clug at nemo.house.cx> wrote:
> abcde is also my main ripper, but I've got a fondness for 'jack' (no,
> not the audio toolchain at jackaudio.org, but the ripper at
> http://www.home.unix-ag.org/arne/jack/  (or apt-get install jack)
>
> it's not quite as easy to use (imho) as abcde, and has a slightly
> different feature set, but it sure does have a fantastically better UI
>
> Despite being apparently 7 years abandoned, it still works. After all,
> like abcde, it's really just a wrapper around cdparanoia,
> lame/oggenc/flac/etc, and cddb(freedb) lookup :)

I'll second flac - I haven't used abcde so I can't comment on the
difference in usablility, but I find jack quite easy to use and has
sane defaults (at least for the kind of music I listen to and the way
I organise my music, I've heard that classical music has different
best practices so I can't comment there).

All the usage you need to know is:
jack -q
where -q fetches the track listing from freedb.org and renames and
taggs appropriately. One nice feature is that this does not have to be
done at ripping time (if say, you are offline) - jack saves the
meta-data it needs to perform this query at a later time. Making
corrections is as simple as editing a text file and running jack -R. I
guess the only feature I would like that it is missing is musicbrainz
support (since their database is more likely to be correct than
freedb).

And I suppose since you indicated you want flac you would do something like:
jack -q -E flac (or whatever the flac encoder is called... I'm happy
encoding to ogg since my lossless backup is... the CD ;)

Cheers,
-Ian