Re: [TriLUG] MP3 Ripping Software

[Joel Ebel]

cdrecord is the core command line application of almost all cd burning 
applications in linux.  cdrdao is an alternative, but cdrecord seems to 
be far more capable and advanced.  There are, again, several front ends. 
 I grew up on xcdroast, but k3b seems to be the most popular CD burning 
application under linux these days.  With k3b, there's a copy cd option 
that makes it really easy.  A couple of notes though.  You probably want 
to only create the image to begin with.  If you burn on the fly and the 
reading of the source cd fails, you've lost your CD-R.  So just create 
an image to begin with.  If it does fail, try increasing the paranoia 
level or polishing the disc with toothpaste or some other abrasive.  I 
bet car polishing compound would work really well too.  Make sure you 
rub radially from the center to the edge, not in a circle.  The 
polishing needs to be perpendicular to the tracks, not parallel.  Once 
you have successfully read an image from the disk, you may want to 
listen to the resulting wave files, just to make sure they sound as 
expected, and then burn the image.  Under k3b, that's under the tools 
menu/burn image.  That should do the trick!

Good luck,
Joel
Randall Barlow wrote:
Wow, cdparanoia is awesome.  It takes forever (so far I've recovered one
track...), but the mp3 that it made seems not to have any errors in it
(sounds great).  Actually, I'm using a tool called cdmp3 that is really
just an interface to cdparanoia.  So how can I use cdparanoia to burn
another copy of the disc?  Or can flac also do all the fancy error
correction?  I tried to read the disc on my winsucks computer and it
crapped out, whining and crying about how it couldn't read the disc... 
So making a copy of the disc would be best, but how?  (Keep in mind that
I need thorough instructions, as I have actually never burned a CD in
Linux before!)

Randy
Joel Ebel wrote:

The best tool for ripping a poor quality CD is cdparanoia.  There are
many graphical front ends out there, I know little of them, but
underneath the hood of almost all of them is cdparanoia.  It has a lot
of error detection and correction capabilities.  However, you might do
well to try cleaning up the CD first.  There are a lot of CD cleaning
products out there, but I find Colgate(tm) to do the trick pretty
well. :)  cdda2wav is another common ripper, but it doesn't have quite
the error detection capabilities.  But for good CDs in good drives, it
can perform faster.  I found cdda2wav to work much better on a Plextor
drive several years ago.  If you're concerned about errors, use
cdparanoia.
Compression is a separate issue.  If you simply want save it before it
gets worse, why not just burn another CD of it?  That way you won't
lose any quality.  Otherwise, if you want to save it losslessly on a
hard drive, there is FLAC.  If you want to save a little space,
consider Ogg Vorbis instead of mp3.  Not only does it make smaller
files and sound better, it's free, open, and unpatented.  Of course if
you need to play it on an mp3 player that doesn't support ogg, you're
stuck.  But consider saving it also on either another CD or FLAC so
when you want to use a better compression algorithm in the future,
you've still got a lossless copy of it.
To encode to flac, go get flac.  For ogg, use oggenc.  For mp3, use
lame.  Once again, there are plenty of graphical frontends that can
automate this process.  I know little of them in Linux.  In windows,
most people seem to prefer CDEX or EAC.  For Linux, perhaps
KAudioCreator or Sound Juicer?  I don't know.  I just use cdparanoia
and oggenc.

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