[Discuss] CD ripping

[invalid at pizzashack.org (Derek Martin)]

On Thu, Sep 08, 2011 at 11:59:03AM -0400, David Kramer wrote:
> On 09/08/2011 11:22 AM, Dan Kressin wrote:
> > --- On Thu, 9/8/11, Gordon Marx <gcmarx at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> I use abcde, but have no particular religious views on the
> >> subject. I like it because it's command-line and super-duper-simple,
> >> and that makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside..

Normally I do prefer the power of a CLI program to a GUI, but this is
an example of a case where the opposite is true...  

> > +1 for abcde, although it's been a few years since I've actually used it.
> 
> +1 again.  There are a lot of options you have to set when ripping CDs,
> so I prefer a command line program with a config file I can shove most
> of them in.  

This is exactly what I liked about grip -- I set the options once and
forget about them.  It takes 4 clicks to rip a CD: one to start the
program, one to select the rip tab, one to click the rip button, and
one to either select all tracks (prior to clicking rip) or confirm
that I want to rip the whole CD otherwise.  No typing.  Very
efficient, though it should be possible to cut it down to just two
clicks. :)

> I also follow that up with a script that normalizes the
> filenames. 

I specifically don't want that.  It used to bug me to have things like
spaces in the file names, but I've gotten over that...  Too many other
things do that to worry about it, and when it comes to the file names
I have bigger worries.  Many of the songs I listen to are from foreign
artists and have titles that can't be represented by Latin-based
character sets.  Some of these I can actually read, and having the
filename match the title of the song remains most convenient, I find.
Granted, the filename becomes much harder to type... but the point is
I never do that, ever.

> A big win for me with abcde is most programs (especially GUI ones)
> insist on organizing your music into folders by artist or album

Grip doesn't do that.  Though it does work that way by default, it
also makes what you want possible.  I happen to prefer that
organization, for several reasons.  One is that there are plenty of
examples where multiple artists have performed the same song, or
different songs with the same title.  To distinguish them, you would
otherwise need to include the artist (and potentially other metadata)
in the song title.  That works but makes the file names very long,
which is sometimes inconvenient.  For example, I've run into cases
when burning MP3s onto a CD or DVD where the resulting path was so
long that mkisofs could not determine a unique file name for numerous
songs, and failed to create the image properly.

I also find that this matters less to me these days, because I mostly
listen to my tunes on a device that organizes the songs for me (like
my Droid).  On those rare occasions when I listen on the computer, and
I'm not using a pregenerated play list, I still find it easiest to
navigate artists and albums than to visually search for one song in a
sea of thousands of files.

So, while I appreciate the suggestion -- and I will take a look at
abcde -- I really am looking for a decent GUI ripper, and preferably
one that's actively developed.

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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