Flutterby™! : Mix, Rip, Burn 2003-08-19 01:12:17.824626+00

Mix, Rip, Burn

2003-08-19 01:12:17.824626+00 by Dan Lyke 8 comments

Okay, I'm finally in the process of organizing and ripping CDs so that I might actually start to listen to some of these gazillion discs that I've paid for. And some I haven't paid for, I'm currently enjoying the "Listen" album from the harmonica pocket which one of the band (I assume) handed to me at Burning Man; but if I actually start listening to music again, I think it's worth buying in that smooth-jazz cocktail music kinda cool bouncy feeling vein.

For various reasons, I'm doing some ripping on my Windows box, and I'll also want playback on Windows. Under Linux this stuff is easy, I use Grip and XMMS for playback. XP doesn't have Ogg Vorbis support natively, so I'm currently using FreeRIP which is ad supported (okay, although I wish ad supported software had ads for products I'd actually want), lacks decent tab navigation when entering track information (yes, the first few disks I've ripped are missing from both FreeDB and Gracenote, so I foresee a lot of data entry), and QCD Player with the "Simple in silver (remixed)" skin, which is okay for me, but will be confusing as hell if I drop it on Charlene's machine.

Surely Windows is up to contemporary professional standards on this matter: Just a simple set of tools with standard widgets that allow fast data entry and expose the critical playback tools without hiding it all behind graphics that appeal to adolescent males? Anyone?

#Comment Re: Mix, Rip, Burn made: 2003-08-19 01:57:10.364442+00 by: haralds

In by book, EAC - http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/ - is by far the greatest tool under Windows. It supports external applications for compression (I use LAME), you can control the number of compression threads (to really load that dual CPU), it makes extra efforts to recover input errors, and has a clean interface.

Although officially not supported, I have run two EACs running with dual DVDs (or CDs).

Now, if I could just find an iTunes like browser/player for Linux, which houses my collection...

#Comment Re: Mix, Rip, Burn made: 2003-08-19 03:29:20.280664+00 by: Pete

#Comment Re: Mix, Rip, Burn made: 2003-08-19 03:45:40.519942+00 by: Diane Reese

#Comment Re: [Entry #6445] Mix, Rip, Burn made: 2003-08-19 08:56:04.154367+00 by: Shawn

Since starting to use Linux on a semi-regular basis, I found Grip and XMMS to be roughly comparable to the the combo I'd been using on Windows for years:

#Comment Re: Mix, Rip, Burn made: 2003-08-19 14:58:41.982879+00 by: mkelley

When I used Windows full time, I always used CDex. It looks like almost everyone here did as well.

#Comment Re: Mix, Rip, Burn made: 2003-08-19 15:53:14.205106+00 by: Dan Lyke

Shawn, data-entry wise, I haven't yet found the shortcut keys to let me enter all the track information into FreeRIP without my hands leaving the keyboard. Of the many disks I ripped yesterday, only a King Missile

compilation and the second CD of a gospel set had available data, and I'd guess that the gospel set data was what I'd entered last time I'd played with digitizing my library.

It'll get easier when I get back to the dusty parts of my collection, lots of classic rock there.

#Comment Re: Mix, Rip, Burn made: 2003-08-19 16:25:24.981304+00 by: other_todd

Late comment here: I am NOT in the CDex camp simply because I hadn't heard of it before this. But I sympathize with wanting to find a simple, direct, robust interface without all the graphical bells and whistles. ALSO, I may be a peculiar user; I am ripping tracks strictly to make my own mix CDs, I do not store music files on my computer for playback there because ... well, I just don't, and I don't like the assumption built into many of these programs that MP3 data is the "final destination" for this audio and therefore you want to make huge and elaborate playlists and catalogs of your files. My files are transient and my playlist only exists until the disk is burned.

Anyway. I use a shareware program called Audiograbber which has one of the most direct interfaces I've ever seen for ripping. I don't have URLs (I'm not at the computer with the tools), but Google should do the right thing. It also is good for balancing/normalizing volume levels once you realize one undocumented fact: Normalize here is a least-common-denominator thing; you must normalize to the quietest track in the playlist, because it will not boost a track above a certain amount (due to clipping, I'd imagine; an overboosted track sounds horrible).

For burning, I use the standard Roxio CD Creator that is packaged with just about every drive known. It knows my hardware and uses its underrun protections and other features, and seems to be well-organized enough despite a few glitches with dragging and dropping tracks.

I also keep a wonderful little Acoustica program for converting MP3s to WAVs, something I end up doing with any files I scavenged from the web. I tested seven MP3 converters by trying to convert a large batch of MP3s of dubious pedigree, some containing minor errors and such. The Acoustica plugin (it acts like one - it insinuates itself into your Windows menus as an MP3 handler app) was the only one to successfully convert the entire lot.

#Comment Re: [Entry #6445] Re: Mix, Rip, Burn made: 2003-08-19 20:36:04.204774+00 by: Shawn

I almost never wind up with a CD that's not in CDDB, so don't generally need this. But I do seem to vaguely remember something about recent UI changes making it easier to do this - something like hitting :enter: saved the current track text and moved down to the next, already highlighted/selected for editing. I remember it being slightly annoying in situations where I didn't want/expect that behavior.

CDEx comes with a drop-down list for selecting MP3 (using Lame or Windows), MP2, VQF, AAC, WMA, Xing, WAV, Ogg Vorbis, or external encoders. It makes simple playlists (no urls), but only if you check the box. It's a GUI interface, but I think it's pretty clean and straightforward.