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jdavidb (1361)

jdavidb
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http://voiceofjohn.blogspot.com/
J. David Blackstone has a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Engineering and nine years of experience at a wireless telecommunications company, where he learned Perl and never looked back. J. David has an advantage in that he works really hard, he has a passion for writing good software, and he knows many of the world's best Perl programmers.

Journal of jdavidb (1361)

Tuesday May 21, 2002
07:32 PM

Quick and Dirty CD Rip HOWTO using Debian GNU/Linux

[ #5133 ]

I never could find a good comprehensive guide to turning CD's into MP3's with Linux, and I found out how recently, so I thought I'd post it for posterity. Note that I am legally entitled to translate my CD's into any audio format I choose, as long as I am not sharing them. [I am not a lawyer; this is not legal advice.]

If anyone actually wants to use this document for a HOWTO or other documentation project, you can redistribute it under either the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License or the GNU GPL.

I'm using Debian. You're on your own if you're not. I install abcde and all of its prerequisites, of which the main one is cdparanoia. Now, I want to rip to MP3 (some day I'll probably go the OGG route), so I change OUTPUTTYPE in /etc/abcde.conf to mp3. (I'm sure there's a per-user file where you can change this, too.) Making MP3's with abcde requires two other packages: id3v2 and toolame. The program actually requests a program called lame, but to get that you'll need to install toolame and make a symbolic link from /usr/bin/toolame to /usr/bin/lame. I suspect lame is a piece of proprietary software and toolame is a free clone, but I didn't look into this.

The CD ROM appears to be /dev/hdc. abcde wants it to be /dev/cdrom, so I make a symlink. (This was the case on my ibook and my intel machine; YMMV.) I also change the group ownership of /dev/hdc to audio and add myself to group audio so I can do this without being root. That's probably a bad idea long term. (Like if you ever want to use a data CDROM again.)

Then you just put the CD in and run abcde. It does a lot of nice things for you including naming the tracks.

I learned most of this the hard way. If there's an easy way I should have learned it, please post links. :)

Coming soon, or at least some day: actually getting your Debian GNU/Linux system to play sound. (In some ways RedHat really has a leg up, but I don't think I'd trade apt-get. Besides, having to figure this all out myself is educational.)


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  • I haven't used LAME [sourceforge.net] but it isn't commercial, though i'm not sure what the difference between it and toolame [sourceforge.net] is. winLAME [sourceforge.net] is a pretty nifty win32 encoder which I have used.

    • The primary difference for me was I couldn't apt-get install lame. At least, not with only a free setup. (No contrib or non-free. I try those from time to time when looking for something I need for school, but this was for fun, and I saw toolame first.)

      --
      J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers

    • Gasp! Sputter! What happened to sourceforge? It ... changed.

      --
      J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
  • I do almost all of my cd ripping in BeOS with a very nice gui app called "Flipside A.E.". Let's you choose your encoder (including ogg), naming style, bitrate, etc.

    • iTunes used to be my friend, back when my Macintosh would boot :) But I never got much into it, then.

      --
      J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
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