Sometimes, you have to do it yourself

[elfs]

I am rather annoyed right now. I went out and paid cover price for the new Ayreon CD, 01011001 and have spent the last two flamin' hours trying to encode the damn thing. There's nothing particularly wrong with the CD; it's not DRM'd or anything like that. I just want to put it on my MP3 player, dammit. And I'd like to be able to encode it at a higher quality than 128bps and 44.1KhZ.

Every single console-based ripper/encoder sucks. They either claim to respect your LaME codings and completely ignore them, or they take "simplified" arguments that they then parse into the quality settings they assume you mean when passing to LaME.

Look, I'm using the command line. I know what I'm doing. Let me do it.

Ultimately, it came down to my ripping the tracks by hand, and then crafting the LaME and id3v2 command lines myself through emacs. Which is, yes, knowing what I'm doing... and being told to do it because rip/coders can't get their stuff together.

(Yes, I know, I dissed Arjen a couple of years back but, y'know, his kind of sci-fi space rock opera does grow on ya. And you have to love an album that uses the word "extremophile" correctly.)

Comments

[woggie.livejournal.com]

Okay, and for my own edification, you hand-rip tracks how? With what commands in which order? I mean, not exhaustively, but so I could do the same if I really wanted to do it.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Start with man cdparanoia

[funos.livejournal.com]

Dunno if you tried it, but I've had fine results with Another CD Encoder, (bka abcde).

[funos.livejournal.com]

Too early to post coherently apparently.
'A Better CD Encoder' would match the filename better. :)

[elfs.livejournal.com]

That was the one I wrestled with the most before giving up.

[funos.livejournal.com]

Weird.
Perhaps it's changed since I last used it.
I can email you my .abcde.conf file if you want.
I ripped several CD at high-quality with it.

Use The Source, Dude

[(Anonymous)]

What about http://lly.org/~rcw/abcde/page/

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, I ripped my entire (700+ disc) CD collection in about two months using:

http://autorip.sf.net/

It's really about as foolproof as you can get. Plug in your preferred cdparanoia and lame/oggenc flags, start it up on a net-connected machine, and go to town.