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I would recommend abcde for ripping/tagging. It's a great, no-hassle CLI tool. I'm sure there is a CLI based album art downloader which you could combine with abcde into a short shell script.

no, silly! It's change for the sake of requiring the purchase of new hardware to run the new GUIs!

Close. The idea is to have the same interface on every device you buy.

Personally, I think that sux. See, I used to wish I could run Windows on my phone. Then, one day, I was able to vnc running on a phone... or ipad... or something small, I don't remember and was able to connect to my desktop. Again, I don't remember if it was Gnome, KDE or Windows, but I've tried them all and the results were the same. They all sucked! They sucked big time. It was impossible to bring up or pull down any menus. There was no right click, drag, or shift click. Scrolling using scroll bars or even accurate clicking was next to impossible. Well, let's just say it sucked. The problem is that the desktop OS was not made to run a four inch screen with a single touch or even multi-touch as an interface.

So, now, rather than making a desktop GUI fit on a phone, they are trying to fit the phone GUI fit on the desktop. The results are exactly what you would expect. Most of the right-click functionality is gone. In Unity or Gnome3, if you right click on the menu bar across the top, nothing happens. Gone is the right click and "Run As" dialog. Gone is the right click and "add to bar". Basically, the right click has been removed from much of the GUI functionality. Gone are the nested menus. Instead of "gnome-foot"/"start-button"/"K" -> System -> Whatever-You-Want-To-Run, you now have something like this:

Move the mouse to the left side of the screen and wait. Did anything happen? No? Move to the top left. OK, how about now? Do you see the program you want to run? I'm not sure what the icon looks like. Just mouse over everything and wait over each icon. It should tell what each app is. Is it there? No? OK, click on the top icon, click in the box, and start typing what you are looking for. Don't remember what it was called? It's like a CD Ripper but it's not called that? Hmmmm. I don't know what you'd type in. I know on the old system you would go to multimedia and look for it. Now-a-days... well, I guess you are just fucked. See, the developers that made your GUI didn't think that ABCDE was important enough to include on the main tool bar so you don't get to run it if you don't know what's it called.

Oh, but if you were on a phone, this would look awesome!

I find that "A Better CD Encoder" works just fine for me and does everything under the sun. Not to mention it is a Linux command line application. http://lly.org/~rcw/abcde/page/

Just insert CD, execute abcde, and it rips and tags right to a directory.

Easy as pie.

Why does anyone need anymore than that?

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

A Better CD Encoder does all of ripping, encoding to ogg, and tagging in one command: abcde. Or encode to flac with abcde -o flac.

abcde is a good program to use for the ripping BTW.

ABCDE (A Better CD Encoder) is the most awsome program for ripping CD's to disk period. In 20 seconds you can be ripping your whole collection with little effort. It deserves some attention:

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

abcde, a better cd encoder. So great it's untrue. Try it, you might love it.

Flac: Opensource, nonproprietary, cross platform, and has very good integration with ogg/vorbis.

As for metadata retention, that depends entirely on your encoder. I highly doubt you will ever find a WMA encoder that can retain the tags from a FLAC file, or mp3 for that matter. Oggenc (the vorbis encoder) does it by default:

$ oggenc -q7 *.flac

This will create ogg/vorbis files with the same filenames and will retain all FLAC tags.

I have no idea about mp3 encoders, becuase I almost never use them. I can say that I would doubt that they can directly open a FLAC file, and I would also doubt they can retain the tags - to achieve this you would probably need some sort of intermediary script or program to handle the FLAC -> WAV -> MP3, as well as tag transiton. That being said, most of the good mp3 encoders are open source, so it could be possible that FLAC support could be hacked into them.

Another solution would be to rip to every format at once. abcde (a better cd encoder) has support for several types of output, while only ripping the CD once. In fact, I would reccomend abcde regardless of what you choose, because it is great for batch rips.

Just as a last note, why in hell would you want to use WMA? I can understand vorbis and I can understand MP3, but why WMA?

For ripping the CDs I like and use: abcde http://lly.org/~rcw/abcde/page/. Its kind of a pain to configure, but once you figure it out, it is great. The best ripper I've found, plus its commandline, just like you would like it.

You can set it up to encode in batch mode with a simple script - then run it after you've ripped a bunch of disks.

I can't imagine why anybody would pay to send their CD collection away and have someone else do this.

Actually, given the lack of upgrade options, I would be hard pressed to recommend this system to anyone. It does look good, fits into small spaces, and doesn't take up a whole lot of space. But I don't know anyone who has these items on the absolute top of their priority list.

He does not know my wife, her mom, my mom and what must be greater than 50% of the US market. They want small, out of the way stuff like this like you would not belive. They are buying those dinky Bose bookcase systems. They don't care if the sound is not as good as a real stereo because they mostly listen to crap on the radio anyway.

It's shocking how clueless they are. Last weekend, I brought my old P90 laptop home to play some music for my mom. "You mean your computer can be your stereo?", she asked me. Wow, I was taken back by that one. We plugged it into her little Bose, which my wife loves, and played my wife's Beatles tunes all night long. My mom was particularly impressed by the fact that my wife's entire Beatles collection fit on half a CDROM. They loved it.

I'd never much bothered with music on my computers before. I fooled around with dinky software on a windoze box two years ago and never bothered with it again until a few weeks ago. Here's what worked:

• abcde. Ablsolutely the easiest thing ever for ripping CDs. OGG tools work just fine. Installing this on Debian with a working sound card is as easy as looking it up in dselect.
• Sounblaster sound cards and MediaGX. One fancier sound card I had did not work right and played back oggs too fast. I have yet to look through my collection of PCI sound cards, but some of them might work too.

This Lindows box needs to have some better software for organizing music, but I'm sure that people like my mom and my wife would love to have one if it were easy enough to use. No, the M$ box is not easy enough to use either. Easy is stand alone operation, perhaps with TV remote control use.

Go get it.

It queries freedb.org servers automagically, rips w/ cdparanoia, uses ogg vorbis to encode by default (though LAME can be easily substituted for MP3 duties), and is a CLI program, because, lets be frank, CD ripping/encoding does NOT need a fancy GUI.

for linux there is software that will do exactly what you want. I use a program called abcde, it is really a frontend for various rippers and encoders and cddb. it combines them seamlessly. To encode a cd to mp3 i just put it in the drive, and type abcde. 20 minutes later i have the mp3s on my harddrive, stored in /mp3/artistname/albumname all with proper id3 tags. where the files are stored is configurable, how they are named is configurable, what ripper and encoder is used is configurable. i use lame set for 256k high quality and cdparanoia. you can find abcde at http://lly.org/~rcw/abcde/page/.

While the link to howstuff works is nice, it's hard to belive you live in Montreal and prefer NPR to the Canadian version. Hell, I only visit Montreal and Quebec City and I prefer Canadian. CBC, if that's what they call themselves, are so much less full of themselves. They are direct, far more in depth and intelligent and less fluffy. They do not play anoying segway music, like those awful horns, at inaproprate times, like reporting plauges, wars and the death of thousands.

For that six hour ride, which is wonderful with or without canned music, you would be better off with ogg and mp3's than this play for pay scam. Check out ABCDE to take control of your media again. Then get yourself a nice little portable player with a random button. The hours will fly by with music YOU really want to hear.

so, does this make any mp3 generating software liable for "viral" infringment? abcde is about as viras as Madona's pap smear. how about more comercial offerings? how about my trusty tape recorder?

It sounds better, it takes up less space, and I'm not infringing any patents. Sure, it takes a little longer, but it's worth it.

By the way, you shouldn't ever convert mp3's to ogg's. You'll get a noticably degraded ogg, since you're losing information from both psychoacoustic models (which were never meant to be layered). Encode all your Oggs from lossless sources and leave your existing mp3's as-is. After all, there's lots of software out there that can play both.

Because dselect often has problems (See here -- that from trying to install vim-gtk). A good alternative is console-apt.

Done. Abcde 1.9.x defaults to Ogg.

Check out

A Better CD Encoder (abcde)

and

Otto

I'm doing exactly what you describe with a spare laptop that had it's keyboard mangled.

I created a supervise/svscan job to monitor the CDROM and tun abcde if it finds a CD, which allows me to insert a CD and have the laptop eject the CD when it's done ripping.

Complete directory structure support for title/artist info.

freedb and cddb support.

otto then lets me play the new mp3s, and it makes life easier by managing them in mysql. I'd be happy to pay for abcde and otto, someone took the time to tie a bunch of tools and funtionality into a practical interface.

Disclaimer: I wrote abcde.

Disclaimer: I wrote abcde.

CDDBURL=http://freedb.freedb.org/~cddb/cddb.cgi

Oh, and if you simply have to use abcde with Gracenote's database, do this search and replace:
s/$NAME+$VERSION/xmcd+fuckyougracenote/

Abcde's default database will change to FreeDB in the next release.

If your CD duplicator is a bunch of drives hooked up via a SCSI bus, you'll find abcde extremely handy for this.

http://frantica.lly.org/~rcw/abcde/page/

Command-line based, can be non-interactive, has support for all the major encoders + distmp3 remote encoding support, does cddb, playlists, id3 tagging, customizable output filenames, etc.

Some people use it with autocd for that truly hands-off feel.

Whether this is true or not, it's pathetic. FreeDB uses the same algorithm.

Anyway, this is a description of the algorithm just so you can see how stupid it is:

The discid looks like a 32 bit hex number, but in reality it's not - it's an 8 bit checksum, a 16 bit number representing the total length of the disc in seconds, and an 8 bit number representing the number of tracks on the disc.

It's mind-warpingly simple. Ignoring MSF offsets for the sake of discussion, this is how it's done:

Get the length of all the tracks in frames, like so:
22047 44492 69957 85152 113637 129910 148045 165852 178462 200282 215427
Divide them all by 75 so you have track lengths in seconds:
293 593 932 1135 1515 1732 1973 2211 2379 2670 2872
This is the really really brilliant part - Add all the decimal digits together like so:
2+9+3+5+9+3+9+3+2+1+1+3+5+1+5+1+5+1+7+3+2+1+9+7+3+ 2+2+1+1+2+3+7+9+2+6+7+0+2+8+7+2
It's 161 or 0xa1. Convert the length of the disc and number of tracks to hex too (0xc87 and 0xc) and put them together - 0xa10c870c. This is only a little bit off from the real discid (a30c850c), and only because of the MSF offsets I skipped over.

Read the cd-discid source code for the full algorithm.

I would be utterly amazed if they could protect this algorithm in court - it's literally just addition.

Best encoder: gogo, or if you're not on x86, try lame.
Best ripper: cdparanoia.

I may be a little bit biased on the frontend market, but as the author of abcde I highly recommend it. :)