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Just use Grip with two cdroms. It will take a while, but it's worth it. Just start with the music you listen to most and work your way through with your collection. That is what I ended up doing for my collection when I switched from Vorbis to MP3 (~800 cds).

My only problem is with accented chars in id3 tags. It looks like the id3 lib doesn't like the utf8 enconding, and they look corrupted in a lot of places. Does anyone know how to convert a bunch of id3 flags from utf8 to iso-8859-1?

There are already a lot of replies to this post saying "no definitely not, OSS developers are all elitest ignoramuses" because it's easy to sound insightful when criticising, but really what they're saying doesn't stack up. It might have been right 3 years ago but the improvements made since then have been staggering.

A lot of software has been rewritten or redesigned with usability being core. Example: grip was deemed a lost cause as far as UI went, so Sound Juicer was written instead. XMMS was deemed fundamentally flawed so Muine and RhythmBox were written. Gnome has adopted a pervasive HIG and while it may have a few rough edges still it's arguably more consistent than both Windows (hands up if you read the Windows HIG - thought not) and even Apples (brushed metal or aqua - what mood is Steven in today?).

Today, if you want, you can get software that's had well thought through usability. That doesn't mean everybody uses it, but it's certainly available to those who want it.

Now, there are some big remaining usability issues in free software but these tend to be structural/architectural. For instance Linux software installation is frequently very difficult and it's not easy to solve without a great deal of engineering.

On Windows the GIMP user interface isn't anywhere near as good as on Linux, despite the GIMP 2 itself making great strides over the 1.2 release in absolute terms, the different (arguably worse) Windows WM model and UI paradigms aren't accounted for and there aren't enough Win32 Gimp developers to give Gimp/Win32 an excellently integrated UI. Or at least, not rapidly.

This is more a side-effect of the Gimp being most popular on Linux and the core developers all using Linux though, rather than any fundamental insight into the nature of open source. I've seen some pretty crap ports to Windows UI from commercial companies as well - for instance, the laughable QuickTime 4 which not only made zero effort to integrate with the host operating systems UI but also committed quite a few usability sins like the thumbwheel.

Windows
You can rip to Ogg using CDex and play using Winamp.

Linux
You can rip to Ogg using Grip and playing using XMMS

1) Unreal Tournment 2003, Enemy Territory, Quake3, Neverwinter Nights, etc. And much, much more with Wine such as Soldier of Fortune 2.

2) Grip, VERY good CD Ripping app. Will auto download CDDB, run the encoder of your choice, etc. As for raytracing Povray can do a lot too, but you just need a good modeler, such as Kpovmodeler. As for a one click installer, check out RPMs or RedHat's Package Management System, looks just like Install Shield.

3) KDE,Gnome,etc. You DO know that they can be themed to look just like the crappy Windows GUI too don't you?

You mean like Grip? Well, at least the ripping part.

dude grip is the coolest http://www.nostatic.org/grip/

I dunno, why not use one of the many existing tools like Grip (my favorite) that will let you plug in any CD ripper or encoder out there (Ogg has been supported forever)? If you search Freshmeat you'll find a lot of them, most of which are open source in some fashion.

grip will also do ogg encoding, according to the Freshmeat entry.

Try grip. Configure it to rip to any format you want - all it needs is the path to the executable. It will do the freedb lookup and name the files in your favorite style too.

Since ogg vorbis is a free codec (as in beer; as in speech) this is really the best way to go. Note that US Linux users who rip to MP3 with free-as-in-beer software are probably in violation of one or more laws. Since XMMS plays OGG as well as MP3 you can mix and match MP3's from your favorite P2P community with OGG's of your own collection.

as you probably know there is a sparse few number of them available to download...

So what are you waiting for? Get oggenc and do your part!

-Renard

Grip is a nice front end to Linux command line ripping and encoding utilities. You can choose which encoder you use and I believe it already has a preset configuration for ogg encoders.

I don't care for iTunes for a player, but it's a DAMNED nice ripper/encoder for my albums. It's simultaneous rip/encode process means I can take a CD from insert to rip to encode to eject in 4 minutes (if I'm lucky and I score a 15X encode/rip time).. With it's auto-encode-on-insert and auto-eject-when-done modes, it makes it a real factory process.

Sorry about this beinbg a long post, but I've done something similar to what I think you're asking about. I've set up an old Pentium 200 w/Linux 2.2.19, 128MB RAM, Ensoniq sound card, and 120GB of dedicated music storage, with...
(enters command)

thorin:/music$ find . -name '*.mp3' -o -name '*.ogg' | wc -l
12648

thorin:/music$

...mmm, alot of songs (900+ albums, yes I own all the CDs), organized by alphabetically by Artist/Album/Song. I use Edna(v0.3?) as the music web server to serve the music (hacked slightly to support .ogg files) on a 10/100Mb house LAN. Edna will allow selection of individual songs, pick from existing playlists, or dynamically generate a 'play all songs' playlist that works from the selected level down.
Any user at a client computer on the LAN can use their preferred browser to stream whatever music (album/playlist/song) they want to their local desktop. Windows clients currently are using Winamp, Linux clients are using XMMS, but any client with support for streaming mp3 and ogg files should work.
For MP3s I use ID3V2 tags because they work with streaming. The tags on the .ogg files seem to stream just fine. I use EasyTag to manage the ID3 tags on the MP3s. Of the TAG utilities I tried, I liked it the best for managing large numbers of MP3 files. I haven't yet found a comparable utility for managing OGG TAGs.
On the server itself, I use Konqueror pointed at the local Edna web server to pick playlists handled by XMMS via an Ensoniq sound card to the main stereo system. MP3s are encoded at a relatively high quality using LAME 3.89 in VBR mode with an average bit rate running about 190Kb/s. I'm currently re-encoding the music from the original sources into the ogg/Vorbis" format, using an average bit rate of 192Kb/s. I use GRIP to rip my CDs with (with full paranoia), and normalize to even out the volume variations of songs so that playlists with songs taken from different albums aren't at radically different volumes. There is a volume normalizing plugin for XMMS that adjusts the level in real time, but I didn't like the way it worked. The volume level of the next song was significantly different (louder) than the previous song, it could take a half second or so to adjust itself. Pre-normalizing (with conservative values) seems to work much better. The music currently occupies about 70GB of disk space.

BTW, my music server is what I use to rip/encode all of the new music, run setiathome, and function as a SAMBA file server/domain controller. It will do all that while streaming music to several clients as well as play through the local sound card without skipping. I discovered that if I used XMMS to read the MP3/OGG files directly from disk (on the server), I had problems with skipping when the server was heavily loaded, even with the XMMS buffers set to very high values, but clients on the LAN would never skip. Streaming to XMMS on the server solved that problem without resorting to the low latency patches for the kernel. On the Linux clients I setting my browser to launch xmms with the -e option which causes new songs or playlists selected with the browser to be appended to the current xmms playlist. ;-)

... are dagrab to rip (mainly coz cdda2wav was playing up), oggenc to encode, and the very friendlyGrip for the frontend. I highly recommend Grip, whatever else you use for the actual back end stuff.

Basically, I was feeling too slack to find out why cdda2wav was giving me grief, so I had a quick squiz thru' /usr/ports/audio, installed dagrab, and was up and ripping within 5 minutes.
God, I love ports.

...but there is no such thing as 'ripping mp3s'. You rip the tracks of a CD, then you encode it with an encoder. These a two very different processes, which are better accomplished (IMHO) by using different tools (perhaps linked using the excellent Grip).

I've been using 3 workstations, all running rip. The conversion process from CD Audio to OGG happens on the fly, so it encodes the audio as it rips it. rip also handles FreeDB lookups for track info.

If you're not comfortable with a console level tool, Grip (as mentioned in other responses) only requires that you insert the CD. It will automatically query FreeDB, rip the CD Audio, and encode it to OGG. You just keep feeding it discs - you never have to hit a single key.

The hardware issue is quite valid if you tend to use portable players, so at this point, anybody with a serious need for portability should probably wait until OGG gets some industry support (the gadget industry, that is ... the recording industry will never support a format they can't control).

But until then, I'm just fine using it for my jukebox server. The sound quality is good, the file size is small, and the format is 100% open. The only problem I can foresee is that the RIAA will criminalize CD ripping even if you own the CD.

Um, if you already own the song, why are you downloading it from Napster? Get a GRIP.

I like Grip. This GPL program can be configured to rip+encode CDs upon insertion and will eject them when done ripping (encoding is a separate process which can be queued up for later since it takes longer than ripping). You can choose from several encoders and the CDDB info is automatically collected. If you install the companion program, Digital DJ, the CDDB info will be shoved into a MySQL database for easy music management/playlist manipulation later on.

I like Grip. This GPL program can be configured to rip+encode CDs upon insertion and will eject them when done ripping (encoding is a separate process which can be queued up for later since it takes longer than ripping). You can choose from several encoders and the CDDB info is automatically collected. If you install the companion program, Digital DJ, the CDDB info will be shoved into a MySQL database for easy music management/playlist manipulation later on.

Check again here is the link the the Grip website. From what I can see there is no banner ad.

KDE comes with so many other good programs as well, like KNode (News reader) and KMail (lightweight email program)... Does GNOME have any comparable programs?

Errr... yes! Pan is probably the best free newsreader for any platform, Evolution is an incredibly well-integrated mail, calender and addressbook program, and Balsa is a very decent more lightweight mail reader. For office programs, Gnumeric is way more advanced than KSpread, Guppi (still in CVS) is one of the only serious free graphical data analysis tools, GnuCash is very polished, and Dia rocks. Graphically, Sodipodi is shaping up very nicely, gPhoto rules, and the GIMP integrates better with a GNOME environment than with KDE. And then there's XMMS (the best mp3/ogg/mpeg/divx Linux player), Grip (the best CD player/ripper combo) and GStreamer for multemedia; there's GnomeICU, Gabber, Gaim and X-Chat for messaging; there's Gnapster for file-sharing; and there's more useful utilities (e.g. Bug Buddy), system utilities (e.g. Red Carpet), and panel applets than you could shake a stick at. And I know I've missed out quite a few more (Gnome-DB, Oregano and Dr. Genius have just spring to mind - and, yes, Galeon, which rocks and is now my primary browser). In other words, GNOME is hardly short on applications.

If anything, I've often found it to be the other way round. While Konqueror rules, and KWord is much better featured than AbiWord (though I personally dislike the interface), I think where KDE usually excels is in the underlying desktop core, rather than the applications. But that's just my opinion.

PS Sorry for ranting.

I agree with your first two points, but not this third one. I had around 150 CDs beamed to my.mp3.com before it was originally shut down and they were all my own and all very legal. Re-inserting these CDs would be a royal pain for me for several reasons:

• I have a lot of CDs and if the number of re-insertions that it asks for is proportional to the number of CDs I have then this is a lot of work for me.
• What if I'm at work when it asks me to re-insert a particular CD? That completely defeats the purpose of using my.mp3.com so that I don't have to lug all my CDs around.
• Worst of all (in the sense that this is more than just an annoyance), this defeats one of the big advantages of having something like my.mp3.com. Before, if I happened to scratch or otherwise destroy a CD that I owned I was at least assured that I would still be able to listen to it on my.mp3.com. Now, my.mp3.com can no longer be used as a backup for my collection.

That's OK though, because after my.mp3.com got shut down I started using mp3.com to find indie music and I started converting my existing CD collection to mp3s using Grip. I also picked up an MPTrip which lets you listen to CD-Rs with MP3s on them! Grip and MPTrip are taking the place of my.mp3.com for me (but I still use mp3.com because there is a lot of good indie music on there).

If you want mp3's of a CD you own, then download LAME and GRIP and make them yourself! It ain't hard. :)

------

Not sure if this would work, but there are MUCH, MUCH cheaper CD-ROM changers out there that could be options.
I know that about 5 years ago, NEC had a 6- or 7-disc SCSI unit that used multiple LUNs, giving each tray its own device (or drive letter in windoze - that's all I used it with then on a work system). You could then write a basic script that rip/enc'ed the 7 discs, after which you could replace them. (Unfortunately, I can't remember if you can replace CD's while one is being accessed.)
It's not quite as fancy, but 5 years ago, this toy was only about $350. A quick check at Pricewatch in the "CD-ROM | Changers" section lists some as low as $45, but most around $200 or so. (The $45 one is probably junk or a misprint.)
On a related note, I ripped about 1000 cd's (all my own...) to an mp3 server, and it took a while, but was not unmanageable with Grip - I highly recommend it!! (CDDB/rip/enc/ID3, etc.) Good luck!!

You can hang it all together nicely with grip, too.

LAME Home Page

Grip home page

CDparanoia home page
--

grip homepage

or you can just do a search on freshmeat for ripping software. Download one, install it and play around with it. It is not that hard.

I suspect that the reason you can only download mp3 files of CD's you own is not a legal one but a technological one. When you insert a CD into your drive, your PC can read the info (CCDB?) on it and use that verify that you own the CD. Can't do the same thing for tapes or LP's.

My old mp3 player, mp3studio used to have those annoying gaps as well.

I am now using xmms and it seamlessly plays entire ripped cd's using a playlist. Use grip to rip the cd's and generate the playlist.

On another note, I think that we need a standard format for mp3 CDROM's. I would love to be able to pop my mp3 CDROM into a portable player, a computer or a car sterio and have it know in each case where the music and the playlists were located.

I propose that we use a directory structure of

/type_of_music/artist/album

where type of music is country, R and B, rock, various....

artist is the name of the group or individual that performed the work

alblum is the name of the collection of songs, singles should be used for a groups set of singles.

all the MP3's will be located in the album level of the subdirectory and each album subdirectory will contain a single M3U of the tracks that are present in that subdirectory.

There could also be one or more M3U's at the type_of_music and artist level to give a higher level view of how to play the music on the CDROM.

For instance, At the root level you could have M3U's called sad.m3u and dance.m3u all.m3u that contain colectively only sad songs, only dance songs and all the music on the cdrom respecively.

How does this sound? Anyone else have any ideas about how to do something like this?

BUT... I've fallen in love with cdex and use it now instead. cdex rips (with very nice skip checking/reporting), cddb's, and encodes in one shot. Best of all, it uses LAME (Lame Ain't an MP3 Encoder), which is the closest thing we've got to a Legal, Free (Free Beer and Free Speech) MP3 encoder.

The LAME page links to a couple of Linux apps that do about the same in the Linux world: Grip (Gtk) and Krabber (KDE), but I've been happy enough with cdex that I haven't tried these yet.