[TriLUG] MP3 Ripping Software

[Joel Ebel]

The best tool for ripping a poor quality CD is cdparanoia.  There are 
many graphical front ends out there, I know little of them, but 
underneath the hood of almost all of them is cdparanoia.  It has a lot 
of error detection and correction capabilities.  However, you might do 
well to try cleaning up the CD first.  There are a lot of CD cleaning 
products out there, but I find Colgate(tm) to do the trick pretty well. 
:)  cdda2wav is another common ripper, but it doesn't have quite the 
error detection capabilities.  But for good CDs in good drives, it can 
perform faster.  I found cdda2wav to work much better on a Plextor drive 
several years ago.  If you're concerned about errors, use cdparanoia.

Compression is a separate issue.  If you simply want save it before it 
gets worse, why not just burn another CD of it?  That way you won't lose 
any quality.  Otherwise, if you want to save it losslessly on a hard 
drive, there is FLAC.  If you want to save a little space, consider Ogg 
Vorbis instead of mp3.  Not only does it make smaller files and sound 
better, it's free, open, and unpatented.  Of course if you need to play 
it on an mp3 player that doesn't support ogg, you're stuck.  But 
consider saving it also on either another CD or FLAC so when you want to 
use a better compression algorithm in the future, you've still got a 
lossless copy of it.

To encode to flac, go get flac.  For ogg, use oggenc.  For mp3, use 
lame.  Once again, there are plenty of graphical frontends that can 
automate this process.  I know little of them in Linux.  In windows, 
most people seem to prefer CDEX or EAC.  For Linux, perhaps 
KAudioCreator or Sound Juicer?  I don't know.  I just use cdparanoia and 
oggenc.

Joel

Randall Barlow wrote:
> I'd like to backup a CD that I have that's not in such good condition
> before it gets worse.  Any recommendations on a good open source MP3
> ripping program?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Randy Barlow