[PLUG] ipods

John Jordan johnxj at comcast.net
Sat Aug 13 19:08:58 UTC 2005


On 11 Aug 2005, at 18:14, Jeme A Brelin wrote:

> > Eventually I got it to rip, but it still insisted on ripping each
> > track as a separate "song." I needed to get it to rip each track as
> > part of one larger file for the whole symphony. In addition, I
> > needed to add a couple seconds quiet space in between each track. I
> > never figured out how to do that or how to get it to make several
> > tracks into one file.
> 
> I don't know of anything out there that's going to do what you want.
> Everything I know that rips CDs rips them track by track.  You can,
> however, join the files when you're done.  You can even keep a couple
> of seconds of blank audio in a file and insert that between tracks
> (there may be a more elegant way of doing this, but I've spent no time
> thinking about it).
> 
> Quite frankly, however, I'm not sure why you'd do this.  The tracks
> are there to help you navigate the piece.  You lose nothing by keeping
> them except when you use "Shuffle" mode, but nobody does that with
> symphonic music anyway.  If you keep the tracks separate and make sure
> they have appropriate track numbers in their ID3 tags, you can listen
> to them in sequence (with appropriate between-track pauses) whenever
> you like.

OK, let me explain what I want to do.

Suppose you just got home from shopping at Classical Millennium, 
as I did the other day. I scored a used copy of Beethoven's 9th, the 
awesome version by Bernstein in Berlin right after the wall came 
down. Bernstein, Jewish, gay, parents holocaust escapees to 
America, conducting in Berlin the most impressive piece of music 
Germany ever produced -- and at the end they changed Ode to Joy 
to Ode to Freedom. It was broadcast live, and at the end people 
were pouring out onto the streets bawling.

Now, the first thing I did was pop this into the stereo and sit back 
to listen to it. Note that I did not wish to play just one track. I 
wanted to listen to the whole thing all at once. I will never want to 
listen to just one track of this CD. Or of any other symphony. So if 
I rip one track at a time, then I have to create a zillion playlists, one 
for each symphonic work. It's much easier to have all the tracks as 
one file. I want my iPod to work just like my stereo -- pop in a CD 
and listen to the whole thing.

But having said that, sometimes I might not want to rip the whole 
CD as one file. Lots of times the publisher will put several works on 
one CD. For example, I am currently ripping a CD that has 
Beethoven's 1st, 7th and Leonore #3 -- nine tracks. If I rip this as 
three files, it will work even better than the stereo, because each 
file will be one complete work.

> > I also never figured out how to name the file and the tracks so they
> > would show up correctly on the iPod.
> 
> Naming them doesn't do diddly.  You need to modify their ID3 tags.  I
> use a combination of the id3v2 and mp3info utilities.  While the
> latter doesn't support version 2 tags, the former has crappy syntax
> and can be a pain to put into scripts.  Essentially, I use id3v2 for
> writing tags and mp3info for reading them in little shell scripts that
> I write to manipulate these things.

I finally figured out how to do that with gtkpod. Stupidly simple, 
really. Just click twice on the name and it switches the name to 
edit mode -- just like a file in Nautilus or Windows Explorer. Dunno 
why I was so dense not to figure that out. (I was right-clicking on it, 
which does not list a "rename" option.)

> > After hours and hours of reading about it, perusing the help,
> > scouring the internet, and asking users on web pages and blogs, I
> > just gave up on it.
> 
> It's really no big deal.  What exactly is your problem?

I found something that works better than Grip -- abcde with the 
advice from Paul Mullen. See other post.

> > Not sure I really want iTunes on my Linux computer.
> 
> I wouldn't touch it with a ten meter cattle prod.

On that we totally agree.




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