[PLUG-TALK] ripping a music CD?

[John Jason Jordan]

On Fri, 1 Jan 2010 12:36:18 -0800
Denis Heidtmann <denis.heidtmann at gmail.com> dijo:

>I was given a music CD which plays fine on my player, but I would like
>to add the contents to my computer's supply of music for convenient
>listening.  My computer's Liteon drive did not even recognize the disk
>as media.  My son's laptop tried, but could not read the data even
>after nearly an hour of trying using grip.
>
>There is nothing on the CD or the packaging which indicates that this
>disk is protected in any way.  The only clue may be  IFPI 1697 stamped
>into the plastic near the hole.  There is also M1S1 stamped into it.
>
>Anybody have suggestions as to what is going on, and how to get this
>thing ripped?

I have done this hundreds of times, using cdparanoia and lame. Start by
making sure they are installed - use your package manager or command
line. Here are some instructions that I saved for myself:

----------
For ripping with cdparanoia and lame

1) Determine how many tracks on are the CD:   cdparanoia -Q

2) Rip the entire audio CD to one giant file (example assumes a disc
with 10 tracks):   cdparanoia 1-10 /home/jjj/MP3s/cdda.wav
(Substitute your favorite folder for where the cdda.wav file will
reside.) I need to do this because I normally rip classical music and I
want to play an entire symphony as one piece, not as several tracks. If
you want individual files for individual tracks I think you just
eliminate the "1-10" in the example. But man cdparanoia will tell you
if I have misremembered. 

When encoding more than one CD I just let cdparanoia overwrite the
cdda.wav file for each subsequent CD. I just have to remember to encode
it with lame (see (3) below) before overwriting it.

While ripping you will see the following:

<space> 	No correction needed
- 		Jitter correction required
+		Unreported loss of streaming/other error in read
!		Errors found after stage 1 correction; the drive is
making the same error through multiple-re-reads, and cdparanoia is
having trouble detecting them
e		SCSI/ATAPI transport error (corrected)
V		Uncorrected error/skip

3) Encode to MP3 (320 kbps VBR file):   
lame --vbr-new -B
320 /home/jjj/MP3s/cdda.wav /home/jjj/MP3s/happyfunfile.mp3
You'll want to read the man page on lame to understand how Variable Bit
Rate works. I find it is excellent, as it saves space by using a lower
bit rate on passages where a higher bit rate would make no difference
in the sound quality. I have serious stereo speakers and I can't hear
the difference between mp3s that I have encoded with VBR as above and
the original CD.

For big works that span disks, rip and encode each track separately,
then join with mp3wrap. Here is the line for Mahler Symphony #6,
encoded as Mahler6a to *d. 

jjj at Devil7:~/MP3s$ mp3wrap Mahlher6 Mahler6a.mp3 Mahler6b.mp3
Mahler6c.mp3 Mahler6d.mp3 

Note that the output filename comes first, then the individual MP3s to
be wrapped. This results in a file called Mahler6MP3WRAP.mp3. Using
EasyTag the name can be changed. Deleting the “MP3WRAP” does not affect
the playability; it just means that the companion program, mp3split,
will not recognize it as a file that can be split. 
--------

I have ripped and encoded hundreds of CDs containing everything from
the Blue Danube to the Ring Cycle. It's a delight to have them with me
on my computer. I also put them on my 60-GB iPod. I am no longer a
slave to radio stations when away from home. Plus, even when at home
it's faster to do click-click-click than to get up, walk across the
room, find the CD, insert it into the player, return to my desk, and
disinter the remote control from under piles of books and papers.