[Resolved] Looking for recommendations -- CD Ripper
Hey hey, I have been using Sound Juicer on my Ubuntu 24 / KDE 5 PC and it works, but it doesn't handle the tags for my MP3 files very nicely. I've also used abcde, at the terminal, and that can be better but it takes a lot finessing at the CLI to get the result I want.
Is there a better CD ripper application that will run on Ubuntu and can make setting the MP3 tags dead simple?
Thanks for any ideas!
Edit: Fixed a typo
ETA: Asunder looks good, does what I need and works well on my PC. Thanks for everyone's ideas and help!
I just tried this app. When it opens, the UI is like 3x zoomed in, I can tell I'm not seeing the whole screen.
I found an open issue in their github with the same complaint. I tried both the appimage and the snapo and they both do this on my Ubunut PC. Guess I'll have to keep looking.
I sounds like your window manager is telling the program to display with high-DPI scaling when it shouldn't be. This is a common issue when running older software written for X11 on newer Linuxes that are using Wayland. fre:ac was originally written in 2001!
You might have a system display setting to control scaling of "legacy" (X11) applications. I know KDE Plasma does.
Looking up Picard's instructions... They recommend whipper, as others have done in the thread.
It can do the tagging for you, but it's important to note that music CDs do not contain metadata.
All the rippers that exist, look up what the CD is online, based on stuff like number of tracks, their lengths, and order. iTunes was the ripping software everyone used back in the day, because Apple made and maintained the first extensive database that could be used to automatically tag ripped music.
Modern rippers typically rely on MusicBrainz (like Picard).
As such there is no 100% reliable auto-tagging ripper, because a disc might match more than one album, or not be in the database. Such cases will always require manual intervention.
I use whipper. It's a command-line application but it's easy to use and works great every single time.
At first you should let it analyze your drive which is the only step more involved. Here's a mini tutorial for that I wrote for myself but you can also read it on the project page where it's probably more up to date:
Analyze the drive's caching behavior: $ sudo whipper drive analyze
Find the drive's offset. Consult the [[AccurateRip's CD Drive Offset database|http://www.accuraterip.com/driveoffsets.htm]] for your drive.
Drive information can be retrieved with $ whipper drive list.
$ sudo whipper offset find -o insert-numeric-value-here. If you omit the -o argument, whipper will try a long, popularity-sorted list of drive offsets.
If you can't confirm your drive offset value but wish to set a default regardless, set read_offset = insert-numeric-value-here in whipper.conf.
Offsets confirmed with $ whipper offset find are automatically written to the configuration file. If specifying the offset manually, please note that:
if positive it must be written as a number without sign (ex: +102 -> 102), if negative it must include the sign.
After that you just rip any disc by running: $ whipper cd rip
And just as an example, here's my ~/.config/whipper/whipper.conf:
@kyub@discuss.tchncs.de
Sorry to spam you - but I ran whipper and it created FLACs. I want MP3s, even though I know that makes me evil. :)
I've reviewed their github page and they don't say it can directly output MP3s. Their example config file, for instance, doesn't show a way to specify output format at all. Am I supposed to convert the files on my own then, or ...? (That defeats my one step process but I'll try if needed)
I used Asunder a lot when I was converting to digital and it handled tagging pretty well except for CDs I made from things like Napster files. It doesn't look like it is updated very frequently now, tho.
Thanks. Am I right in seeing that the only install option for Asunder is to download the tar.bz2 file, extract it and then use make to build it? I have not done that before.
It depends on which distro you're using, but most have Asunder packaged, and you can use Picard as a Flatpak if you can't find it natively packaged, IIRC.