Episode: 3839
Title: HPR3839: Rip a CD in the terminal
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3839/hpr3839.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 06:20:30

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3839 for Thursday the 20th of April 2023.
Today's show is entitled Rip a CD in the Terminal.
It is part of the series Lightweight Apps.
It is hosted by Archer 72 and is about 5 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is Archer 72 Ripsed CDs in the Terminal and avoids the whims of the media
companies.
Hello, this is Archer 72.
Welcome to Hacker Public Radio.
In this episode, since I was looking through my old CDs, I decided to try a command line
CD Ripper called A-B-C-D-E.
This is an acronym for a better CD encoder.
And they're wiki.
It says Grab an entire CD and compress it to AgVorbus, MP3, FLAC, AAC, OGG, Speaks, and
or MPP, Slash, MP+, MusePack format.
By A-B-C-D-E, ordinarily the process of grabbing the data off a CD and encoding it, then tagging
or commenting it is very involved.
A-B-C-D-E is designed to automate this.
With one command, it will do a CDDB or Music Brain's query over the internet to look
up your CD or use a locally stored CDDB entry or read CD text from your CD as a fallback
for track information.
This is a good place to mention that free DB is deprecated now.
So the URL for the CDDB lookup is now at www.genewdb.org.
Now leave the link in the show notes.
Then it grabs an audio track or all the audio CD tracks from your CD.
Normalize the volume of individual file or album as a single unit.
Compress to AgVorbus, MP3, FLAC, OGG, Slash, Speaks, MPP, Slash, MP+, M4A and or Opus
Format, all in one CD read, comment or ID3 tag given intelligible file name, calculate
replay gain values for the individual file or the album as a single unit, delete the
intermediate wave or save it for later use, repeat until finished.
Alternatively, ABCDE can also grab a CD and turn it into a single flack file with an
embedded QC which can be used later on as a source for other formats and will be treated
as if it was the original CD and away ABCDE can take a compressed backup of your CD collection.
Did I mention this was all on the command line?
It was ideal because I wanted to use it on the Raspberry Pi or other HLS type setups.
While I was looking at information on this program, I came across a forum on Ask Ubuntu
and it's posted from a former developer of this program and it preserved the configuration
file there that will rip to 11 different audio formats at the same time and there is
follows.
AugVorbus, MP3, Flack, MusePack, AAC, Opus, WavePack, Monkeys Audio, True Audio, and
MP2.
I didn't try to get all the formats working as I was only interested in AugVorbus, MP3,
Flack and Opus.
Also I commented out the ones that I didn't use and the different formats are put into
corresponding sub-directories.
The author says to keep in mind that this comp file can also be used for a single audio
codec grip and code by using something like the following.
ABCDE, Space, Dash, O, Space, MP3.
So I decided to use this and make an alias to something like ripscde.mp3 and now this
is kind of an outdated way to do things and the project is getting longer than the tooth
also.
The last commit was on the GitHub page was February 14th, 2021.
And unlike the online media companies that decide what can be or not be in the library,
you own what you rip and you have it for good.
And there's one last thing, if this program stops working and you don't want to use the
graphical ones, there's always an ffmp command that dumps the contents of the entire CD to
a Flack file.
Thank you for listening.
Feel free to leave a comment if you want or also feel free to record a show of your
own.
Bye.
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