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323 lines
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323 lines
20 KiB
Plaintext
Episode: 1703
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Title: HPR1703: Open Source CD Rippers
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1703/hpr1703.mp3
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Transcribed: 2025-10-18 08:01:25
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---
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This is HPR Episode 1,703 entitled Open Source CD Rippers.
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It is hosted by first time host Kevin and is about 26 minutes long.
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The summary is, Kevin takes a look at a variety of CD ripping software available on Linux.
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This episode of HPR is brought to you by an honesthost.com.
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With 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15, that's HPR15.
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Better web hosting that's honest and fair at An Honesthost.com.
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Hello, hello and welcome to another episode of Hacker Public Radio.
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My name is Kavi and whilst this isn't my very first appearance on Hacker Public Radio,
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it is my first attempt at flying solo, so this is a totally new experience for me.
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For my first ever episode, I thought I would do a brief round-up of some CD ripping software,
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Open Source of course, that is available on the Linux system.
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Throughout this episode, I hope to actually look at a variety, so I'm going to look at some dedicated
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rippers, graphical and command line, and also take a look at a couple of complete audio
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suites, which actually include the ripping abilities, which want to make a brief comment
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about each and just compare them. Of course, what I see is very subjectionable.
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I mean, a lot of this is down to personal taste, but I'm going to try and give my opinion
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and be as balanced as I can.
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Now, if you're a regular listener to my show Tux Jam, then you'll also know that I'm a big fan
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of Creative Commons music, and I'm not letting you guys off with no music in this episode either.
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Throughout the show, we're going to get to when to have some music tracks from 20-pound
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sounds and blowing up bridges, so that's look forward to.
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But first of all, let's get straight on and take a wee look at the CD ripping software.
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This was all ripped on my Debian system using Matty desktop environment.
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Nothing too major about the system, it's not cutting-edge,
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it certainly isn't bought from the line either.
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It's 8GB quad-core i5, 3.3GHz, so that gives you an idea over the system,
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just so that you can actually get an idea over what it is I was using.
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Now, so to start with, we'll look at sound-ducer, which is very familiar to anybody
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that's used no more GTK desktop, as it varies often the default CD-ripper.
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And how does it look? Well, looks okay, it fits in.
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It's a nice pop-up GUI, it lists all the tracks.
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One of the good things about it was that it found my CD information straight away.
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The CD information, the CD that I'm not going to promote the artist,
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because I didn't use Creative Commons CD purely because most of the time,
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CD-rippers do not find these on an internet databases.
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So, I used a CD that was 11 tracks long and it was 33 minutes in total audio time,
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so that gives you also an idea.
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So, it found the tracks and the information straight away, no problem there.
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One of the things that I wasn't so keen on was this isn't comparison to the other GUI one,
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which I'm going to review in a minute.
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And that was when you were ripping, it wasn't entirely obvious that you were actually doing anything.
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It wasn't until you noticed that some of the buttons started to get greyed out.
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So, and there's a small progress bar down the bottom.
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So, overall, I wasn't too impressed with that part.
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I would rather be a bit more obvious.
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What are the nice features I did like about, I do like it sound juicer,
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is that you can play the tracks before you actually rip them.
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Now, obviously, when you're actually ripping, you're no longer available, the buttons greyed out.
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Once again, it doesn't come up with a pop-up or anything at all intrusive when it's actually finished the ripping.
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It simply basically continues as paranormal.
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The only difference that you'll notice is that the play button is no longer greyed out.
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So, overall, I had a good experience.
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The time to rip was 8 minutes and 53 seconds.
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I would personally have liked to have seen something that said a message of job done as an option.
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I mean, didn't even all seem to give you that option.
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But overall, I was quite happy with it.
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By default, it ripped the tracks into a first of all folder with the artist, then the album name.
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So, it was actually two folders that created one side the other.
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So, that was sound juicer.
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And again, not really probably going to be a big surprise to many people.
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Most people I imagine, if you've tried Linux and you've tried the NomDesk top or a GTK desktop for that matter,
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have probably used sound juicer.
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So, onto a sander.
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And this is actually my default soundripper.
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And it looks quite similar to sound juicer, to be perfectly honest.
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It's a nice, rather unspectacular GUI.
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And once again, found the CD information instantly.
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By default, this time, the rips are put onto a folder.
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That's first of all, it's like a double ballad name.
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It's the artist followed by the album.
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So, artist followed by album.
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The total time to rip this time was 8 minutes 21 seconds.
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So, slightly faster.
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Now, we've been faster, but nothing over the top.
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The one thing I do like about a sander, although a lot of people may say,
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no, no, I don't like this two-in-thrusive, is when it's actually ripping,
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it provides a wee pop-up window in the centre of the GUI,
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you can move this about independently.
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And it says it gives you the progress of each track plus the overall progress.
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And pretty much you can't really do anything with a sander unless you stop it.
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And if you want to see the complete or you stop it, the wee window closes
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and the shah job done, notification pops up.
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So, I quite like that.
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But then again, that's all down to personal taste.
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Some people might find that a wee bit intrusive.
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So, overall, not really an awful lot to compare between the two.
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Both of them did the tracks, except all these were being ripped to og.
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So, both of them did the tracks in roughly the same time.
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So, 8.53 for sound juicer, 8.21 for a sander.
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I think I'm going to give it a wee break here.
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And you might notice a slight theme with the music here today.
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The first track is rip it up by 20 pounds sounds.
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I
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want to rip it up, slow it back at you.
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On his words that you wrote because it told me many things.
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I want to rip it out of now.
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I want to rip it out of now.
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I want to rip it out of now.
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I want to rip it up, slow it back at you.
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On his words that you wrote because it told me many things.
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I want to rip it out of now.
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And a nice rock there from 20 pounds sounds.
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If you like the sound of that, then you can visit them at 20p20lb.net.
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And the first one we're going to look at is bash burn.
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To be honest, I hadn't actually ever considered command line ripping before.
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It's just not been something that sound juicer has always been installed by default.
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A lot of this was I've tried.
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I discovered a sander for reviewing an episode of tux jamma happened to like it.
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So, it's just something I've never really done.
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My first attempt at this, it worked rather well, now I must admit.
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For something that was a command line only interface, it was very, very easy to use.
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Nicely laid out.
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There's one big problem I had with it and that was I was a bit nervous starting it.
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Purely because there is almost no documentation at all.
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If you go to the website, there is some basic documentation on how to install it.
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And then it says usage coming soon.
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So this led me to be a bit nervous.
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However, this was totally unfounded as it was very straightforward to use.
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Now, in saying that, there was a wee bit of setup to do.
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Once we got the setup done, that was fine.
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But there was a wee bit of setup.
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So initially it gave me an error about not having been used before my system
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and then it created a file called dot bash burn RC.
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Now that was okay, but then I had to go hunt down that file in the folder
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because when I actually tried to rip music from the first time,
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it told me there was no CD drive.
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No, it could not find my CD drive.
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So that was rather annoying.
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When I eventually found the bash burn RC file,
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I found it located in the home folder.
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It's just a dot bash burn RC was a hidden file.
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That reader rather annoyingly was not clear.
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So I first of all had to go and put down dev dot SR0 in my case for the CD.
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But for the CD drive and the other thing that had to be done was,
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well sorry, it didn't have to be done.
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But what I didn't notice initially was that it ripped all the music tracks
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to a folder called burn and it puts it in the TMP file by default.
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No, not too much of an issue for me because I happen to notice it.
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But you can change that in the dot bash burn RC.
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However, this would be very annoying if you had done a number of tracks
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or a number of CDs, not notice it had gone into the TMP file
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and then rebooted your computer.
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Or switched it off, come back to the next day because all those files would be gone.
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So personally, I think that's a rather annoying place to be putted by default.
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But that's what they've chosen and it is very easy to change.
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It's just not very obvious.
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This is where I really would like to see some better documentation on this.
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How did it go?
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Well, as soon as I put it in, it gave me a list.
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Pick your option, do you want to extract from rip from CD,
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which format you want to rip in?
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It was all very, very clear.
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But then it came to actually ripping it.
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This was the kind of slight problem I had here.
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Because it said, what tracks do you want to rip enter for default?
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So I assumed enter would just rip all tracks.
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No.
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I said enter, it took me back to the first menu.
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Okay, that was rather annoying.
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So then I decided, let's try typing all in, typed in all unknown command.
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Nope, couldn't do that.
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So what I eventually had to type in was I had to put in one through eleven.
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Now, this time this ripper did not find any audio information.
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And the rather annoying thing was that I had to input each name manually.
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Now, it told me said, you know, we have support symbols, etc.
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Please put in your name for track one, track two, track three, track four, track five.
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So that was I thought a bit of a rather cumbersome way of doing this.
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However, one thing before we write this off entirely,
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the rip time with this was phenomenally good.
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Four minutes, 13 seconds.
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So less than half of the time with the other two.
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That was really was good.
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The biggest problem was, of course, fiddly.
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Well, initially fiddly said of that so initially.
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But if you're a very slow type or you can be bothered typing in everything,
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then it's not quite so handy.
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I think that this would be excellent if you're only wanting to pull that maybe a track or two off an album.
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Not probably the thing that I would recommend for ripping from ripping a whole CD collection.
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Because I think you'd spend enough a lot of time typing out.
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Hey, if you like typing out and fired on that might be that might be ideal for you.
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So, overall, given that was my very first time ripping from the command line,
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I thought, yeah, that was okay.
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Then I found discovered another thing and it was called C-Rip.
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Now, well, it was either C-Rip or C-Rip, but I prefer having C-Rip.
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I found it very, very easier, easy to set up.
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Just loaded it up, no error messages, and it found the CD straight away.
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Now, this one did not ask me which format it wanted to rip to.
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But thankfully, it ripped to Og, which was what I was wanting.
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One of the things that was very nice about this was that it found all the CD information.
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And put these now.
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The way to put the tracks...
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Wait, put the tracks.
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Well, it put everything into Home Fold.
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It didn't print a separate individual folder.
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It put it into Home Folder.
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And put it as Artist Name,
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album name, track number, track title.
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So they were rather long and quite cumbersome lines, but I think you can't change that.
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I just didn't delve too deep into it.
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Now, for a command line, especially given the...
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For a command line tool, especially given how good Bashburn was,
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I expected this to be all.
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This will be the answer I am now.
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That's it, I've understood.
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Well, I was rather disappointed with the rip time in this.
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I thought it would at least be to the GUI tools.
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But sadly, the time to rip was 9 minutes, 6 seconds.
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So that, combined with the rather ugly weight percentage of files,
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I just thought, no, it's probably not worth it.
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That's just my personal opinion, but the fact it took longer than the GUI did,
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kind of leave me a bit disappointed.
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But overall, compared to the fact that I had nothing to go on,
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I didn't know what I was going to be expecting.
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I didn't know how easy or difficult it was going to be.
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I must admit, they were both very easy.
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And this one is a bit better documented online that our manuals
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and setup tutorials, etc.
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Not that this one needed it.
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I mean, the very what, this one I expected,
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because there was so much documentation for it to be quite awkward,
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but it wasn't at all.
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So overall, that was my first experience of command line CD-rippers,
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and I was very impressed.
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Now, before we take a look at my final thoughts
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and also take a look at the different audio suites,
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we're going to have a wee listen to some more music,
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and if you're following us sleep,
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and this will certainly wake you up,
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this is blowing up bridges,
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and the track is grip it and rip it.
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I like to take it the most,
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you get it high on the bus,
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it's come on, turn on your call pass,
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it doesn't get to be heard,
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it doesn't get yours,
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it doesn't stop to cast.
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I like to take it the most,
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you get it high on the bus,
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it's come on, turn on your call pass,
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it doesn't get to be heard,
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it doesn't get yours,
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it doesn't stop to cast.
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It doesn't get to be heard,
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it doesn't get yours,
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it doesn't stop to cast.
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I like to take it the most,
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you get it high on the bus,
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it's come on,
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turn on your call pass,
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it doesn't get yours,
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it doesn't get yours,
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it doesn't get to be heard,
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it doesn't get to be heard,
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it doesn't get to be heard,
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it doesn't stop at cast.
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Everybody knows what's with that as well,
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Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey
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hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey
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Yeah but a punk there by blowing up bridges and if you like that unfortunately they don't
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have enough of a lot of presence on the web. I'll direct you link soles in the show notes
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and indeed for all the tracks and software that's been reviewed in this episode, links
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in the show notes all that I can find by blowing up bridges is four tracks on their bandcamp
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page so rather disappointed by that because I quite enjoyed it I would like to hear a wee bit
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more but maybe the shall be a wee bit more to come yet. Now before we wrap this up I want to think
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let's answer the question is it worth having a dedicated ripper when you might have a full audio
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suite which can do it anyway it's in the options right let's have a consideration then.
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So I looked at two options for this first one is one that just a bit everybody I know seems to
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have this installed and it's one of the first programs they install and that is VLC. VLC it's a great
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audio and video player purely because it plays everything you can throw at it you can do whatever
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you want and it plays it it's great. Now how did it fare? Well it rips tracks really well from CD
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however it's one at a time you can select more than one you can tell to rip the whole track but
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I had problems in the naming aspect of it didn't seem to matter what I what options are tried to do
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do the it just kept on trying to rename the file now somebody online pointed me to VLC's documentation
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and there are supposed to be you can put some different ones in so it will supposedly change so
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for example according to its own wiki if you put in dollar n it's a track number if you put
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in dollar t it's a title so I tried this no didn't seem to matter if I put in dollar t dollar space
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of space dollar n dollar whatever all did was save the track to that title and what a problem
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is what it would do is it would rip the first track and then go back and save over it save over
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it save over it save over it and I tried for a good two hours to get this one again I just couldn't
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and to be honest I just thought no this isn't worth it so yeah fine for a dripping maybe one track
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or a couple of tracks I don't think I would like to rip my entire media library that way and of
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course you're the problem is you had to enter the value in manually so you you know it didn't
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automatically like a sunda or sound juicer or even see rip it did not automatically name it to
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the song you had to manually put it in not that there was any wrong with the quality I was really
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pleased for that and the speed it seemed very fast for the one track but I just could not get it
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to rip the entire album in one go and that's what I was aiming for now the other option I looked
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at was rhythm box now rhythm box is not something I tend to use I must admit I've used it a few
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times and I do find it handy for things like browsing magnitude and gemendo but it's not
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something I ever use so I tried it out it's very quite straightforward when you put the CD in
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there's a rip button appears you can set out you can lay it out in different ways whichever
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you want it click the button and it worked no problem but but we got problem this thing is a beast
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of an audio suite and it took 13 minutes and four seconds on this now you know when you compare
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that the second slowest is C-Rip with nine minutes and six seconds you know four minutes is an
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awful lot if you are going to be ripping maybe 200 CDs so in the answer to the question yes you
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can get a suite that does everything but in good old Linux philosophy I prefer to have something
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one piece of software that does everything where it does one thing really well rather than a big
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behemoth that does everything so like again at the end of the day it's subjective you may totally
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agree with me you may say nope don't agree we are talking heavy but anyway that's what comments
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are for and that's the beauty of Linux you have choice you have variety so if you like this show
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then please do leave a comment or even if you didn't like it if you have any comments leave a
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comment on the the page if you wish to get in contact me you can it's tuxjam at unseen studio.co.uk
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and if you like this and you like the combination of tech talk on music then please check out the
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tech the tuxjam podcast which is you should release now monthly ruling cycle and I do that with
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Andrew who's also known as McNally who I think has done more than his fair share of HPR so hopefully
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this although this is my first hopefully it is not the last time I'll do this and I shall catch you
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again on the next time I do either an episode tuxjam or an episode of HPR
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you've been listening to hecka public radio as hecka public radio dot org
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if you have comments on today's show please email the host directly leave a comment on the website
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