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December 18, 2004

Easy as ABCDE

Since I've been audioscrobbling, I seem to have started listening to my own collection of Ogg Vorbis and MP3 files again, instead of random online radio stations. Sadly, a couple of months ago, a tragic accident with an Ubuntu installer saw me format over said collection, and I hadn't got round to re-ripping things. Hence I've been spending a lot of time ripping CDs lately, and it seems there are two big names in Open Source CD ripping — sound-juicer and abcde. Both support most of the output formats you could ever want to use, although abcde handles a few extra. However...

sound-juicer is a very simple GUI application, with almost no configurability — on the up side, this means it often Just Works, and maybe even Does The Right Thing. This makes it very quick to start using, and probably quite friendly to the average non-geek (or at least, the average non-geek who has already got as far as running Linux). The down side is that when it doesn't do what you hoped, there's not a lot you can do about it. The entire range of configuration options covers the source CD drive, the destination folder, the structure of the path/filenames (chosen from a limited set of examples) and the output format. Not even a quality setting! There is also no way to control how sound-juicer handles CDDB data; in fact, this is what finally drove me away from it. If there are multiple listings in CDDB for a given album, s-j will simply choose the first. It is also completely unaware that an album may be multi-artist, and so the metadata in the resulting Ogg files is all but useless. Great.

abcde is almost entirely unlike s-j. It has a detailed manpage listing the bewildering array of configuration options and command line switches, and appears to only have a command line interface. This isn't a huge issue for me, but for the average non-geek could be pretty off-putting. For the geek like me, though, abcde is fantastic. Despite the huge range of options, when run with no configuration, switches or paramaters at all, it reads the first CD drive, shows me all the CDDB listings it can find for the album, and asks me to choose the most accurate. Then, in the case of a multi-artist CD, it asks me if the track names as given contain the track artist names, and if so, in which of a choice of 6 formats covering just about all the variations I've seen. Result? A directory with a sane name, filled with Ogg Vorbis files with good metadata.

So I suppose I'm saying that, if you're trying to choose between these two, you should choose abcde if you can. It really is A Better CD Encoder.

(You wouldn't believe me if I said I only opened this edit form to post an entry about stuff that happened last weekend, would you? Maybe later then.)

Posted by James at 15:11
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Comments

I find grip is a good compromise between the 2. It's got a reasonable GUI interface, but more options than you can shake a stick at. Well, ok, it doesn't have *loads* of options, but it's pretty good all the same.

Of course, it means you have to have certain Gnome stuff installed, which might put some people off.

Posted by: Carl at December 21, 2004 11:17 AM

How can I raise the encoding quality in abcde?
I want to use the ogg format.

Posted by: nicolas at February 5, 2005 08:18 AM

nicolas: it seems a little confusing. I think you need to set the "OGGENCOPTS" value in $HOME/.abcde.conf to pass the appropriate quality parameter to oggenc. So for example:

OGGENCOPTS='-q 5'

This is completely untested and provided without warranty :)

Posted by: James [TypeKey Profile Page] at February 5, 2005 08:59 AM