CD Ripping

Hi there,
Can I rip my old cd’s using Picard? or is there a software made by metabrainz for ripping cd’s ? (on Linux)

Thank you

Not to my knowledge, but there’s whipper, which I believe @Freso contributes to.

I personally use fre:ac as it has support for AccurateRip, is packaged for most systems, and is available as a Flatpak.

2 Likes

Although not exactly for your situation, for any Windows users who end up here - Exact Audio Copy now has Metabrainz lookup functionality.

3 Likes

I found whipper in the repo, I’m gonna try with that before I resort to something outside de distro, freac is interesting as well.

I need wine to run EAC, so it’s plausible.

Last time I ripped my cd’s I was a silly teenager using musicmatch, It’s. Been. A. While.

Thanks.
Laters

2 Likes

I’ve been using Asunder on linux for years. May not have all the features of fre:ac, but it works well, and is simple to use.

Update, I have been using fre:ac, it gets the job done, so I have a question, if I remember right, musicmatch had an option to rip to Flac, with an option to set the bitrate to whatever we want, freac does not have a way to do this, that I can see. Is there a way to have flac in a specific bitrate? I would like to make flac’s not so fat xD.

Thanks.

FLAC is a lossless format, a bitrate setting does not make much sense. If you want to save space, you will have to use a lossy compression format (e.g. MP3, AAC, or Opus).

1 Like

Precisely. I just checked with a 60 MB wav. Compression 0 gave 37 MB, compression 5 (the default compression) gave 35.4 MB, compression 8 (maximum) gave 35.1 MB. Custom parameters gave 34.8 MB but took more than 7 minutes to achieve! Probably not worth bothering.

3 Likes

Well yes, I know flac’s are the fat of the land, it’s just that I remember this option on probably musicmatch but I don’t really recall. It is nice to have that granularity in the settings, LoL.

I’ll just go to the corner of the room to eat a pack of doughnuts now, don’t mind me.

FWIW, on Windows, fre:ac offers settings in the GUI. Obviously, you are on Linux, so it might not apply to you. Also, I don’t know if those settings are used when you run fre:ac in batch mode.

Did someone say Doughnuts? :doughnut: :doughnut:

EAC will let you mess with the bit rate, but there is a point where you are then spoiling the music you are ripping. Something you will regret years later when you get a better audio system.

FLAC has compression options. As you are in the *nix world, then command line is your friend:

Hard disks are getting much cheaper now, and for the tiny space you’d gain by messing with the compression it is not worth it. As @davitof demonstrated, you likely burn more CPU power and electrical cost that you’d gain in storage. If you are playing back on a phone or battery device, you just make it work harder and drain the battery faster.

Leave the past behind and embrace the future. When an iPod had 1GB of storage a 128kbps MP3 made sense. Now it sounds awful.

1 Like

The difference between FLAC compression levels tend to be at most a couple of percent for non-pathological files, hardly a bandwidth slider.

Modern lossy codecs such as Opus offer better audio quality at the same or lower bitrate than older codecs like AAC or MP3 (I use 96kbps Opus on my phone and it’s definitely enough for headphones on the train).

1 Like

I don’t like to see someone repeat the mistake I did. I ripped 500CDs to MP3 320kbps and then replaced my stereo kit. Those rips were painfully bad and had to replace the lot.

My advice is, if someone is on on a ripping mission then rip the best you can. Even if it is a few quid more on storage space. Once done is it then easy to re-encode to some 96kpbs Opus for a phone if you lack the space, but it is impossible to go in the other direction.

5 Likes