Picard CD ripper plugin

MusicBrainz Picard
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I wrote a CD ripping local plugin for Picard API v3, and it’s working well for my purposes. I was considering making it available on the Github repository, but that’s a learning curve for me and I’d probably want to clean up a few things before doing that…so I thought I’d gauge the interest first. I’m not going to lie, I’m no coder so I had AI help on it. How it works:

  1. After loading a release from your CD drive, automatically invokes Cueripper.Console (optional, can also be invoked from the traditional right-click->plugins
  2. Console only does single-file cue rips, so the rip goes to a user-specified “staging” folder where it is split.
  3. If verified by Accuraterip (option to override), resulting files are automatically pulled into Picard and attached to the last loaded release. Cue sheet ISRCs and flags are attached to the files on import. If a rip is not verified as accurate, the single file .cue is moved to a user-specified folder in case you want to try to repair it with CueTools.

That’s pretty much it. I’m happy with it as-is for my personal use, but if there’s enough interest I’ll tighten some things up and see if I can figure out how to make it available for everyone.

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Hey, nice idea. And well done on embedding the ISRCs! But, there are some issues that would prevent me from using or recommending this.

You are attaching the rip to the last loaded release. While this workflow works for you (the designer), a general user would not expect this behavior. There is already a widespread problem on MB where some releases are associated with disc IDs that belong to other releases. This workflow might contribute to that problem.

It’s also a little backwards in some cases. If the user is an editor who intends to submit the release, they might do so by submitting a cluster they made from files they just ripped.

Having CUERipper and AccurateRip within Picard is a good idea, but I’m not so sure a plugin’s UI could be robust enough to make me prefer that over the CUERipper GUI or some other tool. It seems like the only manual step that it could save me is dragging and dropping the tracks into Picard. That is a very minor inconvenience that is not outweighed by the feature gap between a dedicated app and the plugin that you describe.

For the purpose of associating a disc ID with the correct release, it would be more helpful to have a wizard workflow that may be beyond the capabilities of a Picard plugin.

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