[How to do instruction] CD ripper/player

[TheMetalHead]

Hello everyone. I have written some code for my version of a CD ripper/tagger/player for use with an external USB connected CD drive.

It is available on my GitHub Repo

Everything you need to know is contained in the README.md file of the repo.

It allows you to play your CDs without using the moOde interface. The volume being adjusted using an attached rotary encoder. CDs that have already been ripped can be batch queued for playing. The files are ripped as 320Kbps mp3.

The use case is for the other half to just play her CDs just like the old times.

If you do use the moOde interface you will see that the ripped files will have been tagged for you.

There is a configuration file to edit and an 'Install-cd-rip.sh' file to run. If you don't like it, you can use the 'Remove-cd-rip.sh' file.

[DRONE7]

Interesting... will give it a try.
Currently I use Daphile for ripping and Kent's MoOde cd player script for local playback.

I see you are using abcde and I guess I can change the config file to select something other than mp3 ?

[TheMetalHead]

Yep. You can change the abcde config file to something other than mp3. I haven't tried it myself because I wanted all mp3 files.
I also wanted the CD ripped into the artist / album / (artist) album - track) trackname.mp3 format but this screwed up the embedding of the cover.
The tagging also bombed out if there was no genre.

[DRONE7]

Great, I prefer album art as separate so this should suit fine.

[TheMetalHead]

The album artwork is embedded into each track and is also saved in the same directory as the tracks.
You can change its name in abcde.conf by changing ALBUMARTFILE.

[Tim Curtis]

Looks interesting. What service do you use to get metadata and art?

[TheOldPresbyope]

abcde can be configured to use sources like MusicBrainz, CDDB, CD-Text, coverartarchive.org. 

My experiments with it when i was exchanging ideas with Ashley Cox convinced me I couldn't trust this automation to markup my classical music collection. I had to intervene manually in many cases. I would expect it to work best with genres such as pop and rock.

Regards,
Kent

[TheMetalHead]

Looks interesting. What service do you use to get metadata and art?

I have set the metadata to come from Musicbrainz and cddb. The artwork comes from coverartarchive.orq or even amazon.com as defined by the do_getalbumart() function in abcde.

[TheMetalHead]

abcde can be configured to use sources like MusicBrainz, CDDB, CD-Text, coverartarchive.org. 

My experiments with it when i was exchanging ideas with Ashley Cox convinced me I couldn't trust this automation to markup my classical music collection. I had to intervene manually in many cases. I would expect it to work best with genres such as pop and rock.

Regards,
Kent

I haven't tried CD-Text, will give it a go today. I normally rip on the desktop and manually tag with mp3tag and transfer with winscp over to moOde.

As for not trusting automation, I agree. I have an album that fails to tag using MusicBrainz and CDDB. Neither of these services come back with a genre. Why, I don't know?
What I do know is that with no genre, the function do_tag() in abcde assumes a tag id of 255. This causes eyeD3 to somehow forget all the other tags except for the cover art.
I am going to modify my code to return the genre as 'other' as a default if there is no genre returned from any of the tagging services.

[TheOldPresbyope]

Genre, sure, but I was having more basic problems with getting tracks correctly identified out of the returned list of possibles (clearly the process of generating a digital fingerprint isn't perfect), and with the quality of the community-sourced metadata being returned for the tracks chosen. God help you if you have multi-CD sets. You may even find the contents of each CD tagged in a different language, let alone with differently organized information. 

Generally, tagging classical music is a fiddly process and I find it much easier in a full-fledged desktop app.

None of this is a deprecation of abcde itself, which is a great ripper. [It's also a beautiful example of how to write a complex app in bash.] It just can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

Regards,
Kent