Originally shared by Michael PoloniSecure CD Ripping & Ruby Ripper
A couple of years ago I went through the process of ripping all my audio CDs into a transferable media format. I used Sound Juicer in Ubuntu Linux on my laptop. There were a few CDs that would not extract properly, but I put that down to either compatibility issues with my drive or dying discs.
Later, as I listened to the ripped music, I discovered that not everything had ripped so seamlessly. Of the small sample I've enjoyed, a very small number of tracks have occasional blips in the music. That is - the music didn't rip properly!
Reading up I've discovered that this is a common problem. The audio compact disc is not meant to be perfect, even though it is digital. Therefore I want a solution to rip the audio in a more secure way.
The most popular/robust tool for doing this in Linux appears to be 'cdparanoia'. This is a command line app, which works by copying the music as data files. The data can be ripped multiple times so as to do a comparison, chunk by chunk, to pick up any inconsistencies.
But command line isn't for everyone. And it makes a messy task for grabbing & populating metadata for each track. So here's the solution I've found: RubyRipper http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Rubyripper
RubyRipper is a GUI wrapper that uses 'cdparanoia' and some other useful tools. It will download album and track information from freedb.org, allowing you to edit the data before ripping. It also manages the conversion to different audio formats for you.
So far I've been quite impressed with this little app, and the backend applications it relies on. There are a few minor problems, but it's done a much better job at ripping my CDs than Sound Juicer and Asunder did - it's detected & corrected blips, and handled "enhanced" CDs much much better.
How to install it in Ubuntu 12.04?
* Install some prerequisites: sudo apt-get install cd-discid cdparanoia flac normalize-audio ruby-gnome2 ruby vorbisgain mp3gain lame
* Download the latest tarball from http://code.google.com/p/rubyripper/ and extract it;
* Install Ruby Ripper by changing to the directory of the tarball you just extracted, and:
** ./configure --enable-lang-all --enable-gtk2 --enable-cli
** sudo make install
From the default settings, I recommend increasing the required matches on errors to 3 and maximum tries to rip each track to something big like 15. I came across one CD that took 14 attempts to match a chunk 3 times (although I haven't yet listened to the music to see if it still blips or not)!
Things to watch out for:
* RubyRipper should appear in the dash after you next login. To find it immediately, you'll need to call it from the command line: rrip_gui
* Occasionally it will crash upon looking up the track metadata from freedb.org. Just restart the app.
* If track metadata (e.g. track title) has a - or a / in it, this seems to throw RubyRipper off. For some reason these characters get treated as a field delimiter. So be sure to check all the artist names and track titles that have been downloaded from freedb.org, as you may need to edit them before ripping & encoding.
100+ music CDs down ... many more to go!
References:
* http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Rubyripper * http://code.google.com/p/rubyripper/ * http://code.google.com/p/rubyripper/wiki/Manual * https://www.xiph.org/paranoia/faq.html
A couple of years ago I went through the process of ripping all my audio CDs into a transferable media format. I used Sound Juicer in Ubuntu Linux on my laptop. There were a few CDs that would not extract properly, but I put that down to either compatibility issues with my drive or dying discs.
Later, as I listened to the ripped music, I discovered that not everything had ripped so seamlessly. Of the small sample I've enjoyed, a very small number of tracks have occasional blips in the music. That is - the music didn't rip properly!
Reading up I've discovered that this is a common problem. The audio compact disc is not meant to be perfect, even though it is digital. Therefore I want a solution to rip the audio in a more secure way.
The most popular/robust tool for doing this in Linux appears to be 'cdparanoia'. This is a command line app, which works by copying the music as data files. The data can be ripped multiple times so as to do a comparison, chunk by chunk, to pick up any inconsistencies.
But command line isn't for everyone. And it makes a messy task for grabbing & populating metadata for each track. So here's the solution I've found: RubyRipper http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Rubyripper
RubyRipper is a GUI wrapper that uses 'cdparanoia' and some other useful tools. It will download album and track information from freedb.org, allowing you to edit the data before ripping. It also manages the conversion to different audio formats for you.
So far I've been quite impressed with this little app, and the backend applications it relies on. There are a few minor problems, but it's done a much better job at ripping my CDs than Sound Juicer and Asunder did - it's detected & corrected blips, and handled "enhanced" CDs much much better.
How to install it in Ubuntu 12.04?
* Install some prerequisites: sudo apt-get install cd-discid cdparanoia flac normalize-audio ruby-gnome2 ruby vorbisgain mp3gain lame
* Download the latest tarball from http://code.google.com/p/rubyripper/ and extract it;
* Install Ruby Ripper by changing to the directory of the tarball you just extracted, and:
** ./configure --enable-lang-all --enable-gtk2 --enable-cli
** sudo make install
From the default settings, I recommend increasing the required matches on errors to 3 and maximum tries to rip each track to something big like 15. I came across one CD that took 14 attempts to match a chunk 3 times (although I haven't yet listened to the music to see if it still blips or not)!
Things to watch out for:
* RubyRipper should appear in the dash after you next login. To find it immediately, you'll need to call it from the command line: rrip_gui
* Occasionally it will crash upon looking up the track metadata from freedb.org. Just restart the app.
* If track metadata (e.g. track title) has a - or a / in it, this seems to throw RubyRipper off. For some reason these characters get treated as a field delimiter. So be sure to check all the artist names and track titles that have been downloaded from freedb.org, as you may need to edit them before ripping & encoding.
100+ music CDs down ... many more to go!
References:
* http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Rubyripper * http://code.google.com/p/rubyripper/ * http://code.google.com/p/rubyripper/wiki/Manual * https://www.xiph.org/paranoia/faq.html
Rubyripper - Hydrogenaudio Knowledgebase