Full Circle Magazine FR

When it comes to music CD ripping, Linux has a lot of choice: Asunder, Sound Juicer, RipperX, Abcde, Ripit, Ripoff, and Goobox just to name a few. Choice is one of the great things about Linux, but it can be a bit daunting if you’re new to Linux and just trying to do a particular task. If you’re new to Linux, I could just recommend using Banshee to rip music CDs and leave it at that. Besides being a music playing/cataloging monster, Banshee can rip CDs, lookup artwork, show related Youtube videos, share audio over UPnP, and fix broken metadata. It’s not quite the Emacs of audio players, but it’s pretty close. Ripping a CD in Banshee is simple, just select the CD from the left window and click the Import CD button in the top right of the Banshee interface. If you want to select only particular tracks, simply check/uncheck the tracks you want/don’t want. Banshee automatically does a CD database lookup to help fill in most metadata. Banshee is flexible but not every option is easy to find. By default, Banshee rips music at a relatively normal 192Kbs bitrate. The option to change which bitrate Banshee rips at is hidden among drop-down menus: Edit > Preferences > Source Specific > Source (change this from Music to Audio CDs)

Now you can choose what you want to encode the ripped WAVs with by selecting the options in the import format drop-down. If you like free lossless audio, choose FLAC. For maximum compatibility across media players, I set the import format to MP3 (Lame Encoder). When you change from FLAC to MP3, you also enable the Edit button beside the Import Sources. Clicking on Edit enables you to change the bitrate. Banshee sometimes grabs artwork while you’re playing your ripped media, but it doesn’t automatically insert artwork into metadata when you rip a CD. If you use another program that doesn’t automatically grab artwork, you won’t see any artwork. If you’ve followed Linux Labs for a while, you’ll know I’m a big fan of KODI. KODI likes artwork to be embedded into the music metadata (ID3 tags). There are a number of ID3 tagging programs for Linux, but EasyTag is one of the most comprehensive ones. Adding artwork is a tiny bit tricky, there’s no automatic art lookup, but you can add artwork for: the song icon, the front cover, the back cover, the leaflet page, the CD itself, the lead artist, the artist, the conductor, the band/orchestra, the lyricist, the recording location, even the band logo. I normally just add front-cover art.

To add art, first select the artist on the left side, and select the song you want the artwork for in the middle. On the right hand side, select the Images tab (Common and Images under ID3 tag). Next click the + to add images (1), this will open the file dialog window so you can find the cover art on your file system. EasyTag automatically assumes you want to add the front cover, if this isn’t the case, double-click on the selected image to open the Image Properties. From the Image Properties window, you can choose the type of art the image represents. This process is simple enough, but it adds the artwork for only one song. To add the artwork for all the songs on the album, simply shift+click or ctrl+click on each song to select them, and click on the painting icon (2) in the bottom right of the ID3 tag > Images Window. If you hover over the icon long enough, the following tooltip appears : “Tag selected files with these images.” Songs where the metadata has changed appear in red (not pictured). This helps differentiate between songs with altered meta-data (red) and songs without (black). To save the song metadata, click the ‘save changes (3) to selected songs’ icon in the top middle of Banshee (hint: it looks like a box with a down-arrow) This is a rather simple workflow: CD ripping program > ID3 tag editor I use Banshee and EasyTag most of the time, but the odd time when I run into trouble with CD lookups, I try one of the alternatives like RipperX. RipperX has a much simpler interface, it follows the *NIX philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well. If you’re more into working on the command-line, abcde is a good alternate.