Full Circle Magazine FR

Seeing as how I’m ancient and used to ride a dinosaur to school (uphill both ways, in the snow), I can remember a time when management of a music collection definitely involved managing the physical media (CD's, cassette tapes, I even remember 8 tracks and vinyl records). Of course, digitalization of media makes the management of a music collection MUCH easier now, but it’s not a seamless trade-off. MP3’s sound pretty good, but they actually are inferior to CD quality, so it’s still worthwhile to get music on physical media if you have a truly sensitive ear and want the best listening experience. Somewhat in contrast to that reason for having analog music, my own main motivation for having CD media is that I simply already have it, as I have a lot of CDs that I’ve owned since before the MP3 era. Fortunately, Ubuntu comes with a default application for ‘ripping’ CDs to MP3 format, where your media is easier to manage. It’s called Rhythmbox, and it does a LOT more than just ripping CDs.

Rhythmbox will usually show up by default on the Ubuntu Launcher, usually close to the bottom of the default applications that are there. Its icon appears like a rectangle with some concentric circles: That’s it, just above the ‘Show Applications’ drawer (the unmoving set of white squares at the bottom of the Favorites launcher): Once you launch it by clicking the icon: You’ll see the screen shown right. Note that there’s a lot of music already here. That’s because Rhythmbox automatically searches your hard drive on its first launch and indexes all the existing music it finds. Pretty snazzy! Ripping a CD Now, let’s insert a physical CD into the computer’s optical drive. If Rhythmbox is already open, it will now show an Audio Disc on the left side: If you click on Audio Disc (and you’re online), you’ll get this screen:

As you can see, Rhythmbox has seamlessly tapped into the Musicbrainz online database and found information on the audio CD, and has already filled in track names and even selected every track by default to be ripped. Pretty nifty! Now, click the icon with the three dots at the top of the screen to get the buttons seen here just below the main menu bar (shown above). If you now click ‘Extract’, Rhythmbox will proceed to rip your CD tracks to MP3 format on your hard drive. It will create a folder with the album name, located by default in your home folder’s ‘Music’ subfolder. It would literally be extremely difficult to make the process any simpler or more straightforward. You can also play your CD, or any digital music file you’ve selected, using the play controls at the bottom of the screen (shown below) From left to right, you have controls to Play Previous Track, Play Current Track, Play Next Track, a slider control to select a particular place on the track, a Repeat button, and a Play in Random Order icon. These controls work the same on digital files like MP3s, and on physical media like music CDs. Next month: More music management (and probably less alliteration) using Rhythmbox.