[mdlug] CD to MP3 recommendation: Grip

[Ingles, Raymond]

My wife wanted me to pull the songs off her collection of CDs to put on
her iPod. I did a little searching, and decided to try 'Grip'. It was
easily available on Ubuntu, and could be configured to use the tools I
trust for such conversion - cdparanoia for ripping, and lame for mp3
encoding.

 I messed with it last night, and it worked quite well. Pop in the CD,
and it hits the freedb database to get the info. You can configure how
it saves the files; I have it make an 'artist' directory, then a 'disc'
directory, and then save the files with the name 'artist - song.mp3'. I
changed it from making 128kbps mp3s to using lame's "--preset standard",
which produces VBR mp3s up to 320kbps and sound just fine to my
non-audiophile ears.

 It can do the encoding while it's ripping tracks, and on my dual-core
box they don't interfere with each other. My CPU can encode at around
20x playback speed, so a given CD only takes as much time as is needed
to rip the songs, say 15 minutes with my CD drive (using cdparanoia, as
I said, to make sure I get the actual bits off the disc, not massaged or
interpolated by the drive). I got almost a dozen done last night; just
pop in a CD, hit "Rip+Encode", and go do something else. The machine's
perfectly useable for computing, though, while this is going on.

 Just for reference: in the "Config:Rip:Ripper" tab, I have "Rip file
format" set to "~/Music/%A/%d/%a - %n.wav", and in
"Config:Encode:Encoder", I have "Encode file format" set to
"~/Music/%A/%d/%a - %n.%x". I have "Encoder command-line" set to
"--preset standard %w %m".

 Note: it can rip to Ogg, Flac, or AAC too, of course.

 Sincerely,

 Ray Ingles                                     (313) 227-2317

 "Oh, sure. Let the FBI investigate anybody in any way without
  a warrant. Look how much good J. Edgar Hoover did with that
                    kind of system." - Me
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