handyfloss

I have released (how pretentious!) rip2ogg.py, the wonderful CD ripper everyone was waiting for. You can check its “home page” at isilanes.org.

Why did I do it? Well, one of the wonderful tools GNU/Linux provides to rip CDs is KAudioCreator, which is very neat. However, it has some shortcomings I wanted to overcome (again, how pretentious!):

1. It’s slow. It rips the CD to WAV and encodes the ripped WAVs to Ogg in parallel, while rip2ogg.py does both things sequentially. Yet rip2ogg.py is 40% faster! I have ripped a whole CD in 14 minutes with KAC, and in 10 minutes with r2o.
2. You can not have arbitrary character substitution, just one, and the interface for that is horrible. For example, with KAC it’s very simple to substitute every blank in the track name with an underscore. BUT I have found no way to provide KAC with two lists, so that it substitutes every character in the first list with the corresponding character(s) in the second list.
3. You can change the track title to get a “nice” filename for the Ogg, but the change is also reflected in the “track tile” tag. You can not tell KAC to substitute a “ñ” in the title for a “n” in the filename, but to keep the “ñ” in the “tag title” tag.
4. KAC is not able to rip all CDs. It sometimes chokes on DRM‘d CDs, and copes horribly with scratched surfaces. In contrast, the programs rip2ogg.py uses to rip have never failed for me. More than once command-line was my only way of ripping some rogue CDs. KAC simply couldn’t.

In the end, it all boils down to be able to control what the ripper is doing. To do so, I decided to make this simple script.

Obviously it is FLOSS (GPLv2), so use, modify and redistribute to your heart’s content!