Ripping MP3's with ID3 tags...
 

Hello everybody,

I'm having some trouble out here, and scouring the internet has done me no good, though that does seem strange to me given the problem...

What I'm trying to do is rip a CD to my computer, and encode it in MP3 format. With the lame encoder at the heart of the project, I've tried almost everything to get it working:

Grip and KAudioCreator have the same problem when I run them. They get to the end of a track, and hang at about 99% done. I have a similiar Grip setup on my Ubuntu laptop, and it works fine, so that's a bit strange...

The other program I've tried is Sound Juicer, which works pretty well. I can create decent MP3's using the following Gstreamer Pipeline:
audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lame name=enc vbr=0 bitrate=192
However, that doesn't create ID3 tags, so my files are kind of nameless.

Anybody out there have any ideas as to how to fix Grip and KAudioCreator or to add ID3 tags to the files using Sound Juicer?

Please please, if you have any ideas, I'd much appreciate them, as I have been working on this problem for days now (in comparison, setting up RAID1 for the first time took me two hours or so to figure out).

Any help...ideas? Please?

All quiet on the western front,

-mike

do you have id3lib installed?

Just tried to install it - no luck. Any other ideas?

Grip should definitely do it. Does it list the song names, then not write the id3 tags?

go to id3lib's (sourceforge.net hosted) website and download the sourcecode and compile it yourself if your distro does not have it...

Grip knows the track names, and I'm pretty sure I have id3lib already installed (I'm assuming it comes as a dependancy for Grip?).

I'm sure grip would work...if it worked...like I said before though, both it and KAudioCreator hang at 99% done with the track. Any help on getting it to work would solve the problem.

Also, for what it's worth, I'm running Fedore Core 5 (FC5)

Thanks again for all the help though, I feel like we're making progress.

Still Working On it...
 

Ok. I haven't worked on this in a while, but I have tried some new techniques, and perhaps there are some new ideas on this problem, as I'm losing my wit trying to figure it out.

I checked to make sure that I have id3lib installed. I do. I browsed through the packages in yum that contain mp3, and tried another couple things:
- I installed gstreamer08-plugins-extra-audio because it said it worked with lame...didn't change anything I could tell...
- I installed banshee. It works, and can actually rip a song to mp3. However, it too has problems. For one, when the ripped song is opened in amarok, the program crashes if you right click on the song (which is essential for checking the id3 info). For two, the id3 info is all screwy in amarok. It seems ok in Banshee though..

Any help out there in Linux land? I'm losing my will to rip.

Under Grip if you have the ID3 package installed, you can select Under "Config" and then "ID3" that grip should add the ID3 Tags to your ripped songs...you can even tell it to only do this for .mp3 (Default)

Now if you are ripping to .ogg which is the default I beleive then it will not work.

Check your settings.

Also this works fine for me and I used the standard distro RPM's from extras and Livna.

Cheers

Here the proof (freshly ripped off the only CD I had Lying around):
Comment is mine in the TAG

Right...but like I said before...grip doesn't work. It hangs at 99%. If we can fix that, we can pack our bags and go on vacation. Until that mystery is solved, we're beat as far as I can tell.

I know this might sound stupid but...have you tried reinstalling?

All I did was install grip with all its dependencies then I installed lame and id3lib.
And tada! it works. :)

What repositories have you got setup?

Well, no, I hadn't tried that because I was still of the persuasion that I could fix it without giving up altogether...

A moment ago though, I took your suggestion, and did the following:
yum -y remove lame id3lib grip

That's all well and fine, but it also thought it would remove (and I didn't know how to stop it) these programs:
amarok-extras-nonfree
ffmpeg
gstreamer-plugins-ugly
gstreamer08-plugins-extra-audio
mplayer
mplayerplug-in
mplayer-fonts
xine
xine-lib

Kind of a pain, but I let them all go, and then rebooted (for good measure). Reinstalled all of the above, and it pretty much works. Only thing that doesn't work is that it still takes FOREVER at the end of songs (like multiple minutes to do the last couple percent of a file). Otherwise, it encodes correctly, and does id3tags fine. I believe we have a solution (of sorts).

Thanks for the help, and I'll report back if further problems evolve.

When does it take for ever? When its ripping or when its encoding?

Glad its working now at least :)

It takes forver as it nears the end of the ripping of the track. It does about 98% of a song in a minute or so, and then takes several minutes to do the last 2%...it's so slow, it's hard to tell if it has crashed.

The disc is not spinning (loudly at least) during this, so it's as if it's waiting for something from the software to happen.

I tried to do a whole disc after posting last night, but it stopped altogether after 98% of the eight track.

Suggestions?

Does this happen with the same disk or are these different disks?

Try and open a terminal and do a Then when you rip something try and see if there are read errors or something showing up.

Also try and start grip from the console and see if it is spitting out any errors when this happens.
Might help you narrow the problem down.

Cheers

I'm gonna try something about CD ripping: so, I have wine installed, and I'm gonna try to make a little program like AudioGrabber to recognize DMA data transferring for CD-DVD-rom. If I succeed, I'll let you know;)

OK...now this is getting interesting...

First of all, yes this does happen with all discs I've put in there...unfortunately...

Second of all, I'm not sure what you have in mind with the solution involving Wine, but I'm pretty sure it's not going to be a solution for me. I've yet to install Wine, and it just seems kind of wrong to me to do so...I guess keep me posted though...

Now, I've figured out a couple of things...first of all, I remember Ubuntu having weird permission issues every now and then back when I was running it, so I decided to run Grip as root. Seemed to go a lot faster...it's actually ripping as I type, though it seems to have the same problems with that last 1.5% of a track.

When I started grip in xterm, I did have one error message, but it looks benign:
You be the judge on that. As for the tail -f /var/log/messages, I've got to say that's one of the more useful tricks I've learned in a while. And yes, it's pumping out one heck of a lot of stuff when I run this. I put the stuff that came up today online for ya'all, cause it's long. Click here for a copy of /var/log/messages

This make any sense to anybody?

Thanks again for all the help. Progress can be tough...

Ok....first of all, acting with wine sucks! It is slowing down everything, and removes, sometimes, the bootloader. So I removed wine... Now, about cd-ripping: every ripping program is working like: read track->analize->merge tag->encode->write to location(save). If the ripping program hungs in one of second to final step, there is a possible driver that is a bit conflicting with some others. The "analize" and "encode" section use in allmost cases the sound card. In my case, i found the same error messages when I was use via sound library...and I have ALC850 instead... after upgrading the kernel, drivers, and programs, Grip started with 1'st cd to work well, and never generated errors;) It was a moment of triumf for me, but now I think I just was lucky. If I'm wrong, please tell me!

If its working its working I think...as long as there are no errors any more it might just habe been an issue with the sound kernel module.

What also makes a big difference during rippinga nd encoding is the encoder that u use. I use LAME and it has been very good for me. I find it seems to work the fastest and with very good results.

Happy its working now.

Cheers

Yeah, I pretty much give up. I don't know how to upgrade the kernel, and besides, I have a fairly recent version...hardware support - Linux's achilies heel.

If anybody reading this someday has a theory for me, let me know. Until then, I'm going to...

...be using my other computer with an OS that understands its hardware...Ubuntu.

I'm trying to use Sound Juicer or Grip, but both do the same thing to me. I install all the libraries mentioned above and everytime I try to rip a cd it comes up as an .ogg file in the directory where it's ripped to. I don't understand why it does that even after I read through the manuals and put in the string to let it know how to rip as .mp3

Reading through this I'm either to tired or dumb to fully comprehend it all. So could anyone through it into a nutshell quickly on how to get anything to rip as .mp3 format without takeing 30min per cd?

Yes lame and other libs are installed.

Thanks.

mlissner, have you got SELinux enabled?
If you have try disabling it.

Click -> System -> Administration -> Security level and Firewall.
Select the SELinux Tab -> Change SELinux Setting to Disabled.

Reboot.

- or -
on the command line
should show you if its enabled or not. (permissive or enabled)

Cheers

I do have selinux enabled, but I'm not sure that I want to disable it. I did some reading up on it, and it seems like a good thing for my computer (despite the fact that it slows it down). I'm planning on soon making this computer a server, so when that day comes, I'm going to want selinux.

You really think that's it?

Neo_granas - if you contact me via AIM or personal email, we can try to sort this out one on one and post back. I'm not sure of your setup without you providing more details.

I'm not sure but the errors in your dmessage suggest a security problem.

Just give it a try. You can turn it back on again if it does not help.

I find that SELinux interfears with a lot of services...

Cheers