why can't I rip in WMA format?

newbiesforever · 08-09-2008, 10:59 PM

For ripping music tracks, I've had grip, and I just discovered Sound Juicer CD Extractor. Why can't they rip in WMA file format? WMA is the one that I know plays on every CD player I've used, and I'd rather not worry about whether other formats (such as OGG) will play.

elliott678 · 08-09-2008, 11:04 PM

WMA = Windows Media Audio, that should be enough to tell you why you can't encode them in Linux, it is a proprietary Microsoft format. Also, very few CD players can play WMA files.

jomen · 08-10-2008, 02:37 AM

Most of these players will play mp3 too if they can play wma - players which can play ogg too are not so common.
Why cant you rip to wma (easily)? - see elliott678's answer.
Encoding to mp3 can be done with grip and sound-juicer without a problem - and with many other tools too.
Encoding to wma can be done too AFAIK - I just don't now any easy to use graphical frontends to do this.
Two programs I know of could be used: mencoder (part of mplayer) and ffmpeg.
You would use the command-line to do that - search for these terms and you will find examples.

newbiesforever · 08-10-2008, 11:52 AM

Ah. I wasn't considering the W. Well, when I rip a CD and then burn the tracks in Windows, they're WMA. So if they end up on the CD as something other than WMA, I have no idea what.

b0uncer · 08-10-2008, 12:32 PM

If you write an audio cd (a cd with audio tracks, not a data cd with audio data files), the tracks placed on that disc are not in wma/mp3/ogg/wav format, but they are instead decoded from whatever format the original files are to non-compressed audio that is then placed on the disc as tracks. If you rip a cd to wma files (or any other compressed format such as mp3), you lose some sound quality (and get a file size about 1/10 of what it would be without that compression), and if you then write those files into a (regular) audio cd, you don't get any quality back - that is, the second cd has worse sound quality than the first. To get around this problem, clone the original audio cd and do not compress the audio during the process.

newbiesforever · 08-11-2008, 01:26 AM

Clone the original? Do I need K3B for that?

jomen · 08-11-2008, 02:28 AM

No - you can use cdda2wav + cdrecord for example.
slightly adapted examples as they are given in the manual of cdrecord (man cdrecord):

Code:

To copy an audio CD in the most accurate way, first run

           cdda2wav dev=/dev/hdc -vall cddb=0 -B -Owav

       and then run

           cdrecord dev=/dev/hdc -v -dao -useinfo -text  *.wav

       This  will  try  to  copy  track  indices and to read CD-Text information from disk.  If there is no CD-Text
       information, cdda2wav will try to get the information from freedb.org instead.

       To copy an audio CD from a pipe (without intermediate files), first run

           cdda2wav dev=/dev/hdc -vall cddb=0 -info-only

       and then run

           cdda2wav dev=1,0 -no-infofile -B -Oraw - | \
           cdrecord dev=2,0 -v -dao -audio -useinfo -text *.inf

       This will get all information (including track size info) from the *.inf files and then read the audio  data
       from stdin.

The last example is not customized and uses one drive to read and one to write to.