I am looking for a good program to rip the huge pile of CD's sitting by my desk to mp3. I am currently running the stable version of Debian.

It would also be nice to have a gui mp3 player. I've been using music123.

Well - since I like to keep my desktop organized (and not use programs oriented for other desktops), you have the following choices:

* = What I use/recommend above the rest

GNOME:
RIPPER Grip
RIPPER SoundJuicer *
PLAYER Rhythmbox *
PLAYER Exaile
PLAYER Banshee

KDE:
RIPPER KAudioCreator *
PLAYER Amarok *

I'm sorry for short-changing the KDE list, but I use Gnome primarily. When I did use KDE, those were the only two I ever stumbled across, and cared to use.

Please note, that if you want to encode the ripped CD tracks (and not have them just stay as monsterous .wav files), you will need Lame installed too. Most of these programs default to using .ogg files, but I've never been a big fan of Ogg-Vorbis audio files - MP3s have every bit as good quality, are more widely used, and have a better compression scheme.

Hi Fuzcat,

There are loads of programmes you can use to do this. My personal favourite is Kaudiocreater because it's very simple and fast. This will rip your CDs into Ogg Vorbis format, which is actually better than MP3 since it compresses more and is slightly less lossy. As for a gui MP3 player, the one that really stands out from the crowd at the moment is Amarok, which is intuitive yet comprehensive. Simply right click the folder you want to open and choose to play it with Amarok. Both these packages come with KDE, not with Gnome, but you can install them and use them on either environment. Once installed, you will have the option of ripping a CD you put in the drive with Kaudiocreater or playing it with Amarok.
Oh, and don't forget, if you want to read MP3 files, you will have to download and install the Win32 package, also available in Synaptic.

Best of luck

James

To read MP3s, you need to have libmp3lame installed.

I stand corrected. Win32 is a video codec package. However, I don't have libMP3lame on my computer, just the basic Lame, and I have no trouble reading mp3s.

Either works.
libmp3lame is for providing application support to handle MP3s - it's essentially the same package as lame, just without the lame binary.

Thanks for the suggestions. I do run KDE. My weekend starts tomorrow, so I'll see about checking them out then.

Download and install Real Player 10 and you will not have problems !

Grip for me.

You have to tell it how to encode reasonably though. That would be in vbr-new

My settings in Config - Encode - Encoder are:

Encoder: lame
...
Encoder command-line: -V 3 --vbr-new %w %m
...

The number behind V sets the quality. 1 or 0 (I forgot) being the best. 9 being the worst/smallest. Just don't encode in constant bitrate CBR. Way too many people encode in (CBR). That's another reason why ogg really is the better option if you have an mp3 player that can play it. oggenc has reasonable default options.