Lost ability to "rip" music files from CD

I'm running a regularly updated 16.04. I have a very large collection of music CDs, and regularly "RIP" groups of them as FLAC files and copy them to a thumb drive for playing elsewhere.

Now when I insert a CD and choose "Asunder CD Ripper", nothing happens; I can see the contents in Nautilus, and can copy or even play the files, so I can only assume that I inadvertently fat-fingered something or another along the way. I update the collection every few weeks, so I'm not sure exactly when things changed.

To check the hardware, I booted into the old 14.04 on the same machine, and Asunder works fine there, for what that's worth.

The file /dev/cdrom is a link to /dev/sr0; clicking on either of those in Nautilus informs me that 'There is no application installed for “block device” files.' I seem to recall that's normal.

Does anyone have any idea what I may have done or - more importantly - how I can restore the ability to use Asunder?

Thanks in advance.

Have you tried running asunder from the command line?

Wow - thanks for the quick response.

I wrote that in a hurry, and used the really uninformative "nothing happens." Actually, asunder does indeed display itself; what I should have said is: the asunder window comes up, but unlike its usual behavior, it does not immediately hop on the internet to load all the track names and such things. Nor does it attempt to do so when I explicitly click the button to do so. I rechecked the defaults and Asunder is still set to automatically load the metadata for the CD.

I hope this makes the issue more clear, but if there are other obvious things I left out, please let me know. (and, yes, I did try more than one CD, a reboot, and so forth).

Thanks again.

If you have the repository version of asunder installed, you could try reinstalling it:

sudo apt-get --reinstall install asunder

Thanks.

Reinstalled, but symptoms remained the same.

Rebooted, and symptoms still remained the same.

Used synaptic to "completely remove (including configuration files)".

Used synaptic again to "install" and try again.

Symptoms remained the same, although I'm very suspicious that any configuration file(s) was/were removed, since when I checked in "preferences", my oddly named "destination folder" (which is "~/Music/RIPS") was still listed.

Sigh ... (but thanks anyway...)

There are two types of configuration files - application (my terminology, essentially user-agnostic) and personal. When you purge a package it removes the former but not the latter. It's a bugbear of mine, but that's just the way it works.

Your personal config files should be in ~/.asunder - if you want a completely fresh install then delete (or rename) that directory and then reinstall.

Open Asunder. Open Preferences > Advanced
Make sure "Get disc info from the internet" is checked.
Set it to: freedb.freedb.org
If that does not work, try: freedb.videolan.org

i do seem to remember that asunder has problems getting track info from the default location, but that shouldn't stop it from ripping.

anyhow, i think the advice in post #6 is good, and if that still doesn't work please start asunder from a terminal and show us the output.

aside, i recently started using abcde because it works better for me, esp. when the cds are scratched badly.
that said, you have tried with other cds? cleaned the drive etc?

Grip is another to try if Asunder is still causing you problems.

Hi:

I haven't been ignoring everyone - just distracted by life.

hydrurga: I did remove ALL config files, and reinstalled again. There was no difference I could tell.

TxLonghorn: This was not the issue; the internet location was (and is) set properly. Actually, what usually happened in the past is that the disc was read, giving a listing like "track 1," "track 2" and so forth, and then all those labels were quickly updated as the data came back from CDDB. With this most recent problem, the drive never seems to read the CD at all, and the "track 1," "track 2," etc. never appears. This seems to indicate that Asunder can't see or read the disk, although Nautilus doesn't have any problems. The operating system, however, recognizes that a disk was inserted and pops up the "what to do?" dialog.

ondoho: when I run asunder from the command line, it pops up the GUI and still acts as described above. When I exit the GUI the prompt reappears with no messages of any kind whatever. So apparently there are no missing libraries or anything like that.

ondoho: Yes, I've tried with a variety of different CDs from different labels, etc. I've been a record, tape, and CD collector since the 60s, and don't do scratches; they would cause me great pain.

ondoho and fatmac: thanks for the suggested alternatives; I'll try them as soon as I get a little time, which (sadly) may not be for a while.

all: Given that nautilus (as well as nemo) can copy and/or play/read the tracks, and asunder still acts like there's nothing in the drive, is there any sort of failure that would cause that?

When I run lsblk, I get the following:
$ lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
fd0 2:0 1 4K 0 disk
sda 8:0 0 111.8G 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 31.3G 0 part
├─sda2 8:2 0 31.3G 0 part
└─sda3 8:3 0 31.3G 0 part /
sdb 8:16 0 931.5G 0 disk
├─sdb1 8:17 0 23.4G 0 part
├─sdb2 8:18 0 1K 0 part
├─sdb5 8:21 0 85.7G 0 part /mnt/Development
├─sdb6 8:22 0 98.6G 0 part /home/xxMexx/Documents
├─sdb7 8:23 0 88.7G 0 part /mnt/Genealogy
├─sdb8 8:24 0 76.9G 0 part /home/xxMe/Pictures
├─sdb9 8:25 0 49.2G 0 part /home/xxMe/Music
├─sdb10 8:26 0 165G 0 part /home/xxMe/Videos
└─sdb11 8:27 0 213.5G 0 part /mnt/Backup-c
sdc 8:32 0 931.5G 0 disk
├─sdc1 8:33 0 1K 0 part
├─sdc2 8:34 0 9.8G 0 part [SWAP]
├─sdc5 8:37 0 77.8G 0 part /mnt/Virtuals
├─sdc6 8:38 0 117.2G 0 part /mnt/Library
├─sdc7 8:39 0 489.4G 0 part /mnt/Backup-b
├─sdc8 8:40 0 15.4G 0 part /mnt/Financials
├─sdc9 8:41 0 21.5G 0 part /mnt/Archive
└─sdc10 8:42 0 20.5G 0 part
sr0 11:0 1 1024M 0 rom
sr1 11:1 1 1024M 0 rom
loop0 7:0 0 78.3M 0 loop /snap/core/1441
loop1 7:1 0 79.5M 0 loop /snap/core/1689
loop2 7:2 0 78.4M 0 loop /snap/core/1577

This output is the same regardless of whether a CD has been inserted or not; if the CD is a block device (and I don't know if it is or not), that seems odd.

But thanks all for your suggestions.

Can you actually play a CD using a media player?

As it happens, I hadn't actually checked that (don't ever get old; you end up getting too narrowly focused and really do start overlooking the obvious!).

The answer is "yes." When I inserted a CD and selected RhythmBox (Ubuntu's default) instead of Asunder at the "What do you want to do?" prompt, it immediately loaded and retrieved the track info.

To insure that the track info had not already been stored, I shut down RhythmBox, disconnected from the internet (shut down my Wi-Fi) and inserted another CD that I had never played on the computer (or ripped) before. I received a message that MusicBrainz could not be accessed due to the missing internet connection. I restarted the Wi-Fi, waited for the connection to show up, and pressed "Try again." The track info was all loaded immediately.

Checking the menus, I was unable to locate anywhere that gave a choice of other services (e.g. CDDB, freedb, etc), so I'm not sure what that tells me about my issue with Asunder, but ...

I then noticed that RhythmBox also has the capability to "Extract" the tracks, and has a choice of formats (my preference is flac), so I tried that; after ejecting the CD, I clicked on a "ripped" track and it began to play - not a comprehensive test, but good enough given the circumstances I suspect). In my defense, I don't think it ever occurred to me that RhythmBox wasn't just a "player."

So then I inserted another newly issued CD that I had just received from Amazon, and selected Asunder as my choice; once again, the tracks were not loaded as before - so the problem hadn't magically disappeared (I've been using computers since the mid-60s and have never quite trusted them - things are definitely much better now: the only "music" we played back then was a rather rhythmic - albeit monotonic - version of Jingle Bells played by the teletype machine's bell, so I shouldn't complain).

So: RhythmBox will certainly serve my purposes, although Asunder just "does it" without the several steps RhythmBox requires, so I'd still like to get to the bottom of why things changed: did I unload something inadvertently? did Canonical update something erroneously?

Again, thanks to everyone for the comments, hints and suggestions. I'd still like to figure out what happened just for my own amusement and edification, so let me know if there are other things to investigate or questions to answer...