I'm trying to take all my old CD's and mp3 them so I have it all digitally. Any suggestions on the best app for that? I'm using Linux mint if that matters.
But my real question, I have a lot of CD's I made of random songs that have no artist, title or album info, they're all "unknown". Any apps out there that can fill in that info automatically?

I use abcde for ripping my CDs. I have found no better.

As far as your second question, there is none that I am aware of that can fill in unknown info, except for mass produced CDs as those are likely to be in databases such as FreeDB. However custom made CDs you may just be out of luck.

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abcde, as mentioned, is good. So is soundjuicer. However, that only looks up known CDs and not individual songs. If you've made your own compilations, that will have to be hand-entered.

About the format, you might reconsider the MP3 and choose Ogg or, better, an archival format like FLAC. FLAC is lossless, so you retain the original sound quality. MP3 throws a way a lot of the data in order to make the file smaller. You can really hear the difference if you've set high compression or done transcoding from MP3 one or more times. To me it sounds like the music is being played though a garden hose. So I've gone with FLAC, which also leaves me the option of producing Ogg or MP3 also, as long as I keep the 'original' FLAC files.

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Quod Libet player has a plugin to: Acoustic Fingerprint Lookup "Looks up song metadata through acoustic fingerprinting." Think it uses MusicBrainz like the Picard app?

https://quodlibet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
https://picard.musicbrainz.org/

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Thanks guys.
How much more space does FLAC take compared to a MP3?
I'll check out that Acoustic Fingerprint thing, sounds like that may be the only hope for my custom mix CDs i made way back when

to address the unknown files

I wrote (have) a script to take the file name then add that to the meta data using exiftool and id3v2. then single handled adding what genre they were one folder at a time. then created a folder to put them in categorizing them album - artist etc. among other things I was doing with my mp3. (resampling, sorting, etc.)

I found a great Windows based app that will not work in Linux, the closest thing to it, that is still a far cry from what that windows app can do. That windows app actually look them up on the internet than added tag info.

this other one for Linux is called easy tag.
https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/EasyTAG/Screenshots

it didn't meet my needs. that is why I ended up writing a script to do what I needed instead. you're welcome to it if you think it will help.
But that is just for tagging not ripping. Post production tagging I think it'd be called.


To answer the FLAC Question.
say you got a flac file it is 10MB
the mp3 can be taken down to about half that size (192k) or smaller depending on the BIT RATE you set it to.

I got about 1TB of mp3's I am going through right now as I write this, putting them all on one HDD than needing to get rid of the dupicates. This is what is called Linux Fun

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FLAC takes a bit more space. It's hard to say, it depends on the compression you use with the MP3s and the nature of the sounds you are compressing. Just picking one, the Beethoven/Symphony No. 9 in D minor op. 125 «Choral», Allegro ma non troppo un poco maestoso takes up 65M as FLAC here. The same piece takes 16M as 128Kbps MP3. However, I prefer to keep the CD-quality FLAC around. For me it is worth the space it takes and since the sound is CD-quality I won't have to invest in re-ripping from CD if I decide to work with or transcode the files later.

As mentioned a lot of data is thrown out to make the MP3 file that small and if you use MP3, you must keep your old CDs handy and re-rip from them when you need another format or a different compression rate. MP3 is a terminal format for audio. You can play MP3, but you cannot work with it or transcode it without further unacceptable loss of quality. If you try to recompress MP3 or transcode it to another format, the process will throw out even more data, further distorting the sound.

If you play it on good equipment you will hear the difference. At high compression rates MP3 is garbage, at low compression rates it is still not good. If you want a lossy format, choose Ogg Vorbis, since files of the same size sound better than MP3. I had the misfortune to listen to highly compressed MP3s at a party some years ago and the sound was so bad people, especially me, were quite angry given the other options that had been available and advised.

It's your choice of course but I really very strongly recommend against MP3 and say again Ogg Vorbis if you must have lossy or FLAC if you can.

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I just found this one. you might want to take a look at it, it might take a sound bite and look it up on the net then add your meta data. I myself am going to give this one a try. as long as this is still good information on it.

https://picard.musicbrainz.org/

This will be a post production after you rip your files that are unknown. To try to and hopefully get the information you need added to them.

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Another eg: https://support.google.com/googlepla.../2913276?hl=en

I'd use Puddletag to retag them. It can do database lookups from the filenames.

that was the one I was talking about for Windows Mp3Tag. I never found an alternative for it in Linux. Until now. thanks! now I got to install that one too. I'll be checking it out as soon as all of my mp3 are done migrating to one hdd.

I don't know what happened to the @OP in this matter, but I just found some useful apps for my mp3's.

Thanks guys. Unfortunately all my file names on the songs when I rip them are generic stuff like unknown - track 1, so it will have to figure it out based on the actual audio, so i can't just script it to pull apart the file name. Sounds like picard may be my only hope.
Definitely going to go FLAC though, as I want it to be top quality when played.

Actually it was called TagScanner that I had for windows that I have not found anything close to it in Linux in what it can do. Pretty much everything.