I used to use creavtives playcenter to rip all my cd's to mp3 (because it was fast! less than a minute per song)

but i just tried to find it again on cratives site and, what a f**ing mission.

and i dont really want to have to use windows anyway!

so could someone please tell me which is the best linux based mp3 ripper? (with cddb support)

I have had a look at freshmeat and there are a few, but im not too sure which to pick

your help will be much appreciated

cheers

I like grip using lame for encoding (to ogg rather than mp3).

It may not be the fastest, but it will rip things cleanly or else with cdparanoia.

I was amazed at the qualtiy of things I could get in Linux after ripping in windows and getting all that skipping stuff. Clean as a whistle in Linux (one track took 38 minutes to rip, though) and that is what I want.

you can easily disable the paranoia and extra paranoia by checking the options in grip, or passing -X -Y and -Z to cdparanoia. speeds things up no end if you have faith in your disc.

cheers guys!! i think i will go with grip then

You know what I've been using lately? Konqueror. This browser does all kinds of stupid tricks. Put the audio cd in your drive, then type 'audiocd:/' in the location bar. It will give you some virtual 'directories' where the songs are titled by name, artist and whatnot, plus you can rip as mp3, ogg, or if you're old-school, wav.

You just decend into say, the ogg directory, it gives you an approximate filesize (note approximate, almost all files I have ripped are much smaller than these figures), you just select the tracks you want, and copy them somewhere else. It rips and encodes them on the fly. Doesn't take long, and yeah, it's cddb enabled.

bulliver, I really, really hate you! I spent all day yesterday getting 'ripper' to work so I could copy my cd's to my hard drive and was just about to download a program to convert them to Ogg. Then I stumble over your easier than pie solution after all that frustration.
Thanks

Just download the Ogg/Vorbis tools and libs and get .ogg files! Better than .mp3 'cause it's open source.

no....it's just better. period.

I got audiocd:// or whatever working on mandrake but when I migrated to gentoo it doesn't seem to work, oh well. Literally at the moment I'm using ripperX.

ogg?? better than mp3? whats the difference between them? ie: filesize, quality, and anything else you can think of?

can you conver mp3 files to ogg?

I think you can convert mp3 to ogg with a program called Cantus. I seen it in a link over at www.linuxjunior.org under software issues.

Nah, Cantus is used to edit the tags and that is it. But it works GREAT!

You can find a script to convert them called mp32ogg however, I don't like the quality and do not recommend using it.

Oggs are much better for the size. An ogg can produce superior quality sound at a smaller filesize/bitrate than mp3.

The only downfall, and reason I use mp3 is my in dash MP3 player will not play oggs I've emailed my stereo Manufacterer (Kenwood) several times asking for support to be added. So far it seems to have done a bit of good, but not for my model. Hopefully there'll be a firmware upgrade at some point.

Cool

I tried the audiocd:/ thing in Red Hat and it says "audiocd:/// is not a valid location. Please check the spelling and try again." Maybe I have to mount the cd first?

Nah, it's an audioCD, you normally don't mount those (however I've never given this audiocd:/ thing a try, so maybe there's something else to it). You can use grip to do mp3's or ogg's, and I prefer it for it's speed, and for it's ease of use and well documentation

Cool

The Red Hat 8.0 release doesn't include an mp3 encoder, do you think I should use ogg instead? Where can I get an mp3 encoder for the grip prog?