Hello, all! I'm new here, but I'll get right to the point. I'm turning this PC into a dedicated jukebox. I would like to use linux as the OS, but I haven't found any programs that can directly encode songs from the CD to a compressed format (.ogg, .mp3, etc. etc.) I can rip the songs to a .wav then encode the file but it takes a very long time; I don't know exactly how long because I've canceled every encoding I've tried so far.. but I can safely say that it takes longer to encode the songs than to actually listen to them from the CD. This isn't really acceptable, because I don't feel like spending >300 hours of my time encoding my CD collection to my HDD's.

I've experimented this with Windows Media Player (on Win98) and it takes about 10 minutes per CD to encode the music to the .wma file. This proves to me that the technology is out there to efficiently encode music directly from the CD. However, I'm still at a loss when it comes to linux because I haven't found any programs that can do what I'm looking for. Everything I've run across needs to convert the file to a .wav, then encode the file to whichever format I specify. This takes a very long time. I'm not looking for an exact match in efficiency with a linux program compared to the Windows Media Player (I'm willing to sacrifice a few minutes per CD to use linux... but I'm not willing to spend over an hour of encoding per CD)

Does anyone know any programs that can do what I'm looking for? To sum it all up, I just want to spend about 15 minutes per CD to encode my 200 disk CD collection on my 12GB HDD space.

Thanks for reading,
LittleJohn

in case it helps......
System Info:
CPU: Pentium II 450MHz
RAM: 128MB
CD-ROM: NEC 32X
HDD: 1-Samsung 4GB, 2-Fujitsu 8GB
OS: Red Hat Linux 9

ripperX does that

Thank you... I installed ripperX, but yet I'm still in a bind. For a 2 minute 48 second song it took me 5 minutes and 47 seconds to encode it to a .ogg file. This is about an %207 compression/time ratio. It's just not acceptable when I know I can get a %20 compression/time ratio from Windows Media Player.

Thanks,
LittleJohn

P.S. I really dislike windows... in fact I hate it... which is why I'm going through such great lengths to find an encoder for Linux. But time, in this case, is ultimately more important.. I just need something to rip+encode CD's in a timely manner. I'm not going to do any programming (the reason I started using Linux), and system security isn't that big of a deal on my jukebox... so Linux isn't a necessity.. I would just like to use it to avoid using a M$ product. But thank you all that read for listening!!

But when you get a 20% compression/time ration file from WMP, what type of file did it encode? Is the quality as good as an .ogg file ripped with ripperX?

Try L.A.M.E. and see if it rips any faster. If I'm not mistaken, WMP rips them to .wma files, and I'm told the quality is not as good as an .ogg or .mp3 file ripped directly from the CD. I don't know, though. I do know that .wma files I had left from WMP, that I ripped from .wma to .mp3 didn't sound good at all.

What is your motivation to avoid using a M$ product? If it's strong enough, spend some time searching the LQ Forums, and www.google.com/linux and I think you might find the answer.

LittleJohn,

See this thread -> http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hlight=rip+mp3