I feel a bit silly posting a thread about this, but anyway...

I've been using KAudioCreator to rip CDs to mp3s up to this point and that has served me fairly well, except for the fact that it chokes on certain CDs at the same point without spitting out any error message. It's incredibly frustrating, so I'd like to know if there are any alternatives you can recommend.

I'm looking for something that works as easily as what I've been using up until now because I have several hundred CDs to rip (I stupidly wiped my other HD without backing my MP3s up first). It would be ideal if it supported CDDB lookups as well.

Any recommendations?

http://nostatic.org/grip/ maybe

I"m using Slackware, it doesn't come with Gnome (grip requires Gnome). Thanks for the suggestion anyway!

You don't need a complete Gnome install to use grip. I use it in XFce, for instance. It should pull in the required gnome libraries, but not all of it.

Robin

If you like a gui for this sort of task have a look at soundkonverter.
It is a kde application so should pull down less dependencies.
It will perform cddb look-ups,and is intuitive to use.
Or you could just use Lame from the command line.
The choice is yours....

Regards.
The trooper.

Thanks, though it seems to stall at the same point KAudioCreator does with the CD I used to test it. I'm not sure what's going on here, I'll have to look into it.

Thank you everyone for your help!

Nearly every CD ripper out there uses the same cdparanoia program to do the actual ripping. So chances are your problem is with that. cdparanoia sometimes has a difficult time on disks that have been scratched, suffer bitrot, or otherwise have difficult-to-read areas, especially with the default settings most rippers use.

What I usually do in these cases is to open up a shell and use cdparanoia directly, adding the -z option so that it keeps trying forever. Usually it can eventually get a clean rip, but it sometimes has to work for quite a while before it does. Don't generally try disabling the "paranoia" options. It will appear to rip beautifully, but the output will be corrupted.

If cdparanoia doesn't work, you can try cdda2wav/icedax instead. It might succeed where cdparanoia fails. I believe it also has cddb ability built in.

You might also try the disk on a different system with a different make of cd reader. Some hardware can read bad disks better than others.

Once you have the tracks ripped to .wav, you can use lame, kaudiocreator, or whatever to encode them to mp3.

EDIT: seems I posted late, wizardhat & David already posted what I was going to say.. Sorry.

soundjuicer

I have a lot of CDs and I spent a long time converting them all to MP3s. I haven't found anything better or more flexible than dbPowerAmp suite. It's free but it runs on that horrible platform that everybody hates. I hate it too. It's one of the few times I ever start up a Windows box anymore.

Meh, in windows there is nothing better than foobar (for me) (and you can use discogs with it which are way better than cddb). And I don't suggest converting to mp3 even at vbr 192 (take at least 256), cause the audio loss is heard easily. Or you can use ogg or aac, which are better than mp3. If you want free and lossless, take a look at flac.

K3B is a good choice. I'm not sure about the ease to install it on Slackware. I haven't used Slackware for a long period of time.

I gave cdparanoia a shot and it seemed to work, though it did detect (and fix) a few errors in the same spots where KAudioCreator and soundKonverter stalled. I'll have to look into how to use lame to encode them all but thanks for pointing me on the right track!

ripperx

(although it's just a front end for cdparanoia)

I generally use cdda2wav and lame myself. Although with larger and cheaper HDDs these days, I'm tending to just keep the WAV now.

cdda2wav -D /dev/cdrom --max --channels 2 --stereo --bulk -t 1+14 -O wav TRACK

Which leaves you with WAVs and INFs. One quirk is making sure that the last track number doesn't exceed the number of tracks on the disc.

Well if you're going to go lossless, you might as well encode to flac instead. You get up to 40% smaller files and the benefit of metadata tags as well. Unless you're using a really old system that can't handle the decoding load you've got little to lose and a lot to gain.