What sort of linux tools are people using to import music?

Recommendations??

I've been handed a stack of severly scratched up redbook CDs, and need to recover them.

Years ago when ripping CDs, Exact Audio Copy ("EAC") was the best ripper around because it had some great features for handling scratched up discs. It not only had the jitter correction, but would oversample every read a few times and then when reads were inconsistent it would oversample 30 times (or whatever the user specified) to try to get the correct bits. If the results of all the oversampling were still random, it supposedly was able to use some type of interpolation algorithm to use before / after information to compose a reasonable "filler." I think EAC is a Windows only tool, and was wondering if there's anything comparable for linux.

cdparanoia seems to be the most popular, but I'm not sure that it does the thorough oversampling that EAC does, and it seems to be grossly out of date. The last piece of documentation for it is dated four years ago, and it was in anticipation of a version that does not seem to exist yet. I'm also irritated that cdparanoia gives no way to specify the device I want ripped. With 8 CDROM devices, how do I tell cdparanoia which drive to read from?

Huh. Looks like you're right. But it's what I use.

As far as device:

cdparanoia -d <dev>

But why do you have *eight* CD drives?

I feel silly.. I think when I read the manpage (with speed reading engaged), I saw the --force... and skipped it, figuring it would not be something that would require "force".
I saw a scsi cdrom tower at an auction and figured what the heck.. the case alone is worth $40, so I'll bid $20 on the whole thing, figuring I'll find a use for it later. Two of the drives were Plextor burners, which was also enticing at the time.

My plan now is to use it to import my library of audio CDs. It should be a real time saver to fill the box up, and have a script that goes to town on a batch ripping job. I'm also going to try to recover a friends library of nearly destroyed audio CDs -- which will probably take a couple hours per CD. I really need a good ripping tool that will oversample 25 times and follow that with interpolation when oversampling fails. I'm starting to think I'm out of luck on that project.

Nah, it's easy to miss options and, true, cdparanoia's long options/option descriptions are kinda weird.

Wow. That is a good deal.

I remember when CDs were introduced and all the propaganda was saying, "Sure! Use 'em as frisbees! They're not *fragile* like *vinyl records*!" Uh huh. Anyway, I have put a pretty trashed disc in and gotten good results but I've never tried it on a truly wrecked CD.