Grip Newbie Issue
 

Okay here is the situation. I'm making a compilation cd for my friend. I have all the songs I need on cd and I'd like to rip them into a suitable format for burning them back onto cd so that my friend can listen to them in his car stereo. So I have a few questions:

1. What file formats are suitable for car stereos? I can rip them to .wav files but they are just too big.

2. I think mp3 is the best way to go but since RedHat dropped the ball on the whole mp3 issue I have not seen an option for ripping to the .mp3 format. I can only rip to .ogg or .wav . Will .ogg files work in this situation?

3. Should I just give up on Grip and use another ripper?

Suggestions, comments, ...

I think you should first ask your friend which format the auto stereo supports. Maybe it supports only audio-cds? If so, you need to make them .wavd then create audio cd. No other option.

well the only file format suitable is cdda format, i.e. an audio cd. burning a wav or mp3 file to a CD will make it a normal cdrom, not an audio CD. what formats you burn to cd depends on what burner progam you use, not what ripper. eroaster can decode ogg to wav files no problem... try that. alternatively just add mp3 support to grip.

Hmmm...well lets assume that it does only audio-cds. How would I go about creating the audio cd with .wavd files?

Crashed_Again, I made a spelling mistake. I meant .wav files. It's easiest to make an audio cd from them, but it is possible from nearly every format. Look into your burner program documentation.

Okay thanks alot Mara and Acid. I had a feeling that it would be you two helping me out with this. Its been a long time since I've done something like this in Linux. My memory is shot.

I think I'm just going to rip them all to .mp3 files and then burn them. I'm pretty sure his cd player supports it. Now I just have to figure out how to add mp3 support to Grip.

Ok, no problem. Grip is one of the best ripping programs out there, I think, if for no other reason then it actually reads then names of audio cd tracks and names the mp3s it generates accordingly.

So, here we go:
Open up Grip, Config tab, MP3 tab, Encoder tab. There should be an entry for 'lame' in the drop-down menu - select it. If you've never ripped mp3s with LAME (which is, IMHO, the best one out there) then you'll most likely need to download it - I found it at rpmfind.net, and I've had no problems with it thus far.
Once installed, put the path to the lame executable in grip's "MP3 executable" text box; the "MP3 command-line" one should configure itself; then look in grip's help file for info on the file format. Customizing that will make your life much easier when it comes time to find those mp3s for burning.
Also, I'd check out the Config | MP3 | Options tab - make sure the "delete .wav after encoding" box is checked...as you mentioned, they do take up quite a bit of space. If you want grip to auto-generate a playlist of all the tracks it rips from a disk, keep the "Create .m3u files" box checked.

G'luck, and enjoy the wonderful world of ripping mp3s,
~Laura

As for burning audio cd's/ripping them...

Ripping the audio to your drive into a compressed file will create some loss of the audio (negligable if done right, but still some loss). If you can rip into a wav file, then burn that with an -audio flag, you will have much better sound than with ripping to mp3/ogg and then back to wav. If his player supports mp3 then that's fine, and can hold MANY more songs than a standard audio cd, however for this replies sake I'll assume audio cd's only (meaning no mp3 support).

First rip the CD into wav either using grip or cdparanoia via command line. Then using cdrecord:
cdrecord dev=x,x,x speed=x -v -eject -audio /path/to/wav/audio1.wav /path/to/wav/audio2.wav (and so on)

That is the long route all via cli, all using the actual apps not front ends (assuming cdparanoia was used ;) ).

:)

Cool

rose_bud4201, in your post you keep refering to an MP3 tab under Config. Im not sure if my newness to linux is causing me to not see this but its not there.

config
encode
encoder