Hi.

I know there are countless programs, as well as scripts out there, that make the task of ripping an audio cd a breeze. However, I'm kind of a stickler to my ways and prefer to do everything manually.

Typically what I do is use cdparanoia to rip the tracks, and then use lame or oggenc to encode them to a compressed format. I am at a real loss on how or when to look up the cddb information (artist, track name, etc), which has left me with quite a few albums with no tags. This can be a real pain when trying to use the music with certain media players.

I prefer to keep it simple on my computer, using programs such as Audacious with minimal dependencies, but I really need to know how to look up cddb from the command line, and when.

At what point during the ripping process do I do this? I have been thinking of writing my own script (I know, re-inventing the wheel) but I'm not sure how looking up the cddb works or how it applies the metadata to the final files.

Any help is greatly appreciated! Thanks.

I can't really help much but since nobody else has replied the best I can tell you is have a look at the source code of cd-discid, for which I provide the following URL:
http://wfeca.net/users/rbandmb/cd-discid.c
Or you can just download the attached file below. It's c source code, I had to append the ".txt" extension before LinuxQuestions would allow the upload (?).
Hope this helps. I had a look at it myself and did not have anything obvious jump out at me. But I might study it a bit more. Maybe we can come up with a command line that will at least dump cddb info.

Attached Files

cd-discid.c.txt (8.0 KB, 60 views)

Maybe you can use cddb_query (which is in the libcddb package, at least on a Slackware system) to get the information you need. LAME (and presumably oggenc) can take arguments specifying the title, artist, etc., so obviously you'll have to do the looking up before you run it. There's no man page for cddb_query on my system, but just running the command with no arguments gives you the info you'd need to get going.

Thanks for the responses! And sorry about my slow response time. I'll take a look at the code as well as cddb_query a shot. I wasn't aware that lame and oggenc could take that information as arguments, so that helps me tremendously. Thank you!