Ripping CDs to OGG Vorbis
CONVENTIONS USED

Everyone should know the evils of MP3 files by now. It's time that we all make the switch to OGG Vorbis. Just like we switch OSes to Linux, so too should we settle for nothing less than open audio formats.

I'm going to assume that you have oggenc and cdparanoia installed. If you don't, you can install them using the command urpmi vorbis-tools cdparanoia.

First thing to do is to open up a terminal. Type in cd ~/tmp/ and hit Enter. This puts you into your own temporary folder.

Now, make a directory for the CD that you will be ripping. For purposes of this tutorial, I will be using the directory called RipDisc. So, type in mkdir RipDisc && cd RipDisc and hit Enter. This will make the directory and put you in it.

Type eject and then press Enter to eject your primary CD drive, and then insert the CD you wish to rip. Close the CD-ROM drive.

There are many options for extracting CD audio tracks, but you can just use the defaults if you don't want to do anything special. To do this, you would use the command cdparanoia -B with no other options. But this will most likely be slow, so you would probably want to set the speed parameter.

Assuming that your CD-ROM device can rip at 16X, you would use the following command line:
cdparanoia -B -S16
Substitute the last number in the above command line for whatever speed you want to try.

These commandlines are assuming that your CD-ROM device is the default (/dev/cdrom). If you want to rip from your CD-RW drive, your device would most likely be /dev/scd0. So the command line would look like this:
cdparanoia -B -d /dev/scd0 -S16
Again, that is assuming that your CD-RW drive can rip at 16X. My CD-RW drive worked at 16X, but yours may not. If you have a different CD-ROM drive you would like to use for ripping, just specify the proper device in the same manner as this.

After you figure out what commandline you would want to type in, do so, and the press Enter. If you need more options or help, refer to the man page or use the command cdparanoia --help.

After a fairly long wait, all the tracks will be on your hard drive, in this directory. Type in ls if you would like to see them.

Next, you can encode all these files to OGGs if you type in oggenc *.wav and hit Enter. This will encode all the files you just ripped to OGG files using the default bitrate, which is suitable for most purposes.

If you would like a higher bitrate, for example, 192Kbps, then you would type in oggenc -b192 *.wav. Again, if you need more information for options and so forth, refer to the man page, or type in oggenc --help.

The recommended method for encoding OGGs is to choose a quality setting, between 1 and 10. This would be done like so: oggenc -q5 *.wav.

Once this process is complete, you can delete all the WAV files by using the command rm -f *.wav. Now all that is left in the directory are a bunch of OGG files. You can now go ahead and rename them to whatever you like, as well as you can edit all the information in them using whatever program you like. I use XMMS.

Obviously, you can move the files to where you would prefer to put them. You can use Konqueror or whatever other file manager you like for this (or the console).

I hope that this tutorial was of some use to someone.


© D. Olson 2001-2003 -- Originally found on The Mandrake eXPerience