The Linux Advocate
by Scott Dowdle
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Linux Advocate Column #59 August 27, 1999 LOGIN: As you can tell from the Spotlight below, I've been busy this
week ripping Audio CDs. Let it be known that I own all of the CDs
in question and I don't plan on sharing the MP3 files I create
with anyone that doesn't also own the CDs in question. Not a
whole lot going on this week... I've gotten used to the fact that
every week is a busy Linux news week so only a really, really
busy news week looks busy these days. Did you follow that? :) NEWS: Item #1: Sun buying Microsoft Office competitor - The
"competitor" in question is Star Division, a German
company that produces StarOffice. StarOffice is an office suite
for Linux, Solaris, Windows and OS/2. There is also a Java
version that will run on any Java enabled device. While I played
around with StarOffice 5.0 some time ago, I found it to be very
buggy, basically as bad as a Microsoft application. :) StarOffice
5.1 has been out for some time now but I just haven't gotten
ahold of it to give it a try yet. So far as looks go, SO is just
as flashy and feature filled as any of the Microsoft products...
so I see this purchase by Sun as a big event. Supposedly, Sun
isn't going to make a formal announcement until August 31st. You
can find the story from C-Net at the following URL: http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,40754,00.html?tag=st.cn.1fd2.newstkr.ne
The Daniel M. Duley (core KDE developer) interview GNOME man's land Have I ever mentioned that I'm a HUGE fan of the Artist formerly know as Prince a.k.a. O(+>? Well, I am. Seeing as how a big fad going on lately is MP3 I couldn't help but do a search on freshmeat.net for the various MP3 related programs for Linux. I was delighted to discover that there are a ton of programs to pick from. So far the best frontend for the various tools I've accumulated is a program named Krabber. Krabber is a GUI application designed for the KDE environment that acts as a frontend for: 1) cdparanoia - a free audio CD reader that creates .wav files When Krabber is run for the first time, it checks your system for what combination of software you have installed. I use cdparanoia and bladeenc. Krabber is an extremely easy to use program with a relatively well designed GUI interface. It also talks to the various online CD Databases (cddb) to grab the Audio CD information since as artist, title, and song titles. Krabber has several configurable options, such as how many tracks to encode at a time (1 - 6), etc. I've run three copies of Krabber at the same time, encoding upto 13 MP3s at the same time and it performed flawlessly. Speed: I've started converting my entire O(+> CD collection (well over 35 CDs) about a week ago and am about 2/3rds done with it. I haven't been running the computer 24 hours a day though. This leads into the question about speed. How long does the complete process converting an audio CD into MP3s take? Depends on the speed of your machine and the length of the CD. If I had to guess, I'd say that it takes about 2 to 4 hours per CD... even if I am using my computer for other stuff, such as IRCing, ICQing, web browsing, etc. To be sure, when I had 13 encodings going at the same time, I could noticed a big impact on the speed of my machine when I was using it for other things... mainly because I have the priority for encoding set to the highest value... but my machine was still usable. Do THAT in the Windows World. Quality: Now what about quality? As the screenshots wills how, I've been encoding 44,100 Hz, 128,000 bps in stereo and my ears can't detect a difference between the original CD and the MP3. I did try lower encoding settings but did notice a big difference in quality. Luckily, all of these parameters adjustable. There are even higher quality settings than the ones I'm using, but I don't think I would notice a difference other than the disk space used. Size: Speaking of disk space, I noticed that my CD to MP3
conversion process takes anywhere from 31MB for the shortest CD,
to 70MB for the longest CD for the finished product. The
conversion process first reads in the raw audio data and converts
it into a .wav file which it dumps to disk as a temporary file.
Then the .wav file is converted into MP3. As one would expect,
the temporary files are huge. Just how huge? Well, one CD I have
is a single track of approx. 46 minutes. The temporary .wav file
created for that CD was around 750MB in size. Be warned that you
will need a LOT of disk space to create and store MP3 files. It
is that way no matter what conversion software you use. The
single track CD turned out being approx. 42MB in size. It would
probably been half that if I had chosen mono rather than stereo
but I wanted high quality sound.
All you have to do is: 1) Choose Music - Put an audio CD in the CD-ROM drive and select which tracks on the CD you want to work with. I just select all. 2) Choose Dir - What directory do you want the working files and end product files stored in? 3) Name Files - What do you want to name the files you create? I have Krabber setup to use the CDDB so it automatically creates a directory named after the CD Title and names each track the name of the song. It's extremely easy if one goes that route. 4) Run - Starts the whole process rolling. Krabber automatically spawns the various backend programs to read the CD, dump it to .wav, and then encode the .wav file to .mp3... and it provides a graphical progression window so you know where it is in the process and what is going on. After you have been through it one time, you're a pro. In fact, Krabber remembers what directory you want to use and what filenames you want to use if you are using the CDDB (and why wouldn't you?)... so it's really a matter of just clicking on 1, selecting the tracks with the mouse and clicking on 4. It takes about 10 to go from inserting the CD to getting the work started. The CDDB feature really makes Krabber a joy to use because it not only automatically names files and directories, it also embeds the information into the MP3 tags used by the decoders at playback time. Krabber is also highly configurable such that you have a nice GUI frontend to various parameters of the backend programs. The CDDB features also have some options. Summary: While one could use the various text based backend programs from the command-line, where Krabber shines is in the fact that it greatly simplifies the entire process and automates it in a very user friendly way. Krabber adds the CDDB features. All of the programs involved in this process deserve the credit but without Krabber, the entire process would be much less enjoyable. Functionally, I can't think of any significant ways that Krabber could be improved... but there are always those eye candy features, playback features, and what-not that could keep the author (krabber@gmx.de) busy for years. :) Where to get it? To get a complete list of mp3 related programs for Linux, go to http://freshmeat.net and search for "mp3". Krabber homepage: http://krabber.automatix.de/ bladeenc homepage: http://home8.swipnet.se/~w-82625/ cdda paranoia homepage: http://www.xiph.org/paranoia/
LOGOUT: I hope you enjoyed this installment. Please tell a friend
about this column and get me more readers, ok?!? :) As always,
thanks for reading! Scott Dowdle
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