acripper: Does its job, in a manner of speaking

I am biased — severely biased — with regard to CD ripping software, and I don’t just mean text-based ones.

I have, in the past, thrown out graphical CD rippers and gone back to abcde, which is what I know and like best.

acripper was new to me, and I will blame my aforementioned bias for my less-than-stellar opinion of it.

For a project that dates back to 2007, I can find almost no information on acripper.

It comes in a single tarball off Sourceforge, with no other web page that I know of. Oddly, that file decompresses into a folder that is misnamed “acriper.”

The question marks continue: The README file suggests the software needs compiled, but the Makefile doesn’t seem to work, and the acripper executable included in the tarball is a bash script.

To complicate things, there are almost no flags available to acripper; no man page, and aside from commented lines in the bash script, almost no guidance on how to make it work.

Perhaps I expected too much; it may be that this was just a once-off project for a programmer involved in bigger and better things, and it has stuck around this long just by virtue of being on some CLI app lists.

And really, there’s not much to complain about considering it seems to do its job. True, there’s not much you can manage and its a rather obtuse (and very slow) ripper.

But it does what it claims, and I guess I can’t complain about that. 😐