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. 😐

mcdp: Just when I thought I had them all

Along comes mcdp, sitting right there in Arch’s community repository, just waiting to be picked for a team.

Yep, another console CD player. Quite cute too, with plenty of color, cddb frills, one-key disc controls and a nice timer display.

Press the question mark and it will spill its own man page into your $PAGER, which makes it very easy to find the command you need at any given moment.

I did myself the favor of creating another CD again, so that I could demonstrate this (and a few others) properly.

And as you can see, it does a very nice job. A gold smilie for mcdp: 😀

Okay now I think I’ve seen every console CD player. 👿

ecasound: Looks quite powerful

I’ll be honest: In most cases, outside of music playback or conversion tools, sound utilities are on my periphery.

In short what I’m trying to say is … I don’t really know what to do with ecasound.

I’ve tinkered with it a little. I’ve read a few man pages and looked at one or two tutorials. But aside from being obviously quite powerful, I don’t know what to say.

Probably most of my ignorance stems from a lack of necessity. Like I said, I rarely do much to sound files outside of playing them or transmogrifying them.

So if you have tips or advice, please clue me in. I’d be interested in how to work this right.

camp: An audio player with real style

Console audio players have a lot more style and panache than most people think.

ocp, for one, is rife with bells and whistles. ncmpcpp, despite being difficult to say, has that awesome visualizer.

Here’s another one intended to entice your eyes: camp.

 

(The gif effect was a little wasted there. This machine can’t do much to keep up with playing a tune and recording animation. 🙄 )

The shots I give you aren’t very impressive. camp has a lot more in the way of visual style than I could configure.

Setup is a little tricky, but you’re in luck. Markus Ulfberg has done all the heavy lifting and can walk you through the process.

Markus was kind enough to send me a note about it and hold my hand as I got it going; if you need a coach to get that glitter on your Pentium, he’s your best friend.

And despite what you might think, it’s worth the time it takes to wrestle with camp. The looks of envy from your geeky (and non-geeky) friends will be oh-so-satisfying. … 😈

pianobar: No guidance here either

I had hoped I could show pianobar as a program today, but apparently the Pandora service is “unavailable in your location,” so this is all I have:

(Insert obligatory grumbling about geographical restrictions here.)

I know, and I apologize again, for bringing up software that I can’t properly demonstrate. fbcmd, turses, and now this.

Given the screenshot on the home page and a few others I find floating around the ether, it looks fairly straightforward.

But again, I am afraid aside from installing it, there’s not much I can say. 😦

dcd: I’ll give you three guesses …

I just got done mentioning cdcd, so I should probably mention this one and hope I’ve covered them all: dcd.

Yes, another console CD player, although this one is slightly different.

Whereas jac, cdcd and even adcd all monopolize a terminal prompt to work, dcd releases your terminal for other purposes while it runs.

Whether that’s good or bad is for you to decide. It does mean dcd doesn’t have much in the way of an interface, and I just got done saying I prefer visual applications.

But it does mean that for a background job, like playing a CD, you can do as well to instruct it to start playing, and then go back to what you were doing.

Six in one, half dozen in the other. You can decide which style you prefer — captured virtual console, or one-shot command.

If you still have CDs, of course. 🙄

cdcd: With a name like that …

With a name like that, it’s hard not to know what this does.

cdcd manages the same feat that adcd, jac and (a player to be named at a later date 😉 ) do.

And much like jac, it keeps a captive console as a command-driven interface to audio playback.

Ask for help and you get a list of possible commands directed at your CD player. Say quit and it quits. Simple enough.

For setup purposes, Arch users will want to use /dev/sr0 as their CD device. Others … I’m not sure. Tinker with it and see what happens.

And finally, not to beat a dead horse, but I have to say again … it’s hard for me to find a pressed CD these days.

So maybe cdcd and adcd and jac and (insert name here) will need less attention in coming years.

audiotag: Tagging music files, in its purest form

I remember audiotag as one of the first tools I ever used to manage audio files at the console.

It wasn’t necessarily the best tool for the job, particularly when things like lltag are around to guess the missing information for you. 😐

But it delivers, as you might expect it to.

audiotag can handle renaming tasks, converting tags to file names, batch tag fills and a lot of other menial chores.

And so in that sense, I can’t find much fault.

On the other hand (you knew this was coming), my complaint against audiotag is the same one I have against a lot of similar tools, to include lltag and beets and even id3lib (or whatever it’s called on your system).

There’s no real interface. It’s just a text-based series of flags without any real sense of conveyance.

It works — don’t get me wrong. But after years of hunting down oddball console programs, I have yet to run across something that behaves like audiotag (or lltag or beets or id3lib) but looks like EasyTag.

But with line-drawing characters, of course. 😉

despotify: Again, no guidance for you

I feel guilty dragging out applications that I can’t demonstrate, even just a little bit.

But there is a lot of good software out there that may appeal to you, even if it’s unattractive or unavailable to me.

So here’s the opening screen for despotify, a console interface for Spotify.

Spotify is not uninteresting to me, so much as it is unavailable where I live now.

C’est la vie; perhaps one day I will reside in a zip zone (?) that appeals to American corporations.

(Why they would exclude anyone from their service by virtue of where they live is beyond me. But hey, who am I to blow against the wind?)

Either way, if you have an account and can get it started up, send us a screenshot. We can only wonder what lies beyond despotify’s pixellated front door. … 😯

audtty: Music, remotely

I’ve never understood things like audtty, which remotely control graphical applications.

The inverse of that is fairly easy to understand: a console-based program controlled by a graphical interface. That’s an easy one.

But programs like audtty — and there are a lot of them out there — seem to be backwards.

Just because I can’t wrap my head around it, or can’t see the usefulness of it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t work.

Quite to the contrary: It works great, even up against the newest versions of Audacious.

Of course, running them side-by-side like above, is hardly the ideal. Probably better is running audtty over an ssh session, to control the audio on a distant machine.

But I have probably been working on low-end machines for too long, because still, I can’t see dedicating audio output to a machine that can handle Audacious in a graphical environment, and then committing control to a text-only application from far away.

Like I said, it just seems backward. 😐