tuxrip: If I only had a DVD around here somewhere …

Now I find myself in the same odd situation as I did around the beginning of the year, with a potential DVD ripper in hand, and no DVD to test it.

tuxrip is about a decade beyond its last release. But considering it’s just a bash script that works the strings between mencoder, vorbis-tools, libogg and a few other fundamental libraries, I am not surprised that it still seems to work.

The first time you run it you’ll need to configure it for your machine, and the tuxrip --config wizard will guide you through that. If you make a mistake, I would suggest just hand-editing the .tuxriprc file it creates, which will save you time over re-running the setup.

After that though, I’m afraid I can’t be of much assistance. I see by the home page that there are still a few steps beyond what you see in the screenshot and actually ripping a DVD, to include managing quality settings and a bit more.

I have no doubt that it works, although I wonder if between now and 2005, there haven’t been some advances in both DVDs and encoding that might make tuxrip seem quaint. And I fear it might require a little work to bring it into line with, for example, Blu-ray Discs or x265, just to name one or two off the top of my head.

Already some of it is showing its age: the AUR package installs all the dependencies but you’ll still have to add in mencoder, which isn’t part of mplayer now. (I don’t see a Debian version.)

All that is … assuming it works like it still did. You’ll have to run it through to the end and tell me how it goes. I suppose I should hunt down a real DVD, just for times like this. … 🙄

lame: How could I have forgotten this?

Somehow I managed to work my way through 20 months of console programs — usually on a two-a-day basis — and still not mention lame.

That’s unacceptable, considering I can remember lame from as far back as 1999 or maybe even earlier. Back then I was stuck using Xing‘s Audio Catalyst to convert CDs to mp3s, and a friend laughed and said, “Get lame.”

Fifteen years have not obsoleted lame, and for what I can remember, it still works just as well. And there’s even more reason to love it now, with that beautiful real-time animated conversion statistics graph. K.Mandla likes. … 😀

It might be presumptuous for me to offer suggestions on how to use a program that has been around since 1998 and reached such a widespread audience. It’s even more presumptuous because lame has help pages as long as your arm, covering everything from variable bitrate encoding to filter cutoffs to id3 tagging options. For any tweak I could offer, lame has about 20 variations.

I will be honest and say I don’t use lame much any more, since most tools I see incorporate other encoding tools, or rip straight from audio to mp3/ogg. It’s rare that I see a wav file that needs conversion. 😦 And if I must be absolutely candid, I haven’t ripped a CD to mp3 in years.

Perhaps that too is a sign of our evolution, over the last 15 years.

ripit: For precise, exacting CD conversions

Among CD ripping tools, I have to say that ripit seems to have its stuff together.

Granted, like some other rippers for the console, ripit primarily relies on some underlying utilities. Depending on your preferences, you can relegate the actual ripping process to cdparanoia, cddda2wav or some other tools.

But ripit has a fantastic number of other options available to it, in addition to the flags passed through to the background utilities. I daresay if you really are keen on controlling the finer points of converting CDs to audio files, ripit might be one of the best choices.

The Arch version, as you can see above, found my optical drive without coaxing, and dashed off to cddb to check the title data.

I did notice that -o flag, which declares a target directory, requires an absolute path, or it assumes you’re ripping to the root directory. By default ripit will leave the target files in your $HOME.

At the end of the day I’m still stuck in an odd place though, in that I don’t have any CDs left and I don’t believe anyone around me still buys them. My homemade backup CD works great with ripit, but after that I’m out of test discs.

But I am sure the worldwide departure from CD-based audio is not over yet. 😉

lxdvdrip: If I only had a DVD around here somewhere …

lxdvdrip starts out in German, so make sure you copy the configuration file from /etc/lxdvdrip.conf to ~/.lxdvdrip.conf, so you get the language you need.

This is the other program that I needed to show a few weeks ago, but I didn’t have a DVD drive at the time; I left it at home when I undocked this X61.

Now I find I have a similar problem — a drive, but no disc to rip. This is what we call an error in logistics. 😕

lxdvdrip looks pretty good though. It comes with a smattering of ripping and encoding tools, some of which are way over my head.

If I had a collection of DVDs I’d probably want lxdvdrip for backup purposes. As it is, I only have data DVDs. I daresay lxdvdrip could try and rip them, but to what end, I wonder. … 🙄

No matter. I can see it’s working and it looks pretty good. If it ends up being useful for you, let me know. 😉