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. … 🙄

streamripper: Keeping local copies

It’s been a while since I’ve seen an audio stream ripper — in fact, I think the last one was fIcy, way back when this site was just starting up. 😐

So here’s streamripper, which does something similar to what fIcy does, but seems a little better prepared for the task.

What I remember most about fIcy is that without an -o flag, it would dump its output to the screen, and with an -o flag … it didn’t quite work right.

So seeing streamripper effortlessly pull down a stream, dissect the individual files at their correct start and stop points, nest them in a neat tree of folders, and set aside tracks that are incomplete … well, it’s very pleasant to watch.

streamripper is not new. In fact, it looks like it faded away (I need a better term than that for software that stalls) around 2008. That’s the bad news.

The good news is, I don’t imagine much has really changed in the past six years in the way streaming music is broadcast, or for that matter, how mp3s work. Both technologies are pretty much solid at this point.

So if you can deal with the awful public shame of using six-year-old software, streamripper appears to be a viable option for capturing your favorite online audio. And if you can’t deal with that big a lag in software development … well, you’ve come to the wrong place, bub.

Edit, 2014-11-02: I got a little coaching from wavexx (an fIcy maintainer) and fIcy seems to be working for me now. It’s been a while since I wrote the original post about fIcy so I’m not sure what my problem was the first time, but wavexx helped me iron it out. 🙂

rubyripper: The options continue to multiply

I should apologize for the gap in communications for a few days this week. I was preoccupied with some personal events, and as luck would have it, I find I am also beset with computer issues. More on that later.

For now, rubyripper is next on the Master List.

  

We just saw ripit a week ago or so, and while it’s true that there’s only so much you can do with a console-based CD ripper utility, rubyripper seems quite competent.

True, it doesn’t seem to have as many low-level controls as ripit, but there are distinct audiences among computer users, and for some, a simpler, quicker interaction (notice I didn’t say “interface”) is better.

So much as you can see above, rubyripper has options to rip to flac, ogg or mp3, with command-line flag controls manually edited. Suffice to say, if you don’t know what the controls are for lame, you’ll probably just want to keep the defaults. 😉

One thing I like about rubyripper is the default rip location. Without any prompting, rubyripper dropped the resulting tracks into a folder called “vorbis,” which kept them from polluting my home directory. My OCPD thanks you, rubyripper.

abcde is my first-line pick for console CD ripping, but rubyripper has its charms. Following the theme I mentioned with ripit though, sometimes it’s not so much about the overarching program as the underlying support software.

A sad note: It seems the author has drifted away from the project, citing a lack of need to rip CDs any longer, since online services are quicker and easier. Much like I have said several times over, there doesn’t seem to be much call for CD conversion, and I don’t even know how many of my friends own CDs any longer. 😦

It’s the circle of life.

One last bonus with rubyripper: Install ruby-gtk2 and get … a graphical interface!

I don’t see rubyripper in Debian, which is a bit of a shame. So … Arch 🙂 Debian 😦 That could always change though. 😉

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. 😉