how trivially can i rip my CD collection to FLAC format?

[Andrew Farris]

On Mon, 2010-09-06 at 15:55 +0200, Gurus Knugum wrote: 
> Den 2010-09-06 13:18:20 skrev James Bensley <jwbensley at gmail.com>:
> 
> > Sound Juicer comes with Ubuntu and will rip CDs strait to FLAC, its
> > very easy to use and will look up artist/album/track names on
> > line...So its ticks the basic boxes of what you need...
[snip] 
> 
> I also use Sound Juicer all the time to rip to FLAC. Click If you want to  
> add more tags, I would recommend EasyTag for that.

I'll second the use of Sound Juicer for ripping music... I just recently
backed up my whole CD collection to a new harddrive, just as the OP is
planning, and I used Sound Juicer to do it (collection of ±500 CDs).
Sound Juicer nicely handled filling in all the essential info for the
music tracks (Artist, Album, Track name/number) as well as some optional
ones (genre, year, etc...) and filing them away in my chosen music
folder.

I will say right now that while it worked flawlessly for the most part,
there were a few CDs that I had trouble with during the process. There
were a few that were not in the MusicBrainz database (the one Sound
Juicer uses to auto-fill all the tags ) which I added myself where
possible, and there were a few times where sound juicer simply wouldn't
detect the CD's presence (though it would mount just fine). For these
times, I just ejected the CD, and reinserted, and it would usually
work. 

Also, when ripping the CDs, I found it immensely useful that Sound
Juicer can be set up to encode with custom settings (such as the number
of audio channels the encoded track should have). Because of this, and
because I have a 5.1 surround sound system on my PC, I encoded all my
FLAC files for 6-channel audio by copying and modifying the default FLAC
encoder line to support multiple channels. to do this from Sound Juicer:
Edit > Preferences | Format > Edit Profiles
        select CD Quality, Lossless and hit 'Edit'
        under GStreamer pipeline, change channels=2 to channels=6 (or
        whatever pleases you most)
        hit close
You can also make your own custom format similarly. 

> When you convert your FLACs later to Ogg your tags will remain in the  
> copies, at least when using Sound Converter. I think it's installed by  
> default. If not:
> 
> sudo apt-get install soundconverter

Sound converter isn't in the default install, but it's very useful as
well; I use it a lot when putting music onto my MP3 player. Another
useful feature of Sound Converter is that it can rip the audio track off
of a video for you (giving you just the audio track back). 

Best of luck with your project!

-- 
Andrew
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