Ripping Audio CDs Using Rhythmbox on Ubuntu

Ripping CDs in Rhythmbox is almost exactly like playing them (as shown in Figure 19-25), with the exception of the fact that you click the Extract button rather than the Play button to start the process. While Rhythmbox is extracting the contents of an audio CD and converting each track to a file, it displays progress information in the lower-left corner of the Rhythmbox dialog.
Before ripping a CD, however, you may want to specify the format of the audio files that Rhythmbox creates, the location in which it creates them, and so on. This is done through Rhythmbox's Preferences dialog. To display this dialog, select the Edit C> Preferences menu command. To specify the location to which the audio files that you extract will be saved and the format in which they will be saved, click the Music tab, which is shown in Figure 19-32.
figure 19-32
Rhythmbox preferences for ripping CDs
Rhythmbox preferences for ripping CDs
This dialog enables you to change the following settings:
■ Library Location: Enables you to select the folder in which you want extracted audio to be stored. Though a folder named Music is automatically created for this purpose in each user's home directory, I tend to create a publicly writable directory called / home/music on my systems, to make it easier for multiple users to access a centralized music collection. This also simplifies backups of all of the CDs that all users of your system have extracted. If you want to be really clever, you can either mount a shared network directory as / home/music using NFS or share a local / home/music directory via Samba so that users of all systems on your local network have access to your music. Ask your users not to copy music from this directory, lest the RIAA sue you for a few million dollars.
■ Library Structure: Enables you to specify how the audio files that you extract from CDs will be organized in your music library. This section provides the following settings:
Folder Hierarchy: Enables you to specify the folder hierarchy in which Sound Juicer creates the audio files that it extracts. By default, the tracks of each CD are written in a folder with the name of the CD, which is itself a subdirectory of a folder with the artist's name.
File Name: Enables you to specify the format for the file name used for each audio track that you extract. The default value, Number - Title, is a good setting to use, because this makes it easy for you to create playlists that follow the original track order of your CDs.
Preferred Format: Enables you to specify the file format in which extracted audio files are written. Your choices are CD Quality, Lossless (using the FLAC codec), CD Quality, Lossy (using the Ogg container format and Vorbis codec), Voice, Lossless (using the standard WAV file format), and Voice, Lossy (using the Ogg container format and Vorbis codec, but at a lower quality level).
I typically change the location of my music folder and, unfortunately, the Preferred format for any tracks that I extract from my audio CDs. You'll note that the default formats in which you can extract CD audio do not include an option to extract files in MP3 format. This option will only be present if you have installed the gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse package (or purchased and installed the commercial Fluendo codecs), as discussed in the "Configuring GStreamer" section of this chapter. If you see an entry for MP3 audio on this menu, thanks for following along earlier. If not, install either the gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse package or the commercial Fluendo codecs and restart Rhythmbox to see a menu entry for extracting audio files in MP3 format, which you will probably want to make your default if you want users of other operating systems to be able to play your extracted audio files. The OGG format is far superior to MP3 (and is free of licensing issues), but unfortunately, most people and portable music players can only deal with the MP3 format.
Once you've customized the location of your music files or the format in which they will be extracted, click Close to close the Preferences dialog. You can then click the Extract icon in the Rhythmbox toolbar to begin ripping a CD. While Rhythmbox is extracting the contents of an audio CD and converting each track to a file, it displays progress information in the Status bar at the bottom of the Rhythmbox dialog.
Continue reading here: Creating Audio CDs with Brasero
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