RipRight

What is it?

RigRight is a minimal CD ripper for Linux modeled on autorip. It can run as a daemon and will automatically start ripping any CD found in the drive after which the disc will be ejected. Ripping is always to FLAC lossless audio format with tags taken from the community-maintained MusicBrainz lookup service and cover art from Amazon where possible. If a disc is unknown to MusicBrainz, the CD will be ejected without ripping and can also be optionally rejected if cover art cannot be found.

With RipRight, ripping a CD collection is just a matter of feeding your Linux PC each CD in turn and waiting while they are ripped. CDs which are immediately ejected can be checked with the MusicBrainz Picard tool which allows CD identifiers to be uploaded to the website database. Any errors or inaccuracies in the database records can also be edited on the MusicBrainz website.

How it Works

RipRight is built upon the following libraries:

• cdparanoia
  This does the hardwork of ripping CDs. It isn't the fastest ripping library, but it does try to produce perfect digital extractions. It is configured by RipRight for full paranoia mode, enabling all verification and correction features.
• Curl
  Used to transfer cover art from Amazon.
• ImageMagick
  Processes returned cover art to extract and check image dimensions.
• FLAC
  This library encodes the audio and writes the FLAC files complete with tag information.

RipRight itself merely manages these libraries to automate ripping and encoding of audio CDs. RipRight uses temporary files and threads to enable multiple tracks to be encoded in parallel with ripping.

Usage

• -d, --daemon
  Run in daemon mode. Ripright will detach from the terminal and direct output to the syslog.
• -a, --rip-to-all
  Normally exactly 1 result is required from Musicbrainz, otherwise the CD will be refused and ejected. With this option, the CD will be ripped and tagged to multiple files, once as each result from Musicbrainz. Each rip will be output under a directory named Ambiguous/mb-release-id>/ where the the Musicbrainz release Id is used to identify each possible release.
• -w, --w32-filenames
  Covert characters that are illegal on Windows filesystems to UTF-8 alternatives. If accessing files over Samba, this prevents name mangling which can lose the file extension. Mapped characters are *, ?, " and | which are replaced by ӿ, ʔ, ¨ and ǀ respectively.
• -r, --require-art
  Refuse to rip a CD if the cover art cannot be retrieved. The correct ASIN must be added to the MusicBrainz database for art to be fetched from Amazon.
• -s, --allow-skips
  Normally ripping attempts to make a perfect copy of a CD by using all data verification and correction features of the cdparanoia library. With this option, each bad sectors will be skipped after 20 failed attempts to read the data. Without this option, ripping of scratched or damaged CDs may take a very long time and possibly may not complete.
• -o, --output-file
  Set the format used to produce output filenames and paths. This should be a string containing the following special tokens:

  Token	Meaning	FLAC Tag
  %N	Track number	TRACKNUMBER
  %A	Track artist	ARTIST
  %a	Track artist sort name	ARTISTSORT
  %B	Album artist	ALBUMARTIST
  %b	Album artist sort name	ALBUMARTISTSORT
  %C	Track artist if present, else album artist	ARTIST, else ALBUMARTIST
  %c	Track artist sort name if present, else album artist sort name	ARTISTSORT, else ALBUMARTISTSORT
  %D	Album/CD name	ALBUM
  %T	Track name	TITLE
  %Y	Release type	MUSICBRAINZ_TYPE
  %%	A single percent sign	-

  The release type is will be substituted as one of Albums, Audiobooks, Compilations, EPs, Interviews, Live, Remixes, Singles, Soundtracks, Spokenword and Other.

  Slashes and colons in the '%' output fields are converted to UTF-8 equivalents to avoid creating subdirectories or causing problems with Windows shares mounted via Samba. Slashes and colons given in the format string will be literally preserved.

Downloads

RipRight is released as source with a configure script.

• ripright-0.4.tar.gz
• ripright-0.4.tar.gz.sig
• ChangeLog

The following commands will verify the signature on downloaded files:

The following commands will configure, build and install the software:

The following libraries/packages must also be installed or available, otherwise the configure will fail:

RipRight has been built on Fedora 13, 14, 15, Ubuntu 11.04 and CentOS 5.6 (although flac-devel has to be manually installed on CentOS 5.6 as the packaged version is too old).

RipArrange

It's possible that after ripping a number of CDs, you might change your mind about the format string used to layout the FLAC files. In such a case, the RipArrange application can be used to move the FLAC files based on a new format string.

RipArrange is part of the RipRight release and takes the following options:

• -m
  Move files to new location. This only works within a mount.
• -c
  Copy files to new location.
• -h
  Hard link files to new location. This only works within a filesystem.
• -f
  Remove existing destination files before operation.
• -w, --w32-filenames
  Covert characters that are illegal on Windows filesystems to UTF-8 alternatives as per the RipRight option.
• -v, --verbose
  Output information about files which will not be moved because they are already in the correct location. Normally only things that would be changed are reported.
• -o, --output-file format
  Set the format used to produce output filenames and paths. This option takes the same special tokens as the RipRight --output-file option.

The following example command will re-arrange FLAC files found in the current directory, making a new directory structure under /media/newmusic containing hard links to the current files:

Find and xargs can be used to call riparrange for files in different directories:

Licence

RipRight and RipArrange are released under the GNU GPLv2.

Bugs

Bugs, patches, and suggestions can either be emailed directly to me. Since this is hobby project it can take a long time for me to respond, but I try to review every patch and respond to all emails.

References

• http://flac.sourceforge.net/, FLAC Homepage
• http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/, MusicBrainz