KDE has CD ripping built in
Up to now I’ve converted all my CD’s to mp3 with iTunes on Windows. Actually that’s not strictly true, they were ripped to what ever is Apple’s default format, I keep meaning to rerip them as 192k mp3s. I’ve started using Amarok to organise my music in Linux. It’s a nice program and looks good, but there are a few things missing before it can become my main music client. One is full iPod integration, i.e. ratings and playlists, and the other major thing was CD ripping. I thought it was odd that it didn’t have it built in. So I started hunting for a program to do it in KDE. After a bit of searching I found it’s built right into KDE!
If you open up Konqueror and bring up the navigation panel (F9) there should be something in the tree called ‘Audio CD Browser’. If you have an audio CD in your drive and click on it you see a bunch of different files and folders depending on what ripping software you have installed. In my case it showed the tracks of the CD as CDA (CD audio), mp3 and ogg. It also has the whole CD as one track in all the different formats. You can configure the quality of the ripping through the control panel, I went for variable bit rate with an average bit rate of 192kb/s. Then it’s just a matter of copying the files from audio CD browser like any other file and it rips it on the fly. Truly simple software.
The next step is to integrate it into Amarok so I can pop in a CD, click the CD browser tab, select the tracks I want and click ‘Add to my collection’. That would be really slick.
