CDGRAB
======
cdgrab is a frontend command-line utility (actually, a shell script) that
grabs tracks off a CD, encodes them to mp3 format, and tags them, all in
one go.

Your finished MP3's are stored in a subdirectory of the current directory
(named after the artist) with a filename based on the track title. Spaces
are replaced by underscores, and apostrophes and control codes are filtered
out. The end result usually looks like: Metallica/Dont_Tread_On_Me.mp3
In the future this filename munging will be customizable.

cdgrab uses it's own CDDB routines (using wget) instead of using xmcd's cda
utility (like cdr.pl and ripenc do) - this allows cdgrab to run as a user,
saving those valuable root consoles for more productive tasks like IRC'ing.
;)

Need to go through an HTTP proxy for CDDB access? No problem, just export
your http_proxy variable first so wget can see it.

Low on disk space? cdgrab has different algorithms to schedule ripping and
encoding - you can optimize for speed and disc read completion (-l 1, the
default), or for disk conservation (-l 2).

cdgrab can also take advantage of SMP systems, just like make. Try
'cdgrab -j 2' - it'll run two encoder processes while it rips the next
track.

cdgrab requires the following backend tools to work:

* An MP3 encoder (lame, gogo, bladeenc, l3enc, etc). cdgrab defaults to using
  lame. To change this, edit /etc/cdgrab.conf, and uncomment and change
  the ENCODERSYNTAX line. Any MP3 encoder that takes two filenames on the
  command line, one for input, one for output, will work.
  You can get lame at: http://www.sulaco.org/mp3/
  You can get gogo at: http://www.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~shigeo/gogo_e.html
  You can get BladeEnc at: http://home8.swipnet.se/~w-82625/
* CD Paranoia, an audio CD reading utility,
* Or cdda2wav, the audio CD reading utility cdparanoia was born from.
* cd-discid, a CDDB DiscID reading program. Formerly bundled with cdgrab.
  It's available in Debian or at http://frantica.lly.org/~rcw/cd-discid/.
* wget, an HTTP retrieval program.
* id3, an id3 tagging program. Available at: http://frantica.lly.org/~rcw/id3/

Potential problems:

Having trouble getting cdparanoia to read from your drive as a user?
Add yourself to the cdrom group, change the permissions on your cdrom device
to 660, and if you have a SCSI cdrom drive, check the permissions on
/dev/sg* as well.

Running out of disk space for .wav files but don't want to use -l 2? Put them
in a different location by adding WAVOUTPUTDIR=/some/other/path to your
/etc/cdgrab.conf or ~/.cdgrab.conf.
--
Robert Woodcock <rcw@debian.org>
