Perhaps I ought to have titled this “how to re-import your whole CD library, originally done in Windows, when your external USB drive’s HFS+ partition coughs up a bowl of bits.”  I looked all over the internet to try to get an indication of the best or most efficient way to rip, tag, and organize my disc collection in Linux Mint. I found a lot of information, and a lot of “articles” that were really just thinly disguised spec lists of FOSS audio programs.  In the end I was forced to figure it out on my own as a result of having too many options.

The good news is that, for an aspiring audiophile, EAC runs under WINE in Linux Mint (rel. 5) with no trouble. You can read a pretty concise formulation of the procedure required to make it happen here. That’s the first route I went. It wasn’t particularly easy from there.

See, I’m one of those wierdos who regularly keeps digital music in more than one format. I prefer “lossless” files, but the portable music players available to me (and my car CD player, that reads MP3) won’t play those. Not to mention that they’re bigger than lossy files. For this reason, I must have at least two formats available. My practice up to the present has been to keep FLAC on hand for home listening, MP3 for comparatively high-quality listening with devices that read no other format, and ogg for maximum compression with devices that can use it. (I do prefer to use free software and open standards whenever possible.) Properly speaking, then, I have three music libraries to manage. And I have a lot of music.

After some experimentation, I discovered that the familiar batch conversion tools that I intended to use in order to keep all these libraries straight (especially tagging in all those formats) would have to run through EAC. Those tools (WinXP versions) were a lot fussier in WINE. It’s important to understand that I was trying to avoid, at all costs, the need to write a bunch of file- and filename-conversion scripts. Originally I began ripping the discs in EAC and pulling the raw .wavs over into Sound Converter. I quickly realized that Sound Converter didn’t give me the flexiblity over the command-line encoding options that I needed, so that plan was out. I further realized that no tagging was being preserved in the EAC -> Sound Converter process, so I implemented a third step and a third piece of software, EasyTag, to (hopefully) pull info from CDDB. By this time, managing the directory structure and file info in just one format was a hassle. What’s more, I could see I’d need to add another software step or two before it was a working chain. I dropped back to punt.

I thought, “Surely there’s an easier way.” There is. But it doesn’t involve EAC at all, and that kept me from using it for a while. When I finally gave in it was a good day. The piece of sofware that will do it all for you (with most of the tweaks you want) is called grip. Grip works, and I’m glad. It uses cdparanoia to rip discs, unless you tell it to use another program, and that’s fine with me. As far as I can tell, comparing rip-for-rip with EAC, cdparanoia makes a really accurate copy (provided your drive doesn’t cache). In fact, you can tell cdparanoia to be stupidly accurate if you want. Grip encodes to FLAC, mp3, ogg, aac, and more, and it gives you full control over the encoding options. I just realized that I’m sounding like an ad for grip, which isn’t intentional, but it’s really so much better and easier – even easier than what I was doing in Windows. At least, it’s easier while managing one format library at a time, which is what most sensible people do. With grip, once your “config” tabs are set up, you can reduce the whole process to a few clicks per CD (or less) and a sanity check on the autotagging. Grip creates linux-friendly filenames for your tracks and automatically puts audio files into a reasonable directory structure, which you have control over through tag editing prior to ripping. What a great idea.

Now I’ve arrived at the final juncture of library organization #1 much faster than I had hoped as a result of both grip and amaroK, a fully-featured and functional software jukebox (that’s the fastest description I could concoct). But I’m still going to have to do at least one of the things I was originally trying to avoid: write a script to convert the FLAC library I have been recording to both MP3 and ogg, keeping the directory structure intact. Oh well. Some things can’t be avoided. Unless there’s an approach out there that hasn’t turned up under any of my query strings. In any case, at least I can listen to a shuffled version of my entire lossless music collection while I write the script…

[ Note: if you didn't do a good job with your directory structure, amaroK will fix it all up for you (that's putting it lightly) with the "Manage Files..." --> "Organize Files..." command in the right-click menu. But beware running that command on your whole collection. It blows your CPU to bits. (Yes, intended.) ]