Media Systems: Incorporating the TV and the HiFi - Smart Home Automation with Linux and Raspberry Pi - page 87

Compact Disc
A CD is the easiest and quickest format by far, because most of the constituent parts are available within Linux. A tool,
such as abcde , can automatically do the following:

u Extract the audio as a WAV file

u Convert it to OGG Vorbis

u Determine the artist and album

u Download and apply the tags automatically

u Name the files accordingly

All that is then necessary is to copy the files to your filesystem. I personally always extract my CDs to a separate
(local) folder for reasons of speed—it's faster to write locally and then copy en masse because it means that my server
isn't dealing with lots of small write requests when I might want to stream something else. This also gives me an
opportunity to manually change the files in case there's a problem, as sometimes happens when the album is longer
than the standard 74 minutes. 2
For mass ripping, you can write a short script that saves time by automatically opening and closing the CD
drawer. It might not sound a lot, but the initial hurdle in extracting your music collection is psychological; the thought
of swapping many hundreds of CDs and renaming and tagging each file is daunting. Because the audio is ripped at the
speed of your CD or DVD drive (and not related to the duration of the album), you can extract a whole disc in about 5 to
10 minutes. And with the online track listings database (CDDB, which combines the start time and duration of each
track into an ID for the disc as a whole), the tagging process is also automatic. Sometimes there are duplicate IDs,
which requires manual intervention, but most of the discs can be processed automatically using the -N flag, as shown
in the following script. The abcde script also supports arguments that allow you to specify the format of the filenames,
if this is important to you, along with layout information for handling albums with multiple artists.

#!/bin/bash
while :
do
echo Insert next disc...
read x

cdcd close
abcde -N
cdcd eject
done

DVD
With the more complex format of DVDs and the industry's perpetual insistence that encryption is necessary, the
ripping of DVDs has an extra requirement, 3 namely, libdvdcss2 . This is a library that circumvents the copy protection
on encrypted discs, which most commercial movies use. Its legality is uncertain, so the major Linux distributions have
erred on the side of caution by not including the package. Instead, the library must be downloaded separately, either
from an alternative repository or from compiled source. Naturally, I must take the same “safe” approach and can only
tell you how you might install it, if you find the files on a web site somewhere.

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