Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 6-63.
The Ubuntu Add/Remove Applications dialog
AudioCDRippingandEncoding
K3b + LAME
(Ubuntu repositories)
Ripping
a CD is the process of extracting the original music tracks from an
original audio CD as WAV files.
Encoding
is the process of converting those
WAV files to some other audio format, such as MP3. There are dozens of audio
CD rippers available for Linux, but the one we find ourselves coming back to
every time we try something different is K3b (KDE Burn, Baby, Burn), shown in
Figure 6-64, which is also the best disc burning application available for Linux.
To install K3b, click the Ubuntu Applications menu and choose Add/Remove.
When the Add/Remove Applications dialog appears, type “K3b” in the search
box. Mark the K3b checkbox, and click the Apply Changes button.
Like the gold-standard Windows application Exact Audio Copy, K3b performs
extremely accurate rips. It's also very convenient to use, particularly if you have
a huge stack of audio CDs to rip. As you insert each audio CD, K3b automati-
cally looks up the CDDB track information, rips the audio data to WAV files
(which can be deleted automatically as processing for each CD is complete),
and encodes those WAV files as MP3 files or in another format you specify. All
you have to do is insert a new audio CD each time K3b finishes processing the
last one and ejects it.
Some years ago, we ripped our entire collection of audio CDs to uncompressed
WAV files, because we wanted the best possible audio quality. Unfortunately,
a typical audio CD contains about 600 MB of WAV files, so our collection of
several hundred CDs occupied about 500 GB of disk space. As it turned out,
that was overkill.
