CD to MP3: titles ?

[VJ]

Hello,

I recently purchased an MP3 player (using an IBM microdrive) for my car. In combination with the headunit, it allows displaying titles .

So, I would like to 'rip' my CDs to MP3, and have the titles created automatically. I know this is possible, but the issue is: my computer has no internet connection . I do have easy (and full) access to internet on a high speed connection at work (I can use it for personal use).
Is there a way of downloading the necessary resources (e.g. by selecting my CDs), so that the ripping program (not sure which one I'll use, I'm thinking of using Plextools) can get the titles locally ?

Thanks!


Jörg

[agallag]

http://www.freedb.org/modules.php?name=Sections&sop=viewarticle&artid=12

That would be a good place to start. It's the entire FreeDB database. I'm sure there's a way to point your ripping program at the local copy of the database. Dig around on that website and see if you can find anything.

[Pace]

CDex will allow you to use a local copy of a CDDB - http://www.cdex.n3.net/

[Indiana]

I would strongly suggest using Exact Audio Copy (EAC-Homepage) and Lame (get it e.g. here) for ripping CD tracks to mp3.

Why to use EAC and not other grabbers? Well, I'll quote from the authors homepage

I wrote this software because I am fed up with other audio grabbers. I always had to listen to every grabbed wave because other audio grabbers only do jitter correction while CD-ROM drives reading scratched CDs often produce distortions. Listening to every wave is a waste of time. So in March I decided to write my own audio grabber...

And this is oh so true. It's simply annoying to grab 50+ CDs to mp3 just to find out aafterwards that every 5th to 10th track has some errors and you need to retry the grab. With EAC the ripping may take a bit longer but usually the result is really correct.

And EAC can of course use a local CDDB database.

[Goc]

Yup! I strongly recommend EAC/LAME combination... IMHO, only combination that gives near accurate results.

[VJ]

Thanks for the links, I'm downloading everything as we speak (or better: as I type ).
As far as audio ripping is concerned, I know the Plextor drives have fault correction in hardware (which is very impressive: I tried it before and on one occasion it slowed ripping down to 0.1x , just to overcome some serious fault on the CD - it was a lot faster before and after that particular position), hence my initial thought of using Plextools (IIRC, it also works with the Lame encoder). Still the developper of EAC also has tested with Plextor, so I'll give it a go.

Thanks again!

Jörg

[VJ]

Everything works perfectly ! I made the mistake of downloading the freedb-unix-archive, and then uncompressing it All these small files quickly filled my harddisk (I've now put them in a compressed NTFS folder, which does seem to prevent this effect occuring).
Thanks!
I just forgot that I don't know what standards the Blaupunkt player supports: in the pdf manual, they always mention MP3, 192Kbps; but I don't know if variable bitrates are supported... Guess I'll have to wait before I can start ripping everything...


Jörg

[DGhost]

Plextools is a variant of EAC, IIRC.

I would also vote for EAC/Lame. great combination that has never given me trouble and I have been using it for years.

[Ribbit]

Plextors have a proprietary command set for ripping audio - the Plextools probably use that.

[VJ]

Only downside: it doesn't seem to be able to use a local freedb database...

Ok, this should work, but it doesn't appear to... Still searching...

Jörg

[VJ]

I downloaded the windows version of the freedb archive, apart from taking up less space, it also works with the Plextools software.

Plextools seems to offer few options for writing ID3 tags or sending parameters to Lame, but it rips faster than EAC, but EAC can launch multiple Lame-encoders at the same time, which allows 4 simultanious encodings on my dual Xeon...

Ideal would be to rip to WAVs using Plextools, and then encode the MP3s from WAVs.
I could use the Lame from the commandline to do this, but writing the right ID3 tags becomes more difficult (and less automated)...


Jörg