Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Cheers, Mate

Thanks to this guy for cutting short my evening-long search for a way to rip CDs to MP3.

He's right, it is ridiculously hard on Linux. My understanding is that that's because That Can Get You Sued, and Canonical is probably big enough to be a tasty target for the MP3 patent holders.

Normally I would use the ogg format, but I just got a cheap mp3 player thingy and none of the cheap ones seem to handle ogg. I did check.

2 comments:

Ivan Privaci said...

Depending on WHICH cheap player it is, there's a small but nonzero chance that it has undocumented ogg support (i.e. it's in the firmware but the manufacturer never bothered to mention "ogg" or "vorbis" in the "file formats supported" list in their packaging), or that it may be able to run RockBox instead of the stock firmware.

(The $25US Refurbished "Sansa Clip v1" I picked up has native ogg vorbis support but it's broken for playing single-channel audio as many "oggcasters" publish. Fortunately, RockBox runs on it and handles everything just fine...)

That said, the good news is once you add whatever repository your distribution has its "restricted" media codecs in, the actual ripping should be trivial. I've always been a big fan of the "audiocd:" ioslave in KDE.

Lifewish said...

That's an interesting thought - I'll test it out next time the player, the computer and myself are all in the same location. Cheers.