Ready to rumble! This section will describe the process of ripping a CD onto the harddrive. We will create mp3 files. The folder structure, the way the music is organised on the hard disk, was described and setup in the previous section. So connect to the Internet now, as we are lazy and want to fetch the CD data from freedb! The process described in this section has to be repeated for ever CD you want to rip.
As we use a CD, which is not already listed in freedb, the screenshots might look a bit different as the ones you will encounter for a CD which could successfully fetched from freedb. Therefore you will learn to enter the CD data manually rather than fetching it from the Internet but comments will be made to point out the differences.
Don't try too hard to look for the CD we use in this example. It's a 'special' handbook-writer edition. ;-) Sadly these days, you never know...
Here we go...
The main window with an audio CD in the drive:
If you haven't done so far, insert the CD into the drive which device ID you specified here on this main window.
After a short moment the tracks and their length should be listed on the window, as in the screenshot. That is, if the CD could be identified as an audio CD and read by cdparanoia.
If that's not happening, check the Questions and Answers section for help or go back to the previous section covering the basic setup.
Attention: if the CD could successfully fetched from freedb, all song titles will already be filled out and above the track list, the artist and album name will be shown.
In case that there are more than one entry in the database which matches the 'unique' CD key for your CD, a popup window will appear and you can select the database entry which you think fits best for your CD.
If you have not checked the box for automatically querying freedb (CD Configuration page in the settings dialog), you can trigger this manually with the first button from the button bar. If you don't have a local database but fetching from the Internet you need to be connected to the net.
Double click anywhere in the first, blue 'highlighted' row (track 1):
The Album Editor window pops up.
Enter the album data for your CD according the pattern in the next screenshot. The song title in the Track 1 row of the Current Track box, the rest of the CD data in the Album box.
No need to enter the artist in the Current Track box, unless of course, you have a sampler with different artists for each song.
The upper comment field can be used for individual comments for each song, where as the Album comment field can be used for comments which should be the same across all songs.
Attention: of course, when you have successfully fetched the data from freedb the Album Editor is not empty but already holds the data as shown in the following screenshot. However, it is always a good idea to open the Album Editor once to check whether you are happy not only with the artist and album name (e.g. all words start with capital letters or not...) but to check if there are any unwanted comments.
Note: In this example we are using only id3v1 tags. This limits the length of the fields to 30 characters for the artist, album and song title and only 28 characters for the comment field. If you want to create id3v2 tags, you can use unlimited field length, well, at least what kaudiocreator allows here. Haven't checked. You set this option on the encoder configuration tab, take a look into the Basic Setup section for this.
You can change the tag information of the created files later at any time with a tag editor. Kid3 is a good one for mp3 files with which you can create id3v2 tags, too.
Tags may not be supported by all encoder/file formats. Check the encoder help for more information about this.
After clicking a confirmation message pops up:
We changed the general album data and so a message pops up, asking whether we want to take over this change for the other songs. Yep, we do. Will save us some work. Click Yes.
Attention: this popup window will not appear, if you for instance change the album name in the Album box. However, the change will be valid for the other songs as well.
And another pop-up window:
We are asked to select a music category for the album. Don't mix this up with the genre for the id3 tags. These are the 11 categories which are defined by freedb to pre-sort the CD IDs. As our CD is not in any database (how could it the way we use the program), we have to choose one so in case we would submit the CD data, it would be sorted correctly into the freedb database.
Just choose one of the entries which seems to match the style of the CD you rip. It's not important for this example, we don't submit the CD data anyways. For more info go to freedb.org and read about the categories. Pop or Rap for instance are listed under Rock.
After hitting OK, you come back to the main window again. Just double click on the row of the second track.
Again the Album Editor window pops up and you can see, that the Album box is already filled out with the data we entered for the first track. So just enter the field entries in the Current Track box. The song title for sure and other information if you want.
Click into the next row on the main screen and proceed this way until you entered the track data for all tracks on the CD.
Attention: this popup will not show up, if you have fetched the data from freedb. It was already sorted into one of these categories in the database.
Hit the button as shown on the screenshot
It's the 3rd button on the toolbar. Note, that the artist and album is shown above the track list.
Further note, that there is a check sign in front of every track row. Only the tracks which are marked that way will be processed. A single click on the track row will toggle the track selection. Ensure, that all tracks are selected or use the button at the bottom of the screen (not shown on screenshot) to select all tracks at once.
Once you have started the ripping process by clicking on the button, this confirmation window pops up. Hit OK and then we will take a look at the jobs window to follow what's going on.
Hit the Jobs tab to switch to the jobs window. It's on the upper left of the screen, right under the toolbar with the buttons.
That's the job control window. The first track is just ripped to the hard disk. A program status is shown on the lower left screen in the status row.
Aarrrrgh! Sh*t ! Suddenly this. RTFM (read the f***ing manual)! I wrote it! Why, I am incapable! That's what you'll see, when you try to encode with/invoke an encoder which you haven't installed yet. Tracks that could not successfully encoded will get marked with a red 'x' on the job list, too.
By the way, see how I cheated? The path for the tmp file and the destination path is not what we set up here in the example. Shame over me, but you have checked that you have write access to both, the folder for the temporary files and the destination folder, haven't you? ;-)
Let's do that again...
Hm, now it becomes clear, why the error occured just after the rip of the first song was finished.
See that? Job one, ripping the first track, is gone (finished) but we have a new entry: Job 4 which is the encoding of track 1 to mp3. So ripping and encoding is done parallel. See the status message on the bottom of the window, it's enhanced now.
I could not find a configuration setting to suppress this behavior. The only thing that seems to be configurable is the number of parallel rips and encodings. Wow, do even more jobs parallel? I don't know, what this means on lower end machines? The AMD64 used here didn't seem to have a problem ripping and encoding a track (two different though) at once.
Well, the cycling goes on. Now we are ripping the last track while encoding another one and having one in the encoder queue. After the last track is encoded, a small pop up message is shown on the upper left of the window for a short time.
That's it, ready for the next CD. Enjoy listening to your music...
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