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Reviews CD Rippers - A Short Review
| CD Rippers - A Short Review |
| Reviews | |||
| Written by Tim Bonesho | |||
|
16-Mar-2011
Introduction
I had a need to evaluate CD rippers lately and thought I'd share some of my experiences with you. The list of applications that I'm reviewing is, by no means the total list of CD rippers available in a Linux environment. Hope this is of benefit to you.
Testing Environment
The following evaluations were run on my custom built (as in by me) desktop computer. The box is configured to be fully compliant 64 bit architecture with quad core processor with high cache, 8G high speed RAM with lots of storage (5.75 TB total system capability). The operating system that the evaluations were conducted under is Mint Linux version 10 (64 bit) Gnome. All of the applications were built in my "experimental" version of Mint 10 using the menu package manager for installation or the application as well as any dependent libraries. There was no custom application build or installation.
There was one CD which was used as the ripper candidate throughout the test. The title used is "Bram Stoker's Dracula" composed by Woljciech Kilar. Feel free to amuse yourself with my music selection for this test.
Applications Evaluated:
Critical Requirements
For my application, it is essential that the ripper be capable of ripping to the flac format. I have a capable application (Sound Converter) which does a very decent job of down converting to mp3 if I need to move a copy of my music to a mp3 player. Additionally, the ripper absolutely must provide adequate id3 meta tag information. The final baseline requirement is that the ripper provide the ability to edit the title of the song being ripped. A highly desirable feature of the ripper is to rip the track number as a 2 digit number in the file name (track number-title).
Asunder
The version that was evaluated is version 1.9.3. Some of the features found in this application are:
Observations :
The configuration preferences were very easy to navigate. This ripper provides the capability to simultaneously rip in both flac and mp3 format. For my application this was a real bonus as it saved me the extra step of down converting copies to mp3 format. The usual preference adjustments to compression level etc. were also easy to navigate through.
The actual audio ripping pane was straight forward. The one drawback that I saw with respect to the rippping pane was that the application parsed in the artist's name in front of the track title for the selected CD used in this evaluation.
The total ripping in both formats took less than 3 minutes.
Screen Shots :
Goobox (CD Player)
The repository listed this application as Goobox. When it was built out the named application transitioned to CD Player. The version that was evaluated was 2.1.2. Some of the features found in this application included:
A few things that I found lacking in this application included:
Observations:
The entire application is pretty minimal. My guess is that the ripping functionality is more of an after thought than the applications's main focus.
Screen Shots:
Ripoff
The version that was evaluated was version 0.8.3 . Some of the features found in this application included:
Some of the capabilities that I found lacking in this application included:
Screen Shots:
RipperX
The version of RipperX that was evaluated was version. 2.7.2. The results of the evaluation included the following:
Some of the negative things I found in this application:
Observations:
The user interface on the ripper is appealing. For my use, there were way too many buttons to push in sequence before commencing the actual track ripping. Additionally, the application took an excessive amount of time to rip to the desired flac format. The fact that the ripped tracks did not have the necessary id2, id3 tags was, for me, the deciding factor that this application was not ready for use.
Screen Shots:
Sound - Juicer
The version that was evaluated was version 2.31.6. Based on the original requirements, the following were present in Sound Juicer:
Some of the negative things found in Sound-Juicer:
Observations:
Up to the point of this evaluation, Sound-Juicer was my preferred CD ripper. I have been using it consistently for over three years. Howver the ongoing difficulty with the file track number (not two digit on tracks 1-9) couple with the problems with the MusicBrainz database has led to use of another ripper instead of Sound-Juicer as my default.
Screen Shots:
Conclusion:
Based on the results obtained in this evaluation, I have moved to Asunder as my default CD ripping application. It possessed all of the mandatory features regarded as baseline requirements. As an added bonus, it can rip to both mpp3 and flac simultaneously. This saves a couple of additional steps for me in ripping audio CDs. I found the user interface easy to use and efficient.
Post any pertinent comments in the comments section of this article.
-Tim
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