On Thu, 10 Mar 2011, Stephen Gregory wrote: > On 11-03-10 08:47 AM, Robert P. J. Day: > > > > ... asked about ripping many CDs. > > > > I ripped my small collection of about 100 CD a few years back. I > encoded everything into flac. I used the very excellent command line > tool "abcde." It automagically pulled the CD information from the > internet giving me a chance to edit the result before ripping. > > Whatever tool you use I learned two important lessons: > > 1) always check the CD info. I found lots of typos and questionable > interpretations of track names. > > 2) most importantly: choose a good file/track naming scheme from the > start. Include the Artist and Album in the filename. Many programs > don't do this by default. It makes working with the files a pain > later. (Of course, you can always pull header information to rename > the tracks later.) > > abcde excels at naming files. It handles multi-artist compilation > albums sanely by keeping the album together, instead of seperating > it out by artist. abcde also has options for substituting special > characters out of file names. (I also replace space with underscore > because I am old fashioned like that.) ok, just to recap to make sure i'm not wasting my time, "abcde" looks like it will do what i want. as long as the music CD has no weird properties or anomalies, i can just toss it in the drive, run $ abcde -o flac watch long enough to see that the process starts properly, then walk away and let it create a directory full of FLAC files for that album. a quick perusal shows that the individual FLAC files are, of course, fairly sizable -- anywhere from 15M to 30M. so conservatively speaking, if i consider an album with 15 songs, that will take up at most about 500M on the hard drive. if i buy a 2TB drive, that would give me room for about 4000 CDs. does my math look sane? so for about $100, i can encode way more CDs than i actually have and i can figure out what to do with them later. thoughts? are there any other abcde options i might be interested in? and after i've encoded a bunch of CDs, i'll have to decide what to do with them. then i'll be back with more questions. rday