Semplice Version 2 - Ripping Standard Audio CDs
1.0 Introduction
Semplice Version 2 now includes CD ripping functionality.
Semplice CD rips are basic, in the sense that they are always of the whole disk and no attempt is ever made to do any metadata or album art fetching: for classical music, all Internet-sourced metadata is complete rubbish and you'll end up spending more time correcting it than you would in simply typing it in from scratch in the first place (which Semplice's Tagging menu is there to help you do, of course). Semplice CD rips are, however, always accurate: for starters, the ripper uses the cdparanoia tool to ensure that defective parts of a source CD are read and re-read as many times as needed to arrive at a 'true' output. As an additional factor in achieving an accurate rip, Semplice will examine your optical drive and try to determine a 'read offset' for it: most optical drives read data from block X when they've been instructed to read it from block A. Knowing that difference between requested and actual read locations allows Semplice to adjust the stream of data coming off the CD and thus ensure it's an accurate representation of the data that was originally pressed into the CD. Finally, Semplice will attempt to compare any rips you get it to do with a database of other people ripping the same CD (called the AccurateRip database). If you all end up with the same bits in the same places, you can be very confident that your rip is bit-perfect. This functionality comes from Semplice's interaction with the audiotools package, which is therefore a software prerequisite for Semplice: usually, Semplice will automatically install this package for you as part of its own installation process. If for some reason Semplice fails to install it for you, then CD ripping will still work, but no querying of the AccurateRip database will take place to see if your rip is equivalent to anyone else's. See Section 5 below for instructions on how to manually install the audiotools package should you need to do so (though hopefully, unless you're running a weird distro configured in weird ways, you won't need to do so!) [...]