Page Category: Software

1.0 There are already lots of CD rippers. Why write another?

Whilst it's true that there are lots of CD rippers out there, none of them met my specific ripping and tagging needs very well. My favourite CD ripper on Linux, for example, is abcde. It does a superb job of ripping a CD safely (that is to say, it cares more about accuracy than speed). But it spends a lot of time getting CD metadata (composer, work name, track titles and so on) from online CD databases and then prompting you to edit it in not very obvious ways. The metadata sourced for pretty much any classical CD you can think of is almost always complete rubbish, so abcde spending all that time and effort fetching and applying that metadata to my music files is a complete waste of time, as far as I'm concerned. On the other hand, it's true that abcde can be configured not to consult those online databases at all, which is excellent news... except that then your ripped music is left with absolutely no metadata at all.

I wanted a happy medium of allowing myself to specify some metadata, but not to have to fight bad online sources of metadata in the process! [...] 

1.0 What is CCDR?

CCDR is (I think!) a better way to rip Classical music CDs! It's precise and accurate, generating perfect copies of your precious CDs. It doesn't fetch metadata from online databases, but will instead ask you a handful of questions that allow you to specify your own, accurate metadata. It outputs files to lossless FLAC files, which then represent a bit-perfect archive of your physical CD.

In short, CCDR provides an excellent way to transition from physical musical media to the world of digital music. [...] 

1.0 What is CCDT?

If you've ripped an Audio CD using the Classical CD Ripper (CCDR), then you already possess FLAC files on your hard disk that have been tagged with metadata describing the Composer, the name of the composition involved and its genre: those 'core' tags are part of CCDR's fundamental functionality.

But CCDR won't have been able to write meaningful metadata into the track name, performer(s) and Album Art tags: so, all your ripped music will be called things like “track01.flac” without a lot to distinguish it from the “track01.flac” that was ripped earlier for the other Symphony or Concerto on that CD of yours. [...] 

1.0 Introduction

I will assume in this article that you already know what the Classical CD Tagger is, what it does and how it does it. Please read the main CCDT article now if that's not true for you!

In this article, I'm going to run through the commands needed to get it working on Windows 10. [...] 

1.0 Introduction

I've been ripping music CDs for a long time: I remember doing it for the first time in the middle of the Australian bush in around 1999. Unfortunately, back then, I decided to rip everything to MP3 (because disks were expensive!) and so I soon had to re-rip everything to FLAC once I realised how much of the true audio signal I'd thrown away in the original ripping exercise. Back then, too, I was primarily a Windows user, so I sometimes ripped to WMA Lossles, which then proved inconvenient when I started using Linux on my main desktop -so all my lossless WMAs got converted to FLAC. And then back again when I wiped whatever Linux was flavour of the month and reverted back to Windows… and so on and on.

You get the idea: ripping CDs is one step in a process of converting physical musical media to digital-only. It's the necessary first step, but it's not usually the last one and the tools we use to do any of the steps change over time, as our tastes, skills and experiences evolve. The net result is, probably, a nightmare of tagging history building up in your music files. Mine, certainly, contain a pile of nonsense I don't want and history I don't need… so I wrote a small utility that will salvage the data from the “core” metadata tags (such as Composer, Album name, Recording Date, Performers and so on) and remove anything that's non-core. [...] 

1.0 Introduction

You presumably rip CDs to FLAC files because you care about listening to good quality digital music files: instead of throwing away a significant proportion of the audio signal to create a small MP3 file, you chose to keep the entire audio signal in FLAC format. At least, that's the reason I ripped everything I own to FLAC!

When you care about quality above all else, then, it helps to make sure that your FLAC files don't degrade over time -introduce a little bit of corruption there, a smidgen of bit-rot there… pretty soon your FLAC file will not be a bit-perfect copy of your original CD. [...] 

This site was developed with the idea of enabling the best techniques to organise, manage and (above all!) listen to a large, digital classical music collection. To help achieve these goals, I've written a number of software programs over the years -and there's an archive page where all the old, unmaintained stuff I've written remains available to download. Here, though, are the latest and greatest versions of the core programs I think you'll need to master a classical music collection:

• Giocoso -to play music
• Semplice -to tag, volume boost, merge and convert audio files
• Niente - to make sure your digital music files are not going physically corrupt and continue to meet all logical tagging standards

Click on one of the icons to be taken to that program's 'product page', from which the software can be downloaded and its user manual found: [...]