FC5 mp3 ripping

[Michael A. Peters]

On Sun, 2006-05-07 at 15:30 -0600, Karl Larsen wrote:

>     Hi Dave, It is possible that the new way your making MP3 files that 
> are using the wrong sample frequency. I am very weak on this too, but I 
> have some mp3 music that plays fine in an old cd-rom based mp3 player. I 
> got a cheap mp3 player that uses a sim stick memory and it's tiny. The 
> old mp3 would not play. I gave it to a Windows friend and he put it 
> through their thing and raised the sample rate a lot. Now they play on 
> the new tiny box.
> 
> Karl
> 

Sometimes with old mp3's - they won't play in some software because they
use id3v1 tags which are not correctly read (I believe even totem has a
problem with them)

anyway - get id3v2 from Fedora Extras - and you can then convert the
id3v2 via:

id3v2 -C /path/to/song.mp3

-=-

As far as ripping goes - I rip using cdparanoia - to wav files (using -B
-X options).

I manually create a text file with | delimited meta data.

I do this because CDDB is really really bad sometimes (IE mis-spellings,
different data for different CDs of a multi CD set - IE CD1 might have
the artist as The Rolling Stones, genre rock while CD2 from same set is
Rolling Stones (no the), genre pop) etc. - oh, and Hispanic music, I'm a
fan of some Hispanic rock artists (ie Shakira) and the CDDB rarely has
the accents - so I said to hell with auto tagging, I tag myself. More
work, better results.

Then a shell script goes through and converts all the wav files to flac
for archival purposes, reading the manually entered metadata for
tagging. Another script then transcodes to mp3 via lame preset-standard
(192 VBR). Finally, I run mp3gain on the mp3's using the -a switch.

The result of this method is properly tagged flac files for archival
purposes, and properly tagged mp3 files at a decent bit rate and a sound
level that is consistent through all my mp3's - so I never have to use a
normalizing plugin or futz with the volume (and since I use the -a
switch and do all the mp3's at once, if I listen to them as an album -
the relative volume of the songs is as the mixer intended)

If anyone is interested in my scripts (which could use some
improvements) e-mail me off list. It's more work, but the results are
better.

If you don't want to go through all that - I know that grip in FC5 (in
extras) will properly rip to mp3 if you have lame installed and
configure it to do so.

The GStreamer stuff - I like GStreamer, I really like it, but the fact
that you have to create ripping profiles using a different tool than the
ripper itself is complete BS. I can not recommend Sound Juicer (even if
it does work) for that reason. grip is better in that respect.

OK- I'll shut up now.