Yesterday I wrote about the odd difficulties I had in moving my main desktop computer from Ubuntu 9.10 to 10.04. Everything seems to work fine now, except one thing: Grip, for ripping CDs. Regular readers may remember I posted a guide for migrating from Grip to RipperX. I used RipperX for a while, until someone posted a comment about how he’d installed Grip in Karmic. I followed his link and found he’d set up a PPA. I was getting a little annoyed with filename handling in RipperX, so I used the PPA and switched back to Grip.
Now, post-upgrade, I find myself dealing with a weird Grip bug. This happens only on the system I upgraded in place, not on any of the fresh-install boxes, but when I open a CD in Grip, the tracklisting immediately highlights track 5 (or the highest track number if there are fewer than five on the disc) and won’t let me select any other track. If I click on some other track, it jumps back to track 5 as soon as I let go the mouse button. This effectively prevents me from editing track names in Grip.
Under ordinary circumstances I’d probably put more work into figuring out why this happens, but when uninstalling and reinstalling didn’t fix it, and building from source didn’t fix it, I realized it probably wasn’t a smart use of my time to be bug hunting on a package that is no longer maintained. So I decided to once again look for an alternative to Grip and RipperX. I poked around in Synaptic for a while and installed a few things – Ripoff and Asunder, for example – but in each case I found configurability and editability lacking compared to what I was used to with Grip. A little googling turned up a forum post from a user of another distro talking about Audex, and I decided to try that. It turns out to be in the repos, so installing it was as simple as sudo apt-get install audex.
Audex is a KDE4 application, and it has the polished user interface typical of those. You can set up multiple “profiles” for ripping to different formats and compression levels – it comes with several already configured, including .ogg, .flac, .wav, and several different quality levels of .mp3. The profiles are in a convenient drop-down at the top of the window, with the last-used setting remembered. Insert a CD, and it reads the disc and does an online lookup, and populates titles and cover art automatically. You can edit the song titles before starting the rip; discwide data (artist, disc title, genre, and so forth) are also editable from a clickable link below that information.
I went into the preferences section to set it up the way I liked it, and was delighted to find that the “mp3 extreme” profile was already set up almost exactly as I wanted it, using the lame encoder with the –extreme preset. The only change I had to make was a slight alteration in the filename template, and even this was made very clean and understandable, with the template variables automatically inserted by buttons, and examples automatically generated to show the kind of filenames your template would produce. There is the option to automatically produce a playlist in the output directory. It can even embed the album cover art into each file if you want (I unchecked this option, though). All these options are separately configurable for each profile. Very, very nice.
I ripped a couple of CDs to test it. Audex works on the same model as Grip and others; rip first, then encode, so while track 2 is ripping, track 1 is encoding. Behind the scenes it’s using cdparanoia to do the actual rip. Progress bars are provided. It doesn’t write any work files to the final output directory, which is important for me because my output directory is a network share. And it’s fast. I couldn’t understand why it seemed so much faster than Grip and RipperX until I looked at the files in a tag editor and saw that it was using the 64-bit version of the lame encoder.
All in all I’m extremely impressed. Audex does just what I need it to do, cleanly and quickly, with a minimum of fuss, and with a very well-thought-out interface. It’s still not quite as configurable as Grip, but it’s configurable enough. The only thing I’d had Grip doing that Audex couldn’t was create ID3v1 tags – it only creates ID3v2. But I’ve been meaning to ditch the v1 tags anyway; they’re pretty much useless now, so that provided an incentive to get off my butt and find a way to strip all the v1 tags off my files.
I highly recommend Audex. I wish I’d found it sooner.
[...] Ubuntu: Migrating from Grip to Audex [...]