The Ripper's blues

February 26, 2007 12:11 AM

One-CD-to-one-audiofile software ripper? Failing that, audiofiles merger software?

Quick version: what it says up there.

Anecdotal version (well, if I got you to kindly read this at least I could provide you some entertainment!). Being the happy owner of an iRiver T10 2GB, after some fiddling around I realized that ripping my not numerous CD collection to OGG VBR 64 kbs was just fine for me (I'll now dodge decaying produce from the hardcore audiofiles, do excuse me for a moment). Trouble is, this would easily put around 1200 tracks on the T10, which (and this is the first and only bad thing I've found so far about the lovely T10) can only endure 1000. So either I rip (some/all) CDs as whole tracks, or find some decent merger. I've tried some of the mergers around and they produce files that don't get read past the equivalent of the first unmerged track (not sure where the fault is, merger or T10's decoder).

I'm afraid there weren't any monkeys wearing a fez in the anecdote, which makes me sad.

posted by Iosephus to computers & internet (11 comments total)

I really wouldn't recomend doing this, you aren't going to be able to index specic songs or tag the tracks and you are really gonna regret ripping all those CDs into single tracks later on.

I'm a bit confused when you say the player can only handle 1000 songs. It is a 2GB player, the only limation I can see is that physically it cannot hold more than 2GB, which is probably somewhere around 1000 songs, but that depends on encoding, format, etc. Changing from single tracks into album tracks is not going to effect that size very much. Is there some kind of hard menu limitation beyond 1000 songs?
posted by sophist at 1:21 AM on February 26, 2007

To answer the actual question i would reccomend CDex for ripping (hands down the best ripper imo), select all the songs and then choose "Extract a Section" and this will yield one continuous file.

iTunes and other similar rippers have options in their advanced settings to do the same. I think in iTunes you rip as normal and then join them together as detailed in this Lifehacker article. A quick search also yielded programs such as this to join existing mp3s.
posted by sophist at 1:31 AM on February 26, 2007

Yes, I can see the regret factor and have most of those CDs already in single track format OGG (whence I realized the players limitation too late - take my picture and make me a poster boy for the RTFM cases). The limitation is on the number of files, not their total combined size. So I could have 2000 OGGs of 10kbyte each and be very much screwed still. So the need to reduce the number of files under 1000 by fusing all tracks in a CD into a single track. Then again, there may be a smarter way around this that I haven't thought of. Regardless, I can't find a decent working OGG merger, my Google-fu has abandoned me (I think that one doesn't actually join MP3s, as it sort of says?)

CDex... Ohhh... Will try that one now, thanks!
posted by Iosephus at 1:36 AM on February 26, 2007

Oh yeah forgot about the .ogg thing. Here is a free ogg joiner.
posted by sophist at 1:44 AM on February 26, 2007

Many players, such as foobar2000, can use a .cue file to read one large audio file (say, a continuous file of a CD) and split it into "virtual" tracks once you've loaded it into the player. The .cue file is small basically contains points in time that tell the player where to divide the audio up when it's in a playlist.
posted by tumult at 2:10 AM on February 26, 2007

oops, to finish: this won't work on your iRiver, but what you can do is store your collection like this on your computer and either deliver the whole "album track" to your iRiver or use foobar2000 to spit out divided-up files if you want them that way.
posted by tumult at 2:12 AM on February 26, 2007

If you want to squeeze more files on to your T10 without doing a bunch of silly file joining, try breaking up your 1200 files into two or three folders on the device.
posted by majick at 5:39 AM on February 26, 2007

Exact Audio Copy with the LAME plugin will give you the best possible sound quality.
posted by fvox13 at 10:03 AM on February 26, 2007

It's a little-known fact that iTunes will rip CDs to single files. Select all the tracks, then Advanced > Join CD Tracks, then rip. You can rip to MP3, AAC, AIFF, WAV, or Apple Lossless.
posted by kindall at 11:46 AM on February 26, 2007

I've done this before with Audacity. You just pop in the CD, push record on Audacity, and let it run. Then once the 'single track' you want is finished, push stop and clean up the squiggly bit (I don't know the technical name) until it sounds how you want it to. Audacity can export to MP3, WAV, and Ogg. (MP3 requires a separate download.) Bonus part is that it's all free!
posted by sperose at 1:03 PM on February 26, 2007

All great info, thanks people... Installed EAC and Audacity too, as they seem worth having around (even though I had already started using CDex already for the single track for CD).
posted by Iosephus at 5:23 PM on February 26, 2007