On Tue, 20 May 2003, Aaron J. Grier wrote:

> On Tue, May 20, 2003 at 09:15:50PM +0900, Curt Sampson wrote:
> > So what do people recommend for ripping and storing this stuff?
>
> rip with cdparanoia, encode with flac or shorten (both in pkgsrc).  you
> could even go wild and put together a database (postgresql or otherwise)
> with artwork and a web front end to stream things and browse the
> database...  but I digress.

Well, it turns out that flac was the key, but I'm not doing it
abcde-style. I just came up with a simple little script that uses cdrdao
to rip the entire CD into one file, and produces a TOC file as well. I
convert the TOC file to a CUE file, and then use the flac encoder to
compress the ripped CD data, putting the data from the CUE file into the
cue list in the flac file. This ensures that for live CDs, I don't end
up with gaps in the audio, and also makes it easier to "restore" a CD.

I reckon that, having the TOC and cue information, I can do the CDDB
lookups in batch mode at a later date, rather than having to do it
individually for every CD. And of course I can extract individual tracks
for conversion to MP3 or whatever just by using the cue information in
the flac file. Eventually I'll probably create a database and automatic
extraction/playlist tools and so on.

The one minor hitch is that I can't seem to get cdrdao to use a CUE
file extracted from the flac to build a new CD (though it claims in
the manpage that it can use CUE files), so I have to keep the TOC file
around as well, but that's not a big problem.

So I've successfully backed up and recreated a CD, and it plays ok in a
CD player. Now all I need is enough (mirrored) drive space for the other
eight-hundred-odd....

Thanks for the help, everyone.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson  <cjs@cynic.net>   +81 90 7737 2974   http://www.netbsd.org
    Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light.  --XTC