Linux Multimedia Hacks

Get a Grip on CD Ripping

Use the Grip program to automate all of your CD ripping tasks.

The command line is definitely a powerful tool, particularly for automation, but it can also make doing some tasks, like ripping a CD, more trouble than it’s worth, especially if you plan on tagging the resulting audio with metadata such as ID3 tags. While there are several frontends to command-line tools, Grip, in my opinion, is an excellent example of a GUI frontend that balances the power and configurability of the command line, with the ease of use of a GUI interface. After you get to the end of this hack, your CD-ripping process will be so automated that once you start, you won’t even have to pick up a mouse.

Grip is a pretty common program, so your Linux distribution will likely have it packaged for you already. Otherwise, you can download the latest version of Grip from the official web site at http://nostatic.org/grip. Grip is a frontend in that for the most part, it uses other command-line utilities behind the scenes to do all of the work and simply provides an easy-to-use interface to configure what commands it passes down to those tools. Because it is a frontend, Grip can make use of many different command-line CD ripping programs and WAV encoder programs and, as such, it supports ripping to a number of popular formats including MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, or even a custom encoder of your choosing. This also means that to use those tools, you will need to already have them installed.

Configure ...