CD ripping

[t0nyb]

Newbie here to Mepis and Linux. I am setting up an older PC as a jukebox and decided to use Mepis. It is a Celeron 800mhz with 512 mb ram. I added an old 20g hardrive for the music storage. I am ripping to Ogg. I have had no problems with Kb3. The problem is that it is painfully slow in ripping the CD. 45 minutes to rip a full cd to Ogg format. I have a 52x cd player on this machine. Is this slow speed a hardware issue or is there a faster program to rip with?

[fingal]

Hi not sure why it's so slow, as those specs are okay. I prefer to use Grip, which I've found has got better and better over the years. My current version knows all the track titles, musical genre and the production date on the CD!

It'll rip to OGG format by default, but needs an mp3 library to convert to that format. OGG is great though, so no problems there.

Hope this helps you.

[bigtomrodney]

There are a few things to look at. The first is DMA. You can see what level this is at for your CDROM using the hdparm command (I won't talk you through this one if you don't mind - it's a long time since I've needed it so I wouldn't like to guess).

The next is if there are any problems with your CDROM itself. Disable GRIP/CDParanoia in grip and use cdda2wav instead. It doesn't continually recheck so if you are happy enough your drive is in good order it is quicker.

The last is a bit more difficult. You are using a Celeron 800MHz processor. Celerons are commodity Pentium chips. Basically they used to half the L2 cache because it is so costly. You'll probably find that it has only 128KB of cache. This combined with an 800MHz processor means that unfortunately CD ripping will be slow, though I would think 45 minutes is excessive.

[t0nyb]

I am sorry to say DMA is on. I am using K3b. I may have to try Grip. It could take forever to Rip CD's at 45 minutes each.

[Marsolin]

If you use Konqueror as a file manager then ripping CD's can be very easy. By using the Audio CD Browser link from the left sidebar it will display the CD's contents, along with some folders called MP3, OGG, and FLAC. Select the files in the folder for whichever format you want and drag them to your destination folder. Konqueror will automatically transcode the files to your desired format as it copies them.