Showing posts with label hydrogenaudio. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hydrogenaudio. Show all posts

Monday, October 6, 2008

Ripping and encoding music with EAC, LAME, and Zsh

This is my current ripping+encoding scheme (on Windows, but LAME part is relevant for *nix as well):

  • Use the Hydrogenaudio wiki as an authoritative information source
  • Rip to WAV with Exact Audio Copy for best ripping precision - configure EAC with the configuration guide from Hydrogenaudio
  • Encode to MP3 with the latest LAME (Windows binaries here)
  • Encode high-quality (-V 2) MP3s for the home computer, low-quality (-V 6) MP3s for the portable player

Once the ripping is done, I use this shell-script magic to encode all the WAVs in high quality (low quality left as an exercise):

for x in **/*.wav; do
  mkdir -p ../high/"$(dirname $x)"
  /cygdrive/c/lame3.98/lame.exe -V 2 "$x" ../high/"${x/.wav/.mp3}"
done

This lets me get the attention-intensive need-to-change-the-CD-in-the-drive ripping out of the way quickly. I don't even need to be around later when its encoding.

This requires Zsh with extended globbing turned on (I use it on Windows through Cygwin). Non-zsh note: you can probably use 'find' with or without 'xargs' instead of the '**/*.wav' recursive globbing, but which one is cooler? :-)