-kevin-

software: macFlac

Story

So, long story short. My ancient PC hardware is slow, and I wanted a way to rip CDs to flac on my Mac under OS X. I dug around and looked at a lot of different solutions and they didn't work. I wrote a horrible hack of a perl script. And if it continues to not have too many hurdles, I will improve it.

Download: macFlac v43

Installation

• Download macFlac.
• Put the script on your path.
• Download an OSX version of flac.
  • The ordained list
  • The ordained list
• Install the binary on your path.
• Disable iTunes from starting when an Audio CD is inserted.
  • Start System Preferences
  • Select CDs & DVDs.
  • Select Ignore in dropdown list titled When you insert a music CD:.
• Use cpan to install these modules:
  • CDDB_get
  • XML::Simple

Running

• Be sure iTunes isn't running.
• Run the script from the command line (Terminal).
• Insert CD.
• Wait for CD to be ejected.
• Insert CD.
• Rinse and Repeat.

Caveats

• Currently hardwired to place things in ${HOME}/cdrip/ (see To Do)

References

Other things I tried

• Max: This was probably the closest with paranoia and parallel ripping and encoding. Pretty nice, but would stop suddenly with a bunch of content left undone and lost somewhere on disk. Very scary and unpredictable. Needed something a little more dependable.
• flacit: Nice little script, which gave me the core idea for mine. List of things it doesn't do: run in a loop, set information correctly in metaflac info, try to get names from CDDB. But I admit to absconding with the core idea for my script from this one.
• RipIT: This is my favorite and I use it on my FreeBSD machine, but it is dependent on access to the raw drive, which I haven't a clue about how to accomplish under Mac OS X automounting perversion of FreeBSD.

Troublesome CDs

• Cracker - Countrysides: Appears to have two indexes, making it tricky to extract the times
• Dire Straits - Communique: problem with trailing accented e
• And disk with a data sector: untested

Bugs

• when disk image is mounted it attempts to read it and fails.
• handle mid game eject gracefully.
• Lots of debugging output.

To Do

• allow for configurable path for storage.
• support different file naming possibilities (currently hardwired to Artist/Album/<tracknum> - Title.flac).
• build an install package???
• verbose setting
• gracefully handle the presence of iTunes running.