My HP G60 laptop has an optical drive, so I thought I would give ripping CDs a try on this machine. But I’m not exactly sure about the, err, workflow if I use native Haiku programs. (I don’t want to just install Linux ports unless I have to).
So I stuck the CD in the drive and it was automatically mounted and the tracks appear as wav files with artist / track titles automatically appearing from someplace online. (This worked even with some 30 year old CDs with horrible medieval xmas music on them, so whatever replaces cddb these days is very comprehensive or likes the same music my mom did…)
Then I found MediaConverter and figured I could just use it to convert the the wavs to flacs. It would not work directly from the CD, so I copied the wavs to a folder and tried again. Nope. MediaConverter made a bunch of empty 0KB flac files.
I gave up and downloaded some linux port called “fre:ac” and it worked perfectly. Now, to try to get the tags sorted.
At first I tried “Army Knife,” but I just got confused and it didn’t seem to work properly. I think messing around with file attributes is not such a great place to put the information, but it might be interesting to play around with later.
Next, I just decided to use kid3, a linux port that sucks in about half of KDE, but I understand it and so was able to write my flac tags. Am I missing a nice simple Haiku program for CD ripping?
This was pretty complicated: copy wavs from CD to folder, use fre:ac to convert wav to flac, add tags+cover art with kid3.
I decided to do a quick search and found Flacon. That might do the trick for you. Picard works pretty good for tagging when Army Knife falls short. I don’t think MediaConverter quite works and the Haiku developers are aware and will hopefully sort out its issues before the R1 stable release
I haven’t ripped, converted, tagged music for a very long time…
But it should be easier than those 3 steps. Just mount the audio CD, don’t copy the files to a folder. Then drag those files into fre:ac, get the ID3 tags with fre:ac’s database feature, and convert to flac into the destination folder.
CD playback is awfully broken directly from the CD,but works fine when copying the files to a folder on the SSD and then playing them from there.
I noticed that too when trying to play the wavs using MediaPlayer and it’s probably the same issue that fre:ac has reading the stuff from the CD directly.
If there’s an issue playing from CD directly, consider opening a bugreport.
That said, robotrechi reported issues with MediaConverter, no fre:ac. I assume he didn’t try to convert directly from CDwith fre:ac, because the files were already copied to the disk.
I’ve just retried it with the latest nightly,testing if the situation has improved since I tested it a few months ago,but it has become worse.
Last time the audio was very distorted,but kept playing.
Now it plays the first 2-3 seconds and then goes silent,but the UI looks as if it were continuing to play.
Dragging the progress bar around can make it play another 2-3 seconds before it goes silent again.
The .wav files that I copied to the SSD still play perfectly fine.
Update: Retried on a laptop that I haven’t updated for quite some time (hrev57707) and that does the same as my up-to-date desktop: It plays very short,not even a whole second,then it goes silent but the UI looks like it were playing.
Also tried with another CD of course,same behaviour.
I forgot to mention that playing CDs works poorly for me too. I’m not super bothered by this because playing a CD from a laptop is pretty horrible even when it works properly: the noise of the disc spinning is irritating enough that I almost never play CDs. (But I keep them around as backup.)
I didn’t bother to see if fre:ac (btw, that’s a terrible name, in the longtime Linux tradition of bizarre and incomprehensible app names.) would read the wavs from the CD.
Playing the flacs worked fine in the graphical media player, but the command line player cmus skipped every few seconds. But this is also not a big deal to me since I hate cmus enough that I’m going to try and compile moc player instead.
No. You can play the audio CDs without transfer to Desktop. Tested on hrev58815 x86. No issues in audio stuttering. May depend on desktop overall hardware of course.
Don’t use MediaPlayer for this purpose (yet). Moreso just a demo native app.
You can review ffplay, QMPlay2, and Clementine to play/rip audio CDs.
Ex. Clementine → Tools → Rip…
As I wrote earlier here on the forum, I found one app that can play files directly from the CDs : it is SMPlayer.
You have to drag and drop the mounted music CD from the desktop onto the SMPlayer’s control or player window. .
As I wrote it can play, but only this way - you launch SMPlayer, as Audio CDs do not exist as an object which can be assigned to a specific application program. Only open exists for right click, that just opens a Tracker window - showing tracks as vaw files in a folder, against staring to play the tracks from the disc.
If you try the vaw files with right click on the roll down menu, then …
that tries to play it with Mediaplayer - but that fails.
Even VLC fails - it does not play as on Win/Linux but does some conversion on files on Haiku, maybe load tracks one-by-one to memory or else place , but surely cannot play as it expected by its nature.
SMPlayer won’t stutter or require to copy the files to disk.
It is the one and only - direct CD player -program on Haiku actually … that can do direct play without a hassle - but you must load the CD drag ‘n’ drop.
It won’t open the audio CD from the program - it had not adapted to Haiku …
So, here you are - in an endless loop ! … this can be avoided using drag ‘n’ drop the Audio CD icon from the Desktop.
I did some probatiion regarding CD ripping as well, but it had not found one program that would do all the stuff, so I gave up on. I like if the tags are loaded/filled out before ripping, I just fix typos, etc. to have better tags, but CD databases - which ones wired into the several apps - are often down nowadays, it seems.
I did typing a lot earlier file names, directories, tags but loss of such data made me hate such good work. So now I just play directly the discs if have one - or try to find a playlist on YT …
Everyone in the topic has been complaining that it doesn’t work, there is no “if” here. It sounds like the cdda filesystem should use more caching and readahead to preload the musig in ram, and not wait until the media player tries to access a sector to send a command to the cd drive to read it.
Yes, It works somewhat and the CD-Player will spin up fast and after reading some part it will go slow and fast again, and so on! No matter which program I use!
Copy the files work but it is not the way people will use CDs here!
“if” I only know how to load if first or ahead!
It sounds like the cdda filesystem should use more caching and read_ahead to preload the music in ram
Going back to robotrechie’s first comments–yes ‘fre:ac’ is the best GUI app for converting CDs into MP3 files for Haiku. I will not use anything else.
My other favorite app for ripping CDs is an old BeOS terminal app: RipEnc version 3.00 for BeOS. For most part, as long as there is CDDB entry for the CD, it will auto load the metadata and other CD info; otherwise, you have manual entry.
I used RipEnc for decades and coupled with Zeta OS’ AudioTagger, which is superior to ArmyKnife (IMO) to manage the ID3 metadata. Do not get me wrong, ArmyKnife is still good…wish it would handle the Cover Art pictures better. For example, for some reason ArmyKnife will not display the cover art [it will error out during the load of the MP3 file] but still properly display the metadata–where AudioTagger will display all data elements correctly.
After re-processing my entire CD collection of 2500+ albums in Zeta OS recently, I created newer and higher quality MP3s file versions for my Kodi library–as well as, I was ensuring the metadata and attributes were properly updated for my Haiku instance once copied from the Zeta instance.
I am currently working on updating my MP4 library for my Kodi and updating the MP4 files for Haiku and properly setting its attributes.
