Audio/Sound on FreeBSD

Lots to do here. Making audio drivers work, making gnome and enlightenment do audio, cd players, mp3 players, ripping mp3's

Ripping MP3's

I had never considered myself an MP3 person. I don't pirate music. I occasionally put together a mix of tracks from other CD's, but I had used the native WAV format so I could play them on a normal CD player. Then I was picking out a sound system for my car, and it hit me: with a 10 disc MP3 player in my trunk, I could conceivably carry my whole music collection around with me.

There are basically three kinds of programs out there, and you want one of each. One kind of program rips tracks from CD's, it stores the track in a WAV file without any compression. Another kind of program compresses WAV files into MP3 files. A third kind of program acts as a front-end to these, coordinates activities, and often add some other functionality.

grip

grip is a front end. It is highly configurable and can be used with pretty much any track ripper and any MP3 encoder. It also speaks CDDB, so you don't have to type in all the names of things, and CDDB even works through an HTTP proxy server.

grip also appears to have support for ID3 tags, although they don't seem to be working for me. I need to figure this out, because my MP3 player is supposed to support these. Hmm, I'll bet this is simply a matter of getting the right command-line options for the encoder. No, the man page talks about configuration options I don't have (like the name of an ID3 tag editor). Time to UTSL.

Well, the source is much newer than the packages collection. So I built it and installed it instead. It did ID3 tages, at least. However, it did not pass the filename to dagrab, so dagrab gave it a default name in my home directory, and then grip couldn't find it to encode it to an MP3. grip is also still putting things (m3u files) in an "mp3" directory instead of "MP3".

I use grip with dagrab and bladeenc.

Oh, here's one gripe I have with FreeBSD. The people who bundle the pre-compiled packages of GUI applications always forget to include icons that come with the source. I'm a big fan of launchers in my gnome panel, GTK developers always make images available, but they are never installed with the package.