ABCDE – your command line CD-ripper
August 30, 2007 by Clair Ching
Filed under Geeky Fun
One of my favorite command line tools in ABCDE, also known as A Better CD Encoder. You could run it on the commandline. Though it hasn’t been updated, it’s still in the repos. The nice thing about it is that ripping a CD is quick and you could still interact with the app though it’s not GUI-fied with windows popping out and telling you that you are now ripping a CD, and so on.
Awesome features:
- It has an easy to understand user interface. It gives you what’s going on and what you can do. An example is that when you’re ripping a CD, you have the option to edit the track information.
- You could get information about the tracks on your CD.
- You could rip your CDs and have your music in mp3 or ogg format.
- Get info via CDDB query over the internet.
I have used Grip before but I find ABCDE something easier to use, especially when I don’t really mind not listening to the tracks while the CD is being ripped anyway.
You could download the ABCDE source here. Or look for it in the repositories.
I like it too, and it rips to aac using faac, instead of the other ripping tools which uses some gstreamer thingy, which has been buggy for at least 2-3 ubuntu releases.
Hi, Jan.
I am glad to find someone who also likes using ABCDE. I learned about it two years ago when I installed Xubuntu in my office desktop machine. I didn’t really know what tools to use and searched for it in the repository. Since then, I love ripping my CDs using it. It hasn’t failed me 
hm. thanks )