[slinkelist] Automated ripping and MP3 encoding of entire jukebox

[Dylan Ginsburg]

I find myself needing to convert my entire CD collection to MP3. I really
don't want to spend the next several months of my life being a CD feeding
monkey slave to my computer. I have all my CD's in a jukebox, I have a
digital connection between my jukebox and my computer's sound card, I have
Slink-e, and I'm a software engineer with a lot of experience on the Windows
platform. It seems that I have all of the pieces necessary to automate the
process.

I searched through my local archive of slinkelist on this topic. I found a
thread with the good summary below of the steps that would be necessary to
make an automated process that would rip and MP3 encode an entire jukebox.

Did this project ever go anywhere? If it has begun I'd like to contribute.
If it hasn't begun I'd like to start working on it. If necessary, I will
investigate if it's feasible to do entirely myself but I would sure welcome
anyone else who wishes to work on it with me. I offer to handle the
coordination. (Or not if someone else really wants to do it. It doesn't
matter to me.)

I would choose to write it in C++ using MS Visual C++ 6. I could probably be
convinced (kicking and screaming) to write it in VB or even script though
I'm much less comfortable with those development environments. I'm open to
writing a polished program or finding a way to cobble together the steps
below in a semi-automated, semi-manual process.

Here are my quick takes on those 6 steps:

1. I haven't a clue how to do this one. This is the part that would probably
be the most difficult for me to do myself. I would have to do a lot of
research.

2. Once we have WAV files this shouldn't be difficult using LAME which is a
GPL MP3 encoder. It has a command line interface or the code could be
integrated directly. It's very flexible and is generally recognized as the
highest quality encoder available. I haven't looked into whether it can trim
leading and trailing silence which may be necessary because I suspect we
won't be able to begin/end the WAV recording process at precisely the
correct times.

3. It looks like this information is available using the "playing" CDJ event
through SlinkX. Receiving this event signifies that a new track is being
played so it could be the indicator used by step 1 to begin/end a WAV
recording. I worry about being able to begin the WAV recording before the
song begins. It might be necessary to record one big WAV per CD and break it
up in post processing.

4. Already handled by step 2.

5. The db access is easy once we have the unique key to identify the track
in CDJ's db.

6. I don't know anything about ID3 tags though I suspect it won't be
difficult to add the tag once we have the data and know the location of the
MP3 file. I bet there are command line utilities or GPL code that we can use
to do this.


If anyone is interested in working on this (or if work has already been
done) please contact me via email or this list. Thanks!


Dylan Ginsburg
Product Development Manager
OneSoft Corp.
703-770-4598
dylan.ginsburg@onesoft.com


-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Holopainen [mailto:michael@laserle.fi]
Sent: Friday, August 04, 2000 7:35 AM
Cc: slinkelist@nirvis.com
Subject: Re: [slinkelist] converting cd's to mp3


When there was talk about that project in this list, it came into
conclusion that it should be divided to different areas for people with
expertese in that area : 
1. Digital Signal prosessing = capturing audio stream from soundcard.
2. compressing it to mp3. 
3. interfacing with CDJ to CDDBID of currently playing CD
4. fileoperation to save the files in desired format (naming+path)
5. database operation to retrieve data of matching CDDBID
6. composing & writing ID3 tag to mp3 file