[slinkelist] Automated ripping and MP3 encoding of entire juk ebox

[Peter Luxem]

Hi Dylan,

Nice idea, I went through ripping part of my collection to mp3.  I did it
manually via EAC and Lame, it took about 2 hours for 1 cd, so my computer
was rather busy a lot of the time.  I don't have a digital connection to my
PC (yet), I didn't thought of the possibilities.  See inline for the rest of
my comment.

> 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.
Do it in VisualC++.  Use ATL to make some ActiveX object or just plain
Dispatch compatible interfaces.  I don't know if you're familiar with COM,
but if not, this is a good opportunity to start learning it.  If you design
a couple of interface and implement them, they can be used later by a VB
frontend, or even scripting languages (JScript).  Lately I do almost all my
testing with JScript, it really cuts development time.
> 
> 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.
Yes, use lame.  I encoded everything with lame in VBR.

http://www.r3mix.net

[...Edited...]
> 
> 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.
There is a program called mp3tagger, which fills in V2 and V1 mp3 tags, from
the filename.  So if the filename is correct, it's a minute work selecting
your mp3's and guessing mp3 tags from the filename.  I really works, I did
it this way.

Peter Luxem