I love music! I have hundreds of CDs in my collection, a few of which have survived since from the late 1980s. I have an original copy of Nirvana’s Nevermind, Foo Fighters debut album, Bush's Sixteen Stone, and many CDs from the grunge and metal era of the 1990s. I used to have a Spotify streaming account, but I want to own the music I listen to. Having the CDs is great, but that isn’t much use when I am out walking the dog. So how can I take my music with me when out and about? I need to rip the audio CDs.
Ripping CDs was a popular activity around 15 to 20 years ago. Heck, I remember ripping audio CDs to MP2 (not a typo!) on an AMD K6-2 333. It took plenty of computing power back then, but now even a Raspberry Pi can rip an audio CD and convert the output to MP3 and FLAC without breaking a sweat.
In this how-to, I show you how to use abcde A Better CD Encoder, a terminal application, to rip an audio CD and then convert the audio to an MP3 and FLAC along with full album and track details. I’m using a Raspberry Pi 5 16GB, but this project can use any Raspberry Pi model from Pi 3 upwards. We also tested it on a laptop running Ubuntu and everything was just as smooth.
A Raspberry Pi 3/4/5 or a Zero 2 W or Linux computer
Keyboard, mouse, HDMI and power for your Raspberry Pi
A USB CD / DVD / Bluray drive
Audio CDs
Yes, there are alternative applications. I use freac to rip CDs on Windows, and it does a great job. On Linux, K3B is a KDE-based CD toolbox, and my favorite burning tool. K3B can also be used to rip CDs, but with abcde we can do it all with just a few commands, and very little system resources. We could even script the process to detect, rip and save the audio files to a specific location. But first, let's learn how to use abcde.
Please bear in mind that laws may prohibit you from ripping your audio CDs. Please consult your local laws before ripping your CDs.
1. Open a terminal and update the software repositories and upgrade the software installed on your machine.
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sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
2. Install abcde CD ripping software.
sudo apt install abcde
3. Install eyed3 MP3 ID3 metadata (song info) management and lame MP3 encoder. We need eyed3 to write the MP3 metadata from the online databases for our audio files. The Lame MP3 encoder is the application called after abcde rips the audio CD to WAV format.
sudo apt install eyed3 lame
4. Connect a CD / DVD / Bluray drive to your computer and insert the CD that you wish to rip.
5. In the terminal run the command to rip the audio and encode to an MP3 at 320kbps. Change the 320 value to match your requirements. Anything above 192 is great for most devices.
abcde -o mp3:”-b 320”
6. The application will check online for the album details and then suggest three options. Choose the option that matches the album and track details for your CD, press Q to exit, and then enter the number of your choice.
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)
7. When asked to edit the CDDB, it is your call. If the data looks correct, select N and press Enter. If incorrect, press Y and Enter to edit.
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)
8. Is the album a multi-artist production? If yes, then select Y and Enter, then edit accordingly. No is the default, and nine times out or ten it is correct.
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)
9. Wait for the CD to rip. The CD / DVD / Bluray drive will spring into life and start the ripping process. The application will automatically encode the audio tracks to MP3 as the process progresses.
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)
10. Navigate to the folder containing the MP3s, and test the tracks in VLC or another media player.
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)
What about FLAC?
FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) is a digital audio format that provides lossless compression without any loss of sound quality. Digital audiophiles want the best audio, and while MP3 is decent from a file size versus quality point of view, with the price of storage being so low now, we can afford to rip our audio into the best format.
So with that in mind, lets use abcde to rip an audio CD to FLAC.
We'll need to install some extra software in order to rip to FLAC.
1. Open a terminal and update the list of available software, then install the FLAC tools.
sudo apt update && sudo apt install flac
2. Insert a CD and in the terminal run the command to rip the audio and encode to FLAC. You will need to follow the same steps as six to nine above (identify the artists, album and tracks). By default, the FLAC encoder will
abcde -o flac
With that command we have successfully ripped an audio CD to FLAC using the default compression (5). But what if you want to tweak the compression?
The FLAC encoder has nine levels of compression. The default is five, giving us good quality and reasonable compression. If you want to increase the compression choose eight, no compression, choose 0.
To set the compression, pass the value when running the abcde command. Change the value 8 to match the balance of compression / quality that you require.
Les Pounder is an associate editor at Tom's Hardware. He is a creative technologist and for seven years has created projects to educate and inspire minds both young and old. He has worked with the Raspberry Pi Foundation to write and deliver their teacher training program "Picademy".
