So far I used Asunder for CD ripping. It is very easy to use ... when it works. But with some discs, usually lower quality CD-R, it just hangs right from the start. So I searched for another tool to rip audio CDs on LINUX.
It turned out you can do this very quickly with two command line tools - cdparanoia & lame. As usual you can quickly install them on Ubuntu with a single command line:
$ sudo apt-get install cdparanoia lame
Assuming the CD is loaded in the CD drive, running this simple command will copy all audio tracks in WAV files in the current directory:
$ cdparanoia -B
Next to convert those WAV files to MP3, run this command:
$ ls -1 | xargs -L 1 lame --preset standard
This will compress the audio files about 10 times using VBR ~190kbps.
If you are satisfied with the result, you can delete all WAV files:
$ rm *.wav
This will leave only MP3 files named like track04.cdda.mp3.
Of course these tools have many more options so you can tweak them as much as you like. For example lame option --ta sets the artist and --tl the album in ID3 tags inside MP3 files.
You can also script and automate this process as you see fit, but these are the tools that do the job nice and quickly.
BTW did you know that "disk" refers to magnetic storage while "disc" refers to optical storage? See Wikipedia.
