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More MP3 Ripping Yarns

By Dave F in Reader

Posted in music, Coding, Blogs, Linux, e-commerce on December 23, 2008 at 12:30 pm

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A while back I was bemoaning the loss of CD look up for Music Match Jukebox

http://www.itpro.co.uk/blogs/davef/2008/06/13/musicmatch-jukebox-cddb/

It appears yahoo bought it and severed links to the old data base requiring you to upgrade to the latest version to access a new database. The new version won’t run with IE6 for some reason so as I don’t like IE7 (still) it’s no good to me.

I did try

http://www.itpro.co.uk/blogs/danj/2008/06/26/picardtagger-most-useful-mp3-tool-ever

but didn’t have much joy. It tagged some files but not many and seems to require something to rip them first. So I tried Media Monkey. Also not impressed. A madly complex UI and another stupid library system. As its MP3 ripping times out after a month & I don’t think it’s worth paying for that too has been chucked.

So I’m back to ripping with an old MMJB v7 & cutting and pasting track names from Amazon or wherever I can find a discography. However, I have this down to a fine art (well a system anyway). I rip to a standard directory, I paste a copy of the names into a text file & I have a utility program than renames the MP3’s from the file. Unfortunately I usually have to edit the file to get the format I want “1. A song name - 4:03″ to “01 A Song Name” etc. but it is quick enough to do. I then have to use MMJB again to “super tag” - using this I can set the MP3 tag names to the filename & also add in the artist & album. I then move the dir to the right place. A lot of faffing for what used to happen automatically but at least it is under my control and I could tidy up the formating thing I guess.

I’m not sure where I could upload the renaming utility to but if you want a copy we’ll see what we can do! It could do with a bit of tidying up though!! Actually, Ijust looked at the code & tweaked it a bit - it does format the names for me (at least add a number & remove any previous numbers & dodgey characters). Good job I blogged about it or I wouldn’t have realised I’d already written it that way

I expect there is something good on linux to do this? If anyone wants to recomend something I could just look for that & chuck that on one of my linux machines.

Oh yes, and I nearly forgot - H a p p y C h r i s t m a s ! ! !