On Thu 26 Jul 2018 at 21:55:34 (-0400), Doug wrote:
>
> On 07/23/2018 03:19 PM, Thomas Schmitt wrote:
> >Hi,
> >
> >(i reply to Doug's mail but adopt Dan Ritter's new subject text.)
> >
> >Doug wrote:
> >>I would make some copies of CDs onto a flash drive, if I knew how!
> >The act of copying audio data from CD is usually called "ripping".
> >Program cdda2wav is specialized on that job.
> >
> >I would use my own program cdrskin (which is mainly for burning data to
> >CD rather than ripping data from CD). At then of the man page there is an
> >example:
> >"Extract audio tracks and CD-TEXT from CD into directory /home/me/my_cd"
> >
> > mkdir /home/me/my_cd
> >
> > cdrskin -v dev=/dev/sr0 extract_audio_to=/home/me/my_cd \
> > cdtext_to_v07t=/home/me/my_cd/cdtext.v07t
> >
> >This will yield per track NN a file trackNN.wav in directory /home/me/my_cd.
> >If CD-TEXT is present, then it will be extracted to human readble file
> >/home/me/my_cd/cdtext.v07t .
> >
> >
> >>do I have to format the flash drive, and if so with what system?
> >If the car expects USB sticks, then it probably can handle a (microsoftly)
> >FAT filesystem.
> >
> >>I thought that flash drives come formatted with a Windows file system?
> >They usually do and readers usually are ready to use the filesystem.
> >
> >More important will be to find out which audio file formats are supported.
> >.wav is possibly ok, but also quite a wasteful way of storing sound on
> >a general data storage device.
> >
> Thanx to all for the information. I don't seem to have cdda2wav, but
> I had an interesting (!) experience. I used K3b to put one CD on the
> flash, but I could not seem to get it to do it again, and all the info for
> K3b is 6 years old. I wound up installing Asunder CD Ripper, and it is
> really simple. Tell it what format (.wav) you want, and it will rip to
> a place in the home directory, like "Music" and then you can copy
> each CD package to your USB flash drive. wav may be a lossy format, but
> you can get a heck of a lot of CDs on an 8GiB flash drive!
I don't call ~11 CDs a heck of a lot, but ho hum. Anyway…
I've used cdparanoia -B for ripping CDs, producing .cdda.wav files
(but I must try cdrskin) which I archive on TB-size drives. I don't
trust CDs to be any more long-lived than LPs, and the effects of any
deterioration are worse than with LPs (though buying a good LP could
be frustrating, 7 replacements in the worst case). I then FLAC them,
though perhaps I ought to revisit the choices for lossless
compression.
Occasionally we play CDs in the car. The player was in the boot in the
past, and I'm not sure that burnt CDs enjoyed the experience. Nowadays
it's in the dash, but the temperature there can be way over 40°C/100°F
so not awfully good for any disc.
However, the ripped files are all useless for the car player as these
filetypes are ignored on a USB stick. I don't know all the formats
it'll play but obviously MP3, and also the .m4a files that get-iplayer
downloads off the beeb.
But one opportunity you ought perhaps to exploit when encoding your
CDs (and any other audio sources like youtube etc) for the car or
portable players is to compress the dynamic range. Car stereos can
produce good quality when parked up, but at 85mph it's pointless
trying to play through any quiet passages.
So I start by companding with sox, currently using:
sox <a-set-of-wav-files> -t wav -r 44100 -b 16 -c 2 <output-wav-file> \
compand 0.3,1 6:-70,-60,-20 -15 -90 0.2 gain -n -0.01;
before the lame step. (Stringing the input files together is essential
for handling segues between tracks.)
Cheers,
David.
