grabcd README

grabcd is an audio CD ripping and encoding suite
(c) 2004-2008 by Christian Garbs <mitch@cgarbs.de>
licensed under GNU GPL

http://github.com/mmitch/grabcd

== What does it do?

"grabcd-scan" reads a CD and lets you enter track information (I'm no
fan of CDDB as the data there is very limited - think of a hit sampler
CD with different artists, you can't have a different artist per
track).

"grabcd-rip" will then read the CD using icedax and start the encoding
via "grabcd-encode" (this will be done automatically).  You will get
OGG encoded files in a specified directory hierarchy.


== What's special about this?

grabcd-rip and grabcd-encode can run on different machines.  This was
essential for me when writing these scripts as my CD-ROM was in my
slow workstation while the server with the fast CPU had no CD-ROM.


== How to use it?

Generate a config file, either /etc/grabcd.conf for everyone or ~/.grabcd
for yourself.

This is an example for "everything local":

CDINFO_TEMP=/tmp/cdinfo
CDINFO_REMOTE=/mnt/storage/grabcd-scan
ENCODE_HOST=localhost
ENCODE_BINARY=/usr/bin/grabcd-encode
ENCODE_NICE=20
ENCODE_PATH=/mnt/storage/ogg


This is an example for "networked operation":

CDINFO_TEMP=/tmp/cdinfo
CDINFO_REMOTE=mitch@yggdrasil.mitch.h.shuttle.de:/home/mitch/ogg/grabcd-scan
ENCODE_HOST=mitch@yggdrasil.mitch.h.shuttle.de
ENCODE_BINARY=/home/mitch/bin/grabcd-encode
ENCODE_NICE=20
ENCODE_PATH=/home/mitch/ogg



== Configuration options

CDINFO_TEMP    - The artist/track data is temporarily stored here
CDINFO_REMOTE  - The artist/track data is archived here.  Useful if
                 you want to reread a CD later.  Just copy the
                 appropriate file to $CDINFO_TEMP and start grabcd-rip.
ENCODE_HOST    - Where to run grabcd-encode.  Set to empty or "localhost"
                 for local operation.  Set to a "hostname" or
                 "user@hostname" for remote operation.
ENCODE_BINARY  - Where to find the grabcd-encode binary.
ENCODE_NICE    - Nicelevel for grabcd-encode.
ENCODE_PATH    - Where to put the encoded files.



== Limitations

grabcd-scan and grabcd-rip always read from /dev/cdrom.  This is
because Audio::CD does not seem to have a configuration option for
this.  If icedax uses another device by default, you can set
$CDDA_DEVICE to the correct one.