Review: Cdparanoia

CD digital audio grabber

by Timo "Blazko" Boewing, mail@neveprise.de

Version: 0.01, 2002-03-08

Cdparanoia reads the digital audio data from a Compact Disc and writes the data as PCM wave files to the hard drive. This is no hard core test of this software but a slight overview intended for recommendation.

1.0 about Cdparanoia > top of page

Cdparanoia is a very powerful CDDA to PCM wavefile audio grabber. Basically, it does the job cdda2wav does, but implements more quality check and error correction.

Cdparanoia comes with a console user interface and runs on most GNU compliant systems, such as GNU/Linux. Future ports for Sun Solaris and NetBSD will follow.

2.0 review > top of page

Cdparanoia - on the one hand - is easy to use, on the other hand it is quite feature rich. The simpliest command line to just grab the tracks of a CD (range) is:

cdparanoia --batch 1-16

This will cause cdparanoia to use the standard CD-ROM device for reading and grabbing tracks one to sixteen into seperate files, using PCM wave format. Cdparanoia may also write AIFF files:

cdparanoia --batch 1-16 --output-aiff

When reading the stream, Cdparanoia does extended error checking and rereads parts of the track when bad data arrives. During the grabbing proccess, you get progress bars with funny smileys representing the current data quality.

Pic 2.0a: Cdparanoia in action (click image to enlarge)

Cdparanoia is a really nice tool with simple usability, regarding it is a console application.

Cdparanoia makes use of smileys indicating corrupt data, here the legend:

smiley	meaning
:-)	normal operation, low / no jitter
:-\|	normal operation, considerable jitter
:-/	read drift
:-P	unreported loss of streaming in atomic read op
8-\|	finding read problems at same point during reread, hard to correct
:-0	SCSI / ATAPI transport error
:-(	scratch detected
;-(	gave up trying to perform a correction
8-X	aborted due to a scratch / skip
:^D	finished grabbing

3.0 rating > top of page

Cdparanoia

Category:

software, audio

Function:

CD audio grabber

Version:

III release 9.8 (2001-03-23)

By:

Xiph

License:

GPL

Platforms:

GNU/Linux
NetBSD
Solaris

Features:

dest. file formats: wave, aiff, aiff-c
source device can be specified (in case of multiple CD-ROMs and / or parallel grabbing)
extended error detection & correction
ASCII-progress bars
quality / error indicator (smileys)

Pro:

good error detection / correction
easy to learn command line interface, not too complicated
console app, can easily be run on remote systems via ssh etc.

Contra:

i discovered no parameters telling "rip the complete CD", instead i have to specify tracks 1-n

Rating:

9 / 10

Comment:

The best CDDA grabber i ever used ... and: love the smileys!