# &application; Manual

## Introduction

&application; is a simple and clean CD ripping tool. It allows you to extract the audio from audio compact discs and convert them into audio files that your computer can understand and play.

&application; is designed to be easy to use and to work with little user intervention. For example, if your computer is connected to the Internet, it will automatically attempt to retrieve track information from the freely-available MusicBrainz service.

## Using &application;

When you start &application;, it will examine the CD in the selected drive and try to locate information about its audio tracks. It can match against the serial number of the CD as well as the lengths and positions of the tracks. Occasionally, another CD may have the same layout, causing the wrong track information to be displayed. If this happens, you will have to enter the information manually.

This is what &application; typically looks like when started with an audio CD in the drive:

### &application; on Startup

&application; on startup

The top of the window contains controls for the title, artist, and genre of the CD. Below that is a list of the audio tracks on the CD. You can set the track and artist for each track. &application; uses this information to name the folders and files where your music is stored. In addition, the track and album information is encoded directly into the audio files. Many music players, including portable devices and car stereos, use this information to organize and display the audio files.

To edit the title of a track, first select the track, then click on the title. When you have finished entering the title, press the Enter key on your keyboard, or click outside the title.

When you edit the artist for the CD, the artist for each track is automatically updated. Most CDs are by a single artist, and this feature saves you the time of entering the artist for each track.

Some CDs, however, are compilations of songs by different artists. For these CDs, you will have to enter the artist for each track. To set the artist for a track, first select the track, then click on the artist. You can set the artist for the CD to a value like "Various" or simply leave it blank, depending on how you prefer to organize your music.

By default, &application; will extract all of the tracks on the CD to audio files. If you do not wish to extract all of the tracks, you can control which tracks are extracted using the check boxes in the Extract column of the track listing. Only the tracks you have selected will be extracted.

Whenever possible, &application; will detect when a new CD has been inserted and re-read the track information. On certain types of computers, it may not be techically possible to determine automatically when a new CD has been inserted. In this case, you can always click on the Re-read button to re-read the track information from the CD in the drive.

When you have entered all the information you need, click on the Extract button. &application; will begin reading the audio from the CD and saving it to files on your computer. By default, the audio files are stored under the `Music` folder in your home folder.

Extracting a CD can take a long time, depending on the speed of your computer. You can safely minimize &application; or move to another workspace to continue using your computer while the audio is being extracted.

## Preferences

The preferences window allows you to control:

- Which CD drive &application; uses if you have more than one drive,

- Where the extracted audio files are placed on your computer, and

- Which file format and codec is used for the extracted audio files.

### Preferences Window

Preferences window

### Selecting a CD Drive

If you have multiple CD drives in your computer, the drop-down list labelled CD drive allows you to select which drive to use by default. The check box Eject when finished allows you to control whether &application; will eject the CD from the drive when it has finished extracting the audio files.

### Naming Audio Files

The Music Folder drop-down list allows you to select which folder to store your audio files in. Select one of the folders from the list, or choose Other to select another folder with the file chooser. By default, files are placed under the `Music` folder in your home folder.

The Track Names allows you to control how the files and folders are named. &application; can store audio files in seperate folders, helping you keep your music organized. You can choose how these folders are created and named using the Folder hierarchy drop-down list. By default, &application; creates a folder for the album artist and a subfolder for the album.

Use the File name drop-down list to select how the audio files are named. By default, &application; uses the track number followed by a hyphen and the track title. Selecting the Strip special characters check box causes &application; to remove or replace characters such as spaces and punctuation in the filenames.

Even when Strip special characters is not selected, &application; will remove the `/` character from filenames. This character cannot be used in any filenames on UNIX, Linux, and similar systems.

### Selecting a Format

You can select which audio file format &application; uses to store your tracks on your computer. There are a number of available formats, each with its own advantages. The available formats on your computer may vary, but the following choices are usually available:

CD Quality, Lossy (Ogg Vorbis audio)

- This option is selected by default. Ogg Vorbis, like other lossy audio formats (such as MP3 and AAC) discards some information from the original audio data. Although the audio file is not a perfect replica of the CD audio, the differences are often not distinguishable to most listeners. As a result, lossy formats tend to have very small file sizes.

  The Ogg Vorbis format is the default lossy format used in &application;. Ogg Vorbis is an open format, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, which tends to produce smaller file sizes and higher quality audio than many other lossy formats. While it is not as widespread as the older MP3 format, most music software can play Ogg Vorbis files, and many hardware players have incorporated support.

  Xiph.Org maintains lists of software players, portable hardware players, and static hardware players which support Ogg Vorbis.

CD Quality, Lossless (FLAC audio)

- The FLAC audio format is a lossless format. That is, no audio data is lost when converting to FLAC, even though it compresses audio files by as much as 70%. FLAC and other lossless formats are popular in cases where high fidelity audio is needed, but files need to be compressed to save disk space and network transfer times.

Voice (WAV audio)

- The Voice output profile produces low-quality mono audio files. You may wish to select this for lectures, books on tape, and other spoken word CDs, where the loss in audio quality is less important.

If you need to store tracks in the MP3 format (for example, because your portable music player only supports MP3 and not Ogg Vorbis), you will need to create a new profile. To do this, run gnome-audio-profiles-properties, press New and name it `MP3`. Then press Edit and set GStreamer Pipeline to `audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lame name=enc`, the File Extenstion to `mp3`, and check Active. Then start &application; and select the MP3 format.

This profile uses the LAME MP3 encoder, so you will need to have the GStreamer LAME plugin installed.

&GFDL;