I am constantly refining the process of creating perfect music files to be as automated as possible while still leaving the user with control over as much as possible. To see for yourself how painless it is to make professional-grade music files on your UNIX/Linux machine, go through the crip tutorial.

This script is special because it is the only one that I know that is capable of doing group vorbisgain/replaygain and/or normalization (adjust the volume to be as loud as possible without clipping/distortion) and group labelling/tagging, which makes it easy to allow a group of tracks to be treated as one piece. It can also trim off the silence at the beginning and end of these tracks/groups.

First the script fetches the CDDB info off the internet. Then it prompts you for the grouping of the tracks. This is important because it will treat each group of tracks as one piece, label and vorbisgain/replaygain and/or normalize them (using the volume gain/peak of that group). Normalization is now obsolete with the creation of vorbisgain (replaygain) utilities, so I have that turned off by default and it'll run vorbisgain instead.

You can, of course, have each track be a group by itself (such as what you'd want to do with most pop CDs). But since I've also ripped a lot of Classical music I found it necessary to group tracks differently fairly often.

Then it will prompt you for the Artist and Album info (which is already defaulted to what is pulled from CDDB). Afterwards it will prompt you for a filename for each track you selected. Again this field is defaulted to what it suspects that you'd want. For most pop CDs all I have to do is hit enter here because the filename is almost always exactly what I'd want.

It will then prompt you that it's ready to rip. From here everything is automated, so hit return and it usually finishes in about an hour. The script calls cdparanoia to rip the tracks, and then oggenc/flac/lame to encode them. It also labels the files with info appropriately, including the CDDB CD DiscID number (so you will always have a CD reference hex-number inside your OGG/FLAC/MP3 file).

I've looked into other scripts out there that do something similar to this script, but decided to write my own since I couldn't find one that groups tracks and trims silence. I used this script to rip and encode my collection of over 200 Bach CDs, as well as a bunch of other Classical and non-Classical CDs very easily.

I've provided links below that include some of the prerequisites that you may need.