Ripping your Music

Digital music is one of the most popular killer-apps of the computer world. Most people like to listen to a large variety of music from their hard disks or custom burnt CDs. Music lovers can rip their audio CDs into the Open Source Ogg Vorbis format (which is similar to the MP3 format) on PCQLinux 8.0. MP3 encoding support now requires licensing, which is why many OSs offer other alternatives. For example, WinXP now encodes only WMA. Similarly, PCQLinux 8.0 (based on RHL 8.0 and using the same licensing terms) also encodes by default into Ogg Vorbis. You can, however, add MP3 encoding abilities using third party utilities like

RipperX. 

What we have in PCQLinux is GRip, an audio CD ripper for Gnome, which can rip as well as play audio CDs. You can launch Grip from Extras>Sound and Video on the start menu. This will open the GRip application. Simply put an audio CD into your CD drive and GRip automatically detects the audio tracks and displays them on its interface. 

Before ripping the audio CD, you need to configure the audio ripper. For this, select the Config tab in GRip, which will show you more tabs beneath it. Select the MP3>Encode tab and change the encoder to “oggenc”. Select one or more tracks that you like to rip into the Ogg format by right clicking on the tracks. 

After this you are ready to rip the audio CD to Ogg Vorbis. To start ripping, select the Rip tab. You have two ripping options here: Rip+Encode and Rip only. Rip+encode rips the audio tracks into .wav file and then converts them to Ogg

Vorbis.

However, Rip only just rips audio CD into .wav files. Select either of the ripping options to rip your audio CD. During the ripping process Grip shows you a graphical status of ripping. Once done, you are informed of this, and you can start listening to the OGG files immediately in

Mplayer.

Sanjay Majumder