Favorite app to rip/encode/play or all in one ?

[Sweet Spot]

I originally was going to ask what everybody's favorite applications for ripping/encoding was, but perhaps there's an app that does it all in one package ? When using Windows, I've used J.River Media Center, which is a really great program which rips, encodes, burns, and plays all sorts of codecs. I only ever used Nero for burining iso's and such, and wouldn't mind using a dedicated burning app.

Is there one such program for the KDE desktop ? If not, then I guess the next question is which apps do you guys think are the best in terms of having a well laid out GUI, is easy to use, and is capable of taking advantage of the latest codecs when encoding ? Easy to configure is also a big factor, since I'd rather not have to go through hell just to get it to set bitrate and arguments etc...

Regards,
Doug

[lingenfr]

Re: Favorite app to rip/encode/play or all in one ?

My format of choice is ogg (q 6). I like grip for ripping and encoding and amarok for playing. I tried kaudiocreator for ripping/encoding and just was not satisified. Too few options, too little in the way of configurability. If I could find a KDE app as good as grip, I would use it.

[Sweet Spot]

Re: Favorite app to rip/encode/play or all in one ?

I'll definitely try Grip then. I'd really rather not resort to installing Wine in order to get the type of stable/friendly/powerful apps that I'm used to. Thanks for the suggestion, I'll let you know how it all fares out.

Regards,
Doug

[Sweet Spot]

Re: Favorite app to rip/encode/play or all in one ?

Man, there are just certain things with Linux (or is it this distro) that just don't make sense (to me).

If I put a music CD in my top CD RW drive, I'll get a pop up asking what it should do with it. I"ll tell it to open in a new window, and it will be listed as being in : "system:/media/hdc" But is this simply a virtual location ? Because if I navigate to any other place, that location gets lost, and I can't find it again. Furthermore, in my file tree, there are two physical CD locations listed. One is CDrom and the other is cdrom0 But when a disk is in, no information shows up at all ?!

When I open Grip, I see a place to configure where the disc is (why can't these things just automatically be detected ??) and when I paste the directory which is given to me (as is above) it is said to be an invalid path etc..

This is all really frustrating, considering that in (hating to make comparisons but, this much is true) Windows, this would never be an issue. How do I get Linux/Kubuntu/Ubuntu to recognize both my CD/DVD media drives, and then set up Grip to see either one at my will ?

Sincerely confused,

Doug

[lingenfr]

Re: Favorite app to rip/encode/play or all in one ?

For grip it should be /dev/cdrom. I think that mine was auto detected. I use EAC on Windows. My cut is that grip is as/almost as good. I have not followed with using an optimized encoder as I was doing on Windows. I have a number of frustrations, like finding a single .m3u structure that will work on Windows, Linux or my portable player. Maybe my grandkids will have that. Good luck. Stick with it, it is worth it.

[Sweet Spot]

Re: Favorite app to rip/encode/play or all in one ?

Alright, thanks. /dev/cdrom allows Grip to detect my DVD drive, which is the slave of my CD-RW drive, but it still doesn't detect the CD-RW one, which is the one I want to use. When I insert a disc into the CD RW, Kubuntu does detect it, and will open a new window with the contents.

With all the things which are going batty with my current configuration (in general, not just this issue) I'm really close to just doing a fresh install, and possibly thinking of going back to plain ol' Ubuntu. After all, I can still use Amarok in it, and Grip is native to it. About the only other thing I'd want is Kaffeine, and Nero to burn if at all possible.

I'm really liking Ubuntu in general, but there are many "sketchy" things about it, that make me a bit dizzy from time to time. I know it'll be worth it once I've got everything set up to my specifications, which I think is very possible. I only wish that I was able to get answers (not necessarily from here) faster. I just feel a bit guilty about constantly asking questions, but I also do a lot of searching, and it can take forever to just find a topic which is somewhat similar to what I was asking about.

Regards,
Doug

[lingenfr]

Re: Favorite app to rip/encode/play or all in one ?

Go to your /dev directory and look around. See if there is cdrom0, etc. and just try them. You will find your drive. You may be right about Ubuntu. There are plenty of things I don't like about KDE. For the apps I use, I have just found better support for KDE apps than Gnome. Regardless of which you use, there is some assembly required. Good luck.

[Sweet Spot]

Re: Favorite app to rip/encode/play or all in one ?

Well, in my /dev directory, there are a few entries, such as cdrom, cdrw, dvd, dvdrw Denoted by pretty stacked orange, blue and green cube icons. So yeah, there's those. But what do I do with them, or it, once I know which is the right one ?

Then of course, there's the one's in my /home directory. /home/media to be precise. There's cdrom and cdrom0 At least one of those is detected, which is the dvd burner. Once I get past this, and a couple other minor issues/annoyances, I might actually start to get to like Kubuntu !

[Sweet Spot]

Re: Favorite app to rip/encode/play or all in one ?

Thanks for the pointer. I managed to find the right one, which was /dev/hdc That did the trick ! For any new who might find this thread from doing a search, all I did was type /dev/hdc in the configure tab in grip. Then shut it down, and restarted. Soon as I inserted the CD, the tracks popped up. I guess you have to manually configure the drive each time, if you're going to change which one you're using. Good enough though.

Regards,
Doug

(now on to the next problem !)