[Abcde-users] -n option

[Gabriel Rosenkoetter]

On 19 May, 2016, at 20:23 EDT, Ell Sam <ell.sam at e17th.com> wrote:
> I want to rip a cd without any interaction or lookup (the computer doing it has no internet). I would like if I can pre-supply the artist, album, and track info so they get tagged into the mp3 files.

That's perfectly reasonable, and you've got the right command-line flag for that (-n).

> I rather do it in a script before I insert the cd so I can be looking at the disc while I enter the information.

You're going to run into a little bit of a snag there with the order of operations that abcde uses, but if you're planning on doing the ripping one CD at a time (rather than expecting to compile a whole bunch of tracklists and then feed all of your CDs into a jukebox), you should be fine; see below.

> Also it seems that even the normal way does not have an option to change the artist.

Oh, sure there is: you're just supposed to intuit that the way that you specify an artist and title in the same field (regardless of whether that's a disc a track title field) is that you write, "Artist Name / Object Name". (Or, actually, you can do them in the other order and with other dividers, if you're labeling tracks, and you tell abcde that this is a "Various Artist" track, it'll ask which format the data's in. But I'm pretty sure disk titles (DTITLE) must be in the "artist / title" format, using a / as a divider.

Note that nobody involved with abcde invented the CDDB file format, and relying it should not be taken as endorsement of it: it's just the standard that exists to do this thing.

> again... I dont know what to write in the template file. (TRACK="Happy Birthday")?

(Side note: if you've got something set for CDDBMETHOD in your ~/.abcde.conf, -n may not get honored the way that you want it to. So don't do that. :^>)

The simplest way to do this is going to be to run abcde -n with the disk inserted. abcde will quickly get the number of tracks on the disc, then say:

CDDB unavailable
---- Unknown Artist / Unknown Album ----
1: Track 1
…
n: Track n

Edit selected CDDB data [Y/n]?


Until you confirm a few more messages, abcde doesn't care if the CD's in the drive, so eject it, and hit enter (to select the default, y), at which point you'll be looking at the template the man page refers to in whatever you've got $EDITOR (or maybe $VISUAL?) set to. Modify that file, put the CD back in the tray and close it, save and close the file, and then respond to the rest of abcde's prompts.

If you'd really like to get into the gory details of the CDDB file format, try http://ftp.freedb.org/pub/freedb/latest/DBFORMAT <http://ftp.freedb.org/pub/freedb/latest/DBFORMAT>, or for a funnier (if slightly dated) version, maybe https://www.jwz.org/doc/cddb.html <https://www.jwz.org/doc/cddb.html>.

Hope this helps...

--
Gabriel Rosenkoetter
gr at eclipsed.net

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