[Abcde-users] Problem with 'abcde -d disc.flac'

[Charles Steinkuehler]

Sorry to chime in late, I was away for the Thanksgiving holidays.

On 11/17/2018 6:34 AM, Bjørn Forsman wrote:

> I see my mkcue output lacks the "INDEX 01 00:00:32" part. So it's
> mkcue that gets it wrong!
> 
> I found this page[1], which says that
> 
> """Well, abcde uses mkcue rather than cdrdao to extract the disc's
> TOC, and mkcue does not do the fancy sub-channel reading that cdrdao
> does. You will miss out on pregaps, ISRC-codes and such. More
> importantly (because this actually affects the audio), I don't think
> mkcue handles the PRE_EMPHASIS flag at all.
> """
> 
> (The quote is from 2011, but it seems nothing has changed wrt. abcde
> using mkcue.)
> 
> So there it is. mkcue has issues. An it fails on my CD, where cdrdao succeeds.
> 
> So why doesn't abcde use cdrdao instead of mkcue?
> 
> In abcde manpage I find
> 
>     CUEREADERSYNTAX
>         Specifies the syntax of the program we use to read the CD CUE
> sheet. Right now we only support 'mkcue', but in the future other
> readers might be used.
> 
> I guess I have to look at other ripper programs. I see there is a
> project called whipper, and it seems to use cdrdao instead of mkcue.

I fixed all this ages ago (patches sent to the Debian BTS) and for a
while I think the changes were added by Jesus Climent in at least one
of the branches of abcde but then got changed/removed when some other
code was merged in.

I haven't ripped a CD in ages, but I have disks with both pre and post
gaps that rip properly to flac, and will then rip properly from flac
to mp3.  IIRC, there were two fundamental changes required to make
this work:

1) I added a "whole disk" ripper setting, which rips the pre/post-gap
data as well as the track data and stores it all in the flac file.  If
you just rip all the tracks, you don't actually get all the data on
the CD.

2) mkcue was replaced by an internal shell script function that would
properly deal with pre/post gaps.  I think some of the other cue sheet
handling needed minor tweaks as well.

If anyone is interested, I can dredge up my local changes and see
about merging into the latest abcde.  Here's the Debian BTS issue I
filed about this in 2006:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=377240

...there were some additional patches and fixes added later, but this
is the issue that includes the initial patch set supporting full disk
ripping with gaps.  I think the changes got overwritten or reverted
during later merges/additions.

-- 
Charles Steinkuehler
charles at steinkuehler.net