Doc rework

[clinton/abcde.git] / README

ABCDE
=====

abcde is a frontend command-line utility (actually, a shell script) that
grabs tracks off a CD, encodes them to Ogg/Vorbis, MP3, FLAC, Ogg/Speex and/or
MPP/MP+(Musepack) format, and tags them, all in one go.

Your finished Ogg/MP3/FLAC/Speex/MPP's are, by default, stored in a subdirectory
of the current directory (named after the artist) with a filename based on the
track title. Spaces are replaced by underscores, and apostrophes and control
codes are filtered out. Colons are replaced with an underscore and a hyphen. The
end result usually looks like: Our_Lady_Peace/01.Supermans_Dead.ogg This
filename munging is customizable - edit the mungefilename function in your
abcde.conf to change it.

Need to go through an HTTP proxy for CDDB access? No problem, just export your
http_proxy variable first so wget/fetch/curl can see it.

You already store CDDB entries for your CD collection on your hard disk? Piece
of cake. Just edit CDDBLOCALDIR to point to the repository and give abcde the
"-L" flag to make use of it.

Low on disk space? abcde has different algorithms to schedule ripping and
encoding - to optimize for disk conservation, use -l.

abcde can also take advantage of SMP systems, just like make. Try 'abcde -j 2' -
it'll run two encoder jobs while it rips the next track.

abcde now uses FreeDB by default. To use a different FreeDB mirror or another
CDDB service, change the CDDBURL option in your abcde.conf.

Frustrated that you can't use the CPU power on Machine A sitting right next to
Machine B with the fast cdrom drive? Now you don't have to be - Run distmp3host
(included in distmp3) on Machine A, and then run abcde -r MachineA from Machine
B (where "MachineA" is a dns name or IP address). Use this in combination with
'-j 0' to shift all encoding off the local machine.

You do not have internet connection, or just feel with free time to write down
all the song names and artists instead of using CDDB? Use -n and edit the
template.

To make abcde 2.x work more like 1.x, put these options in your abcde.conf:

INTERACTIVE=n
OUTPUTTYPE=mp3
ID3TAGV=1

MAJOR CHANGES
=============
Changes in 2.2-pre2:

* Support for MPP/MP+(Musepack) format. It can be downloaded from 
  corecodecs.org. It is supposed to be Free (not only free), and released under
  the GPL...
* New "-w <comment>" option to add a comment for a given CD on the command
  line.
* New "-t <number>" option for starting the numbering of the output files at 
  a given starting number. Ideal for albums with more than one CD.
  New "-T <number>" option, similar to "-s" but also modifies the tag entries
  on the files themselves.
* Support for keeping an existing playlist (and not add new entries to it),
  erase the existing one (overwrite) or append new entries to the existing
  one.
* Under ./examples you will find a very basic way to make abcde run in the
  background and start a non-interactive rip of a CD, if it can find an
  audio CD in the tray.
  The abcded script depends on eject and cdparanoia being installed in your
  system.
* New mungegenre function to switch off (or modify) the default behaviour of
  transforming uppercase characters to lowercase.
* No network but you have been using abcde with local CDDB storage before?
  Use -f and it will try the local CDDB and fallback to an empty template.

Changes in 2.2-pre1:

* cdparanoia permits performing a query to the CD drive and obtain a list of 
  valid audio tracks. So, now we perform such query and process the results.
* Support for "None of the above" has been added with the "0" selection. A 
  template is created, and the selection to edit it is defaulted to "y".

New options in 2.1.19:

* ONETRACK mode has been introduced. Setting the flag "-1" will create a
  single file with all the tracks from the CD.
  
Changes in 2.1.18:

* CDSPEED option defaults to eject. However, since cdparanoia has a built-in
  option to set the speed, we use it. There is not way (right now) to force the
  use of eject, but it will be introduced in a future release. Also one can use
  the pre_read function to set the speed with other program.

New options in 2.1.16:

* -S, CDSPEED and CDSPEEDOPTS for setting the speed of the CDROM. One can set
  the options in abcde.conf and pass the value on the command line.  This option
  can be used with "eject -x <speed>", "setcd -x <speed>" or the built-in
  cdparanoia option "-S <speed>", if the CD reader supports it.
* Added a pre-read function. Modify it at your pleasure in abcde.conf
  One can use it to close the CD drive.
* -m option, to modify the playlist to include CRLF in every line. Some players
  insist on having those to work properly with playlists.

New options in 2.1.15:

* -V can be used to obtain some more information about the CDDB queries.
* -v shows the version, basic help, and exits.

New options from 2.1.10 to 2.1.13:

* CDROMID has been introduced for cdda2wav use with SCSI devices.
* Use -L to retrieve the CDDB entries from a local repository (also one can
  set CDDBUSELOCAL in the config file).
* If CDDBCOPYLOCAL is set to "y" we store copies of the CDDB entries, under
  CDDBLOCALDIR (defaults to "~/.cddb).

Modifications from 2.1.9 to 2.1.10:

* Initial (still incomplete) MacOSX support is on the works.
* A new tool (curl) has been added for MacOSX compatibility, as HTTPGET
  option.
  
Options modified from 2.1.8 to 2.1.9:

* KEEPWAVS option now sets the clean to "no".

Options added/modified from 2.1.3 to 2.1.5:

* Ogg/Speex added. Use "-o spx" to rip your audiobooks, for instance.

Options added/modified from 2.1.1 to 2.1.3:

* WGET has been substituted by HTTPGET. Now we support fetch as retrieval
  program.
* KEEPWAVS has been introduced. Set it to "y" and the wav tracks will be
  kept.
* CDDBPROTO is used to specify the protocol level in the CDDB retrieval.
* DAGRAB has been introduced as a cd ripper.

Options added/modified from 2.0.3 to 2.1.x:

* -b use batch processing. It uses normalize-audio to adjust the volume of 
  the songs, and a -g gapless option from lame to remove gaps. Only available
  for mp3+lame combination.
* a new "normalize" option has been added to -a, to normalize the volume.
* -o works now with a combination of the different outputs: ogg, mp3, flac.
  Combine them separated by ",". Example: "-o ogg,flac".
* OUTPUTTYPE is no longer used for the output file type. From version 2.1 abcde
  implements multiple-output and the file type is always appended at the end of
  the file. The OUTPUT variable can be used in the PLAYLISTFORMAT and
  OUTPUTFORMAT to create different directory structures and playlist names for
  each of the output formats selected.

* DYEAR can be used as DiskYear value in CDDB data. If the data is not supplied 
  by the CDDB server, it can be added.

Other options that changed from 1.x to 2.x:

* -e doesn't exist anymore, abcde now presents you with all of the cddb data
  and asks you if you want to edit it. If you don't want to be asked,
  use -N or INTERACTIVE=n
* The output type defaults to Ogg/Vorbis. Specify -o mp3 or OUTPUTTYPE=mp3
  if you still want to output mp3's.
* -l 2 is now just -l, LOWDISK=2 should now be LOWDISK=y
* -V and -v are gone, abcde will now prompt you if you'd like to use Various
  Artists handling, after showing you the cddb data.
* -P is now '-a playlist,clean', PLAYLISTONLY=y is now
  ACTIONS=playlist,clean
* -p is now '-a playlist,move,clean', PLAYLIST=y is now
  ACTIONS=playlist,move,clean
* cddb-tool has been cleaned up a little bit. 'get' is now 'query' and
  'read', and the tempfile handling has been removed.
* ID3COMMENT is now COMMENT.
* FreeDB is now the default CDDB database.


REQUIREMENTS
============

abcde requires the following backend tools to work:

* An Ogg/Vorbis encoder (oggenc, the default, or vorbize) or:
* An MP3 encoder (lame, gogo, bladeenc, l3enc, etc). Any MP3 encoder that
  takes two filenames on the command line, one for input, one for output,
  will work.
  You can get lame at: http://www.mp3dev.org/mp3/
  You can get gogo at: http://homepage1.nifty.com/herumi/gogo_e.html
  You can get BladeEnc at: http://bladeenc.mp3.no/
  You can get a trial version of mp3enc at:
    http://www.iis.fhg.de/amm/download/ or:
* FLAC encoder (flac) or:
* Ogg/Speex encoder (speexenc) or:
* MPP/MP+(Musepack) encoder (mppenc)
* normalize-audio for volume normalization.
* CD Paranoia, an audio CD reading utility,
* Or cdda2wav, the audio CD reading utility cdparanoia was born from,
* Or dagrab, another audio CD reading utility.
* cd-discid, a CDDB DiscID reading program. Formerly bundled with abcde.
  It's available in Debian or http://www.hispalinux.es/~data/files/cd-discid/
* An HTTP retrieval program: wget, fetch (FreeBSD) or curl (MacOSX)
* id3, an id3 tagging program. Available at: http://lly.org/~rcw/id3/
* id3v2, an id3 version 2.0 tagger. http://id3v2.sourceforge.net/
* (optional) distmp3, a client/server for distributed mp3 encoding.
  You can get distmp3 at http://wlug.westbo.se/medlprog/medlprog.html

Potential problems:

Having trouble getting cdparanoia to read from your drive as a user?  Add
yourself to the cdrom group, change the permissions on your cdrom device to 660,
and if you have a SCSI cdrom drive, check the permissions on
/dev/sg* as well.

Abcde's new mailing list is abcde@listas.hispalinux.es. So far has not
been actively used.
The posts from non-subscribers are moderated to prevent spam.

Archives of the old list are publically available at:
http://lly.org/~rcw/abcde/list/current/threads.html

Abcde's current page is at http://www.hispalinux.es/~data/abcde.php
Abcde's new homepage will be at http://abcde.hispalinux.es/.
Abcde's old homepage is at http://lly.org/~rcw/abcde/page/.
--
Jesus Climent <jesus.climent@hispalinux.es>

abcde was originally created by Robert Woodcock <rcw@debian.org>, but is
currently maintained by Jesus Climent <jesus.climent@hispalinux.es>