README

   1 ABCDE
   2 =====
   3
   4 abcde is a frontend command-line utility (actually, a shell script) that
   5 grabs tracks off a CD, encodes them to Ogg/Vorbis, MP3, FLAC, Ogg/Speex and/or
   6 MPP/MP+(Musepack) format, and tags them, all in one go.
   7
   8 Your finished Ogg/MP3/FLAC/Speex/MPP's are, by default, stored in a subdirectory
   9 of the current directory (named after the artist) with a filename based on the
  10 track title. Spaces are replaced by underscores, and apostrophes and control
  11 codes are filtered out. Colons are replaced with an underscore and a hyphen. The
  12 end result usually looks like: Our_Lady_Peace/01.Supermans_Dead.ogg This
  13 filename munging is customizable - edit the mungefilename function in your
  14 abcde.conf to change it.
  15
  16 Many of the questions related of problems executing abcde have been moved to the
  17 FAQ, which should be distributed along with this package. Reffer to that file
  18 for help.
  19
  20 To make abcde 2.x work more like 1.x, put these options in your abcde.conf:
  21
  22 INTERACTIVE=n
  23 OUTPUTTYPE=mp3
  24 ID3TAGV=1
  25
  26 MAJOR CHANGES
  27 =============
  28 Changes in 2.4:
  29 * Support for mkcue, to create a CUE sheet of the CD structure.
  30 * New -o <output(1)>:<options(1)>,... way of passing specific options to an
  31   output. Now we can pass specific options without having to modify a config
  32   file. This feature was already present in the last versions of the 2.2 cycle.
  33 * Unix PIPEs, as a second way to encode files with a tight disc space.
  34 * Option to erase the "encoded" entries from the status file. Allows
  35
  36 Changes in 2.2:
  37
  38 * Support for MPP/MP+(Musepack) format. It can be downloaded from
  39   corecodecs.org. It is supposed to be Free (not only free), and released under
  40   the GPL...
  41 * New "-t <number>" option for starting the numbering of the output files at a
  42   given starting number. Ideal for albums with more than one CD.
  43 * New "-T <number>" option, similar to "-t" but also modifies the tag entries
  44   on the files themselves.
  45 * New "-w <COMMENT>" to add a comment to the tracks of a given CD rip. Use
  46   quotes.
  47 * New "-W <number>" option to combine both a comment with "CD #number" and a
  48   starting number for both the tracks and the tags with "#01" (that is, 101 for
  49   the 1st CD, 201 for the second...)
  50 * Support for keeping an existing playlist (and not add new entries to it),
  51   erase the existing one (overwrite) or append new entries to the existing
  52   one.
  53 * Under ./examples you will find a very basic way to make abcde run in the
  54   background and start a non-interactive rip of a CD, if it can find an
  55   audio CD in the tray.
  56   The abcded script depends on eject and cdparanoia being installed in your
  57   system.
  58 * New mungegenre function to switch off (or modify) the default behaviour of
  59   transforming uppercase characters to lowercase.
  60 * cdparanoia permits performing a query to the CD drive and obtain a list of
  61   valid audio tracks. So, now we perform such query and process the results.
  62 * Support for "None of the above" has been added with the "0" selection. A
  63   template is created, and the selection to edit it is defaulted to "y".
  64
  65 New options in 2.1.19:
  66
  67 * ONETRACK mode has been introduced. Setting the flag "-1" will create a
  68   single file with all the tracks from the CD.
  69
  70 Changes in 2.1.18:
  71
  72 * CDSPEED option defaults to eject. However, since cdparanoia has a built-in
  73   option to set the speed, we use it. There is not way (right now) to force the
  74   use of eject, but it will be introduced in a future release. Also one can use
  75   the pre_read function to set the speed with other program.
  76
  77 New options in 2.1.16:
  78
  79 * -S, CDSPEED and CDSPEEDOPTS for setting the speed of the CDROM. One can set
  80   the options in abcde.conf and pass the value on the command line.  This option
  81   can be used with "eject -x <speed>", "setcd -x <speed>" or the built-in
  82   cdparanoia option "-S <speed>", if the CD reader supports it.
  83 * Added a pre-read function. Modify it at your pleasure in abcde.conf
  84   One can use it to close the CD drive.
  85 * -m option, to modify the playlist to include CRLF in every line. Some players
  86   insist on having those to work properly with playlists.
  87
  88 New options in 2.1.15:
  89
  90 * -V can be used to obtain some more information about the CDDB queries.
  91 * -v shows the version, basic help, and exits.
  92
  93 New options from 2.1.10 to 2.1.13:
  94
  95 * CDROMID has been introduced for cdda2wav use with SCSI devices.
  96 * Use -L to retrieve the CDDB entries from a local repository (also one can
  97   set CDDBUSELOCAL in the config file).
  98 * If CDDBCOPYLOCAL is set to "y" we store copies of the CDDB entries, under
  99   CDDBLOCALDIR (defaults to "~/.cddb).
 100
 101 Modifications from 2.1.9 to 2.1.10:
 102
 103 * Initial (still incomplete) MacOSX support is on the works.
 104 * A new tool (curl) has been added for MacOSX compatibility, as HTTPGET
 105   option.
 106
 107 Options modified from 2.1.8 to 2.1.9:
 108
 109 * KEEPWAVS option now sets the clean to "no".
 110
 111 Options added/modified from 2.1.3 to 2.1.5:
 112
 113 * Ogg/Speex added. Use "-o spx" to rip your audiobooks, for instance.
 114
 115 Options added/modified from 2.1.1 to 2.1.3:
 116
 117 * WGET has been substituted by HTTPGET. Now we support fetch as retrieval
 118   program.
 119 * KEEPWAVS has been introduced. Set it to "y" and the wav tracks will be
 120   kept.
 121 * CDDBPROTO is used to specify the protocol level in the CDDB retrieval.
 122 * DAGRAB has been introduced as a cd ripper.
 123
 124 Options added/modified from 2.0.3 to 2.1.x:
 125
 126 * -b use batch processing. It uses normalize-audio to adjust the volume of
 127   the songs, and a -g gapless option from lame to remove gaps. Only available
 128   for mp3+lame combination.
 129 * a new "normalize" option has been added to -a, to normalize the volume.
 130 * -o works now with a combination of the different outputs: ogg, mp3, flac.
 131   Combine them separated by ",". Example: "-o ogg,flac".
 132 * OUTPUTTYPE is no longer used for the output file type. From version 2.1 abcde
 133   implements multiple-output and the file type is always appended at the end of
 134   the file. The OUTPUT variable can be used in the PLAYLISTFORMAT and
 135   OUTPUTFORMAT to create different directory structures and playlist names for
 136   each of the output formats selected.
 137
 138 * DYEAR can be used as DiskYear value in CDDB data. If the data is not supplied
 139   by the CDDB server, it can be added.
 140
 141 Other options that changed from 1.x to 2.x:
 142
 143 * -e doesn't exist anymore, abcde now presents you with all of the cddb data
 144   and asks you if you want to edit it. If you don't want to be asked,
 145   use -N or INTERACTIVE=n
 146 * The output type defaults to Ogg/Vorbis. Specify -o mp3 or OUTPUTTYPE=mp3
 147   if you still want to output mp3's.
 148 * -l 2 is now just -l, LOWDISK=2 should now be LOWDISK=y
 149 * -V and -v are gone, abcde will now prompt you if you'd like to use Various
 150   Artists handling, after showing you the cddb data.
 151 * -P is now '-a playlist,clean', PLAYLISTONLY=y is now
 152   ACTIONS=playlist,clean
 153 * -p is now '-a playlist,move,clean', PLAYLIST=y is now
 154   ACTIONS=playlist,move,clean
 155 * cddb-tool has been cleaned up a little bit. 'get' is now 'query' and
 156   'read', and the tempfile handling has been removed.
 157 * ID3COMMENT is now COMMENT.
 158 * FreeDB is now the default CDDB database.
 159
 160
 161 REQUIREMENTS
 162 ============
 163
 164 abcde requires the following backend tools to work:
 165
 166 * An Ogg/Vorbis encoder (oggenc, the default, or vorbize) or:
 167 * An MP3 encoder (lame, gogo, bladeenc, l3enc, etc). Any MP3 encoder that
 168   takes two filenames on the command line, one for input, one for output,
 169   will work.
 170   You can get lame at: http://www.mp3dev.org/mp3/
 171   You can get gogo at: http://homepage1.nifty.com/herumi/gogo_e.html
 172   You can get BladeEnc at: http://bladeenc.mp3.no/
 173   You can get a trial version of mp3enc at:
 174     http://www.iis.fhg.de/amm/download/ or:
 175 * FLAC encoder (flac) or:
 176 * Ogg/Speex encoder (speexenc) or:
 177 * MPP/MP+(Musepack) encoder (mppenc)
 178 * normalize-audio for volume normalization.
 179 * CD Paranoia, an audio CD reading utility,
 180 * Or cdda2wav, the audio CD reading utility cdparanoia was born from,
 181 * Or dagrab, another audio CD reading utility.
 182 * cd-discid, a CDDB DiscID reading program. Formerly bundled with abcde.
 183   It's available in Debian or http://www.hispalinux.es/~data/files/cd-discid/
 184 * An HTTP retrieval program: wget, fetch (FreeBSD) or curl (MacOSX)
 185 * id3, an id3 tagging program. Available at: http://lly.org/~rcw/id3/
 186 * id3v2, an id3 version 2.0 tagger. http://id3v2.sourceforge.net/
 187 * (optional) distmp3, a client/server for distributed mp3 encoding.
 188   You can get distmp3 at http://wlug.westbo.se/medlprog/medlprog.html
 189
 190 Abcde's new mailing list is abcde@listas.hispalinux.es. So far has not
 191 been actively used.
 192 The posts from non-subscribers are moderated to prevent spam.
 193
 194 Archives of the old list are publically available at:
 195 http://lly.org/~rcw/abcde/list/current/threads.html
 196
 197 Abcde's current page is at http://www.hispalinux.es/~data/abcde.php
 198 Abcde's old homepage is at http://lly.org/~rcw/abcde/page/.
 199 --
 200 Jesus Climent <jesus.climent@hispalinux.es>
 201
 202 abcde was originally created by Robert Woodcock <rcw@debian.org>
 203