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 2.2-pre2:
  29
  30 * Support for MPP/MP+(Musepack) format. It can be downloaded from
  31   corecodecs.org. It is supposed to be Free (not only free), and released under
  32   the GPL...
  33 * New "-w <comment>" option to add a comment for a given CD on the command
  34   line.
  35 * New "-t <number>" option for starting the numbering of the output files at
  36   a given starting number. Ideal for albums with more than one CD.
  37   New "-T <number>" option, similar to "-s" but also modifies the tag entries
  38   on the files themselves.
  39 * Support for keeping an existing playlist (and not add new entries to it),
  40   erase the existing one (overwrite) or append new entries to the existing
  41   one.
  42 * Under ./examples you will find a very basic way to make abcde run in the
  43   background and start a non-interactive rip of a CD, if it can find an
  44   audio CD in the tray.
  45   The abcded script depends on eject and cdparanoia being installed in your
  46   system.
  47 * New mungegenre function to switch off (or modify) the default behaviour of
  48   transforming uppercase characters to lowercase.
  49
  50 Changes in 2.2-pre1:
  51
  52 * cdparanoia permits performing a query to the CD drive and obtain a list of
  53   valid audio tracks. So, now we perform such query and process the results.
  54 * Support for "None of the above" has been added with the "0" selection. A
  55   template is created, and the selection to edit it is defaulted to "y".
  56
  57 New options in 2.1.19:
  58
  59 * ONETRACK mode has been introduced. Setting the flag "-1" will create a
  60   single file with all the tracks from the CD.
  61
  62 Changes in 2.1.18:
  63
  64 * CDSPEED option defaults to eject. However, since cdparanoia has a built-in
  65   option to set the speed, we use it. There is not way (right now) to force the
  66   use of eject, but it will be introduced in a future release. Also one can use
  67   the pre_read function to set the speed with other program.
  68
  69 New options in 2.1.16:
  70
  71 * -S, CDSPEED and CDSPEEDOPTS for setting the speed of the CDROM. One can set
  72   the options in abcde.conf and pass the value on the command line.  This option
  73   can be used with "eject -x <speed>", "setcd -x <speed>" or the built-in
  74   cdparanoia option "-S <speed>", if the CD reader supports it.
  75 * Added a pre-read function. Modify it at your pleasure in abcde.conf
  76   One can use it to close the CD drive.
  77 * -m option, to modify the playlist to include CRLF in every line. Some players
  78   insist on having those to work properly with playlists.
  79
  80 New options in 2.1.15:
  81
  82 * -V can be used to obtain some more information about the CDDB queries.
  83 * -v shows the version, basic help, and exits.
  84
  85 New options from 2.1.10 to 2.1.13:
  86
  87 * CDROMID has been introduced for cdda2wav use with SCSI devices.
  88 * Use -L to retrieve the CDDB entries from a local repository (also one can
  89   set CDDBUSELOCAL in the config file).
  90 * If CDDBCOPYLOCAL is set to "y" we store copies of the CDDB entries, under
  91   CDDBLOCALDIR (defaults to "~/.cddb).
  92
  93 Modifications from 2.1.9 to 2.1.10:
  94
  95 * Initial (still incomplete) MacOSX support is on the works.
  96 * A new tool (curl) has been added for MacOSX compatibility, as HTTPGET
  97   option.
  98
  99 Options modified from 2.1.8 to 2.1.9:
 100
 101 * KEEPWAVS option now sets the clean to "no".
 102
 103 Options added/modified from 2.1.3 to 2.1.5:
 104
 105 * Ogg/Speex added. Use "-o spx" to rip your audiobooks, for instance.
 106
 107 Options added/modified from 2.1.1 to 2.1.3:
 108
 109 * WGET has been substituted by HTTPGET. Now we support fetch as retrieval
 110   program.
 111 * KEEPWAVS has been introduced. Set it to "y" and the wav tracks will be
 112   kept.
 113 * CDDBPROTO is used to specify the protocol level in the CDDB retrieval.
 114 * DAGRAB has been introduced as a cd ripper.
 115
 116 Options added/modified from 2.0.3 to 2.1.x:
 117
 118 * -b use batch processing. It uses normalize-audio to adjust the volume of
 119   the songs, and a -g gapless option from lame to remove gaps. Only available
 120   for mp3+lame combination.
 121 * a new "normalize" option has been added to -a, to normalize the volume.
 122 * -o works now with a combination of the different outputs: ogg, mp3, flac.
 123   Combine them separated by ",". Example: "-o ogg,flac".
 124 * OUTPUTTYPE is no longer used for the output file type. From version 2.1 abcde
 125   implements multiple-output and the file type is always appended at the end of
 126   the file. The OUTPUT variable can be used in the PLAYLISTFORMAT and
 127   OUTPUTFORMAT to create different directory structures and playlist names for
 128   each of the output formats selected.
 129
 130 * DYEAR can be used as DiskYear value in CDDB data. If the data is not supplied
 131   by the CDDB server, it can be added.
 132
 133 Other options that changed from 1.x to 2.x:
 134
 135 * -e doesn't exist anymore, abcde now presents you with all of the cddb data
 136   and asks you if you want to edit it. If you don't want to be asked,
 137   use -N or INTERACTIVE=n
 138 * The output type defaults to Ogg/Vorbis. Specify -o mp3 or OUTPUTTYPE=mp3
 139   if you still want to output mp3's.
 140 * -l 2 is now just -l, LOWDISK=2 should now be LOWDISK=y
 141 * -V and -v are gone, abcde will now prompt you if you'd like to use Various
 142   Artists handling, after showing you the cddb data.
 143 * -P is now '-a playlist,clean', PLAYLISTONLY=y is now
 144   ACTIONS=playlist,clean
 145 * -p is now '-a playlist,move,clean', PLAYLIST=y is now
 146   ACTIONS=playlist,move,clean
 147 * cddb-tool has been cleaned up a little bit. 'get' is now 'query' and
 148   'read', and the tempfile handling has been removed.
 149 * ID3COMMENT is now COMMENT.
 150 * FreeDB is now the default CDDB database.
 151
 152
 153 REQUIREMENTS
 154 ============
 155
 156 abcde requires the following backend tools to work:
 157
 158 * An Ogg/Vorbis encoder (oggenc, the default, or vorbize) or:
 159 * An MP3 encoder (lame, gogo, bladeenc, l3enc, etc). Any MP3 encoder that
 160   takes two filenames on the command line, one for input, one for output,
 161   will work.
 162   You can get lame at: http://www.mp3dev.org/mp3/
 163   You can get gogo at: http://homepage1.nifty.com/herumi/gogo_e.html
 164   You can get BladeEnc at: http://bladeenc.mp3.no/
 165   You can get a trial version of mp3enc at:
 166     http://www.iis.fhg.de/amm/download/ or:
 167 * FLAC encoder (flac) or:
 168 * Ogg/Speex encoder (speexenc) or:
 169 * MPP/MP+(Musepack) encoder (mppenc)
 170 * normalize-audio for volume normalization.
 171 * CD Paranoia, an audio CD reading utility,
 172 * Or cdda2wav, the audio CD reading utility cdparanoia was born from,
 173 * Or dagrab, another audio CD reading utility.
 174 * cd-discid, a CDDB DiscID reading program. Formerly bundled with abcde.
 175   It's available in Debian or http://www.hispalinux.es/~data/files/cd-discid/
 176 * An HTTP retrieval program: wget, fetch (FreeBSD) or curl (MacOSX)
 177 * id3, an id3 tagging program. Available at: http://lly.org/~rcw/id3/
 178 * id3v2, an id3 version 2.0 tagger. http://id3v2.sourceforge.net/
 179 * (optional) distmp3, a client/server for distributed mp3 encoding.
 180   You can get distmp3 at http://wlug.westbo.se/medlprog/medlprog.html
 181
 182 Abcde's new mailing list is abcde@listas.hispalinux.es. So far has not
 183 been actively used.
 184 The posts from non-subscribers are moderated to prevent spam.
 185
 186 Archives of the old list are publically available at:
 187 http://lly.org/~rcw/abcde/list/current/threads.html
 188
 189 Abcde's current page is at http://www.hispalinux.es/~data/abcde.php
 190 Abcde's old homepage is at http://lly.org/~rcw/abcde/page/.
 191 --
 192 Jesus Climent <jesus.climent@hispalinux.es>
 193
 194 abcde was originally created by Robert Woodcock <rcw@debian.org>
 195