Q. What happened with normalize? A. Normalize has changed its name under Debian, which is the GNU/Linux distribution for developing abcde (well, is The GNU/Linux Distribution i only use, at the moment). Now it is called normalize-audio. If you are using some other flavour of OS, you need to change the name of the executable in your abcde.conf file. Q. I am using MacOSX and I am having problems to use abcde. A. Well, I have a Mac, but I use linux on it. I have not been able to find a way to make it work there, since I do not have the development tools installed. I have placed a basic support, but some user reports are just complaining about abcde not encoding the ripped tracks, as if cdda2wav/cdparanoia/cddafs would never end reading them. If you have such a system and experience problems, please, report them, and I will try to work them out with your help. Q. I would like to give the trackname and the artist_name directly to the encoder (in my case oggenc), but found no documentation. A. That is not possible, since abcde gets the information from CDDB database. You can create a template and fill it with the option "-n". Q. What formats can I encode my music to? A. As for version 2.2, abcde includes support for MP3, Ogg/Vorbis, Ogg/Speex, Flac and MPP/MP+(Musepack). Q. I have a CD with a data track, and abcde complaints it cannot read/encode it. A. It is not easy to find a data track on a CD. Right now, I can only think of getting the track info from CDDB and ask the user for continuing should a "data" track name is found. But the solution is far from been optimal. For now, if you find a "data" track and you know the number, restart abcde specifying the tracks to be encoded, leaving out the data one. Version 2.2 includes some checkings with cdparanoia, to try to get this right. Q. How can I separate the different output files I get using multiple-output support? A. Use the OUTPUT variable in PLAYLISTFORMAT and OUTPUTFORMAT. It holds the different output file types you passed to abcde (i.e., ogg, mp3, flac) during playlist creation and file/directory creation. Q. I keep on getting files with ".ogg.ogg" extension. What am I doing wrong? A. The code for multiple-output adds automatically the extension of the different outputs you select with the "-o" extension (or with OUTPUTTYPE variable). Erase the ".${OUTPUTTYPE}" part from the OUTPUTFORMAT variable in /etc/abcde.conf or ~/.abcde.conf Q. I use Debian/RedHat/(put your Unix flavour here) and MP3 encoding is not working. What am I doing wrong? A. Since MP3 is considered non-free (you get it for free, but hardware players and net broadcasters have to pay license fees), some release engineering groups and release management teams have decided not to provide MP3 encoding tools. These distributions or operative systems have decided to use Ogg/Vorbis as the default encoding format, since it contains no (known) patent claims and they are (supposed to be) completely Free (released under a BSD-like license). However, there is no strong (at the moment) hardware support, although some groups and companies are strongly working on getting it, real soon now. For that reason some people prefer to encode to MP3. UPDATE *** UPDATE There are at least 3 known brands already selling Ogg/Vorbis portable players: Rio, iRiver and Neuros. Go buy one and you have no more reasons to use MP3. If you are among those individuals, you might need to add support for MP3 encoding to your system: Debian : check http://marillat.free.fr to install lame in your system. others prefer bladeenc. Check www.apt-get.org or google. RedHat : search on rpmfind.net FreeBSD: By default includes LAME support. OpenBSD: Available by specifying you want to install the port with LAME support, or by just installing it later from the ports tree. NetBSD : Available in pkgsrc. Others : Please, help me here. Q. I have modified some of the options, and now CDDB has stopped working. A. Check that you have modified everything in the right way. For instance, if you modify the HTTPGET program you might want to set some options of your own. If you use the predefined ones (wget, curl and fetch) abcde will try to use some defaults. Keep in mind that the output should go to the output as standard output, to be saved in a file for later use. Q. My hardware player (put it here) does not recognize the playlists created with abcde. What I am doing wrong? A. Try using "-m" when creating the playlists, or setting DOSPLAYLIST as an option in the config file. Q. I am requested to have eject when setting the speed although I do not use for anything. A. If you do not use cdparanoia, eject is used for setting the speed of the cdrom drive. You can substitute it for "setcd" with "-x" as the argument, but you have to install it manually (setcd is, at least, available in Debian). Another way to get the same results is using the pre_read function, defined in your /etc/abcde.conf file. Q. Huh! Why is MPPENCODER (with MPP) and .mpc the extension? A. Dunno. You must ask the guys who created and defined the format. The standard is MPEGplus (MPP/MP+) but the files use .mpc extension. Q. I want the new *put the newest and coolest codec there* format to be supported by abcde. Abcde is so cool but i want to encode also to this new format... A. Patches are welcome! ;) No, seriously, if the format is usable, available for Linux and open source/free software, it should be fairly easy to integrate. Support for AAC (m4p) should be the next one to be introduced. Q. (Thanks to Amaya) Where are those options and settings defined? Why dont you include a proper abcde.conf as an example? A. I do. It should be installed under /etc/abcde.conf and contains more or less all the defaults abcde uses. You can use $(HOME)/.abcde.conf to override those defaults. OBSOLETE -------- Q. I set KEEPWAVS to "y" but abcde insists on erasing my directory, along with the wav tracks. What I am doing wrong? A. The default action set includes clean, which cleans the temp directory, if nothing goes wrong. Take the "clean" out from the action list and you are done. UPDATE: KEEPWAVS unselects now the clean action.