abcde: A Better CD Encoder
“Grab an entire CD and compress it to Ogg/Vorbis, MP3, FLAC, Ogg/Speex and/or MPP/MP+(Musepack) format.” I just had to grab a single track from a CD and as abcde is soooo easy to use I just wanted to make sure you also know this piece software. If not: take a look at it!
September 30th, 2005 at 09:04
St00pid.
Offering encoding to anything but mp3 will only cause fragmentation of the market. mp3 is the typical instance of a “good enough quality” format which everyone can read. Everything else just produces lock-in.
And yes, I know: This criticism is also valid for my fav client, iTunes, which encodes to AAC by default.
I’m not making any friends…
October 10th, 2005 at 09:28
Two years ago, I ripped my complete CD collection with about 250-300 CDs with abcde or with my wrapperscript myabcde, respectively:
http://karl-voit.at/scripts/#myabcde
http://karl-voit.at/scripts/#abcdestatus
It was a pleasure to use and thanks to abcde, all my albums were encoded very easily using an Ogg Vorbis Encoder.
Unfortunately I had to learn, that Bnerds comment above is absolutely true: although Ogg Vorbis is better than mp3 in several technical domains, you get troubles with lock-in-effects. I bought a nice portable mp3-player which can handle ogg-files.
But iPods and a lot of other players do have problems with oggs and the current iTunes with Quick Time 7 is not able to handle ogg files yet. Probably there will be a new ogg-support but almost for sure, there will be pitfalls like reduced support for meta-tags and so forth.
I decided to rip all my CDs again – but this time using iTunes and target format mp3 (196kbit/s).