abcde – CD ripping software for the command line

Last Updated on July 22, 2020

Other Features

There’s a wealth of options available. I’ll just focus on the main ones.

If you’re got a multi-core processor, you’ll probably want to maximize performance by using more than a single core when encoding audio. abcde lets you define how many encoder processes are run. This is extremely useful if a single core isn’t particularly fast.

There’s 3 different CD lookup methods supported by abcde. The default is MusicBrainz, but there’s also support for CDDB and CD-Text. You can also disable lookup.

And there’s lots more:

• Works with different ripping software. It supports cdparanoia, cdda2wav, icedax, pird, dagrab, flac, libcdio, and for Max OS X users there’s cddafs support too.
• Grab individual tracks of the CD.
• Grab a CD and turn it into a single FLAC file with an embedded cuesheet.
• Comment or ID3/ID3v2 tags.
• Normalize the volume of the individual file (or the album as a single unit).
• Calculate replaygain values for the individual file (or the album as a single unit.
• Determine how tracks are labeled for a standard ‘single-artist’, multi-track encode and also for a multi-track, ‘various-artist’ encode.
• Create playlists for single and various-artist encodes.
• Download album art by using the ‘getalbumart’ action. Many hardware playback devices can use this image during playback and show it on the device’s display. The album art can be embedded into the file container.
• Pad track numbers if there’s less than 10 tracks – this option lets you make tracks with starting filenames 01 02, instead of 1 2.
• Supports 2 CUE modes: ‘mkcue’ and ‘abcde.mkcue’. mkcue generates CUE sheets from a CD TOC (Table Of Contents).
• Option to keep the wav files after encoding.
• Set the ‘nice’ness of the encoder, the CD reader, and the distmp3 processes.
• Encode on remote hosts using distmp3.
• Eject the CD after all tracks are read.
• Low disk space algorithm. abcde has different algorithms to schedule ripping and encoding.

Next page: Page 5 – Summary

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Encoders
Page 4 – Other Features
Page 5 – Summary