The best CD ripper in the world
Just discovered Grip today, and I must say I was very impressed.
The very first thing I ripped with it was One More Mile by Muddy Waters, which is a double CD album. Obviously I'd like to listen to all of these in order without having to break to change CDs (or make a playlist especially for it), so I thought of editing the Vorbis comments after encoding to reflect this.
One of the great things about Grip is that it has space in several places for hooks, i.e. commands to run after ripping and encoding. My problem was solved in a very elegant way by writing a script that (with a little help from awk) runs vorbiscomment to add 22 to the TRACKNUMBER comment after encoding (22 being the track number of the last track on the first disc).
It strikes me that customisability of this sort is, in general, one of the big wins of the Unix toolbox approach. You might write a program for a specific purpose, but if you make it customisable enough, and especially if you give the user lots of hooks to run arbitrary programs, and your program uses open data formats, people can end up using it in very different ways. And that can only make your program more appealing and powerful.
[ Entry posted at: Tue 16 Aug 2005 17:43:50 BST | 0 comment(s)... | Cat: Geeky ]