[Techtalk] abcde: parameters for mp3 ripping

[Wim De Smet]

On 11/28/06, Roberta Gallini <regina.amazzone at gmail.com> wrote:
> I must be too "windows-oriented" but sometimes I think that some of
> Linux' programs have a tortuous behaviour expecially when you find
> 1000 lines in a conf file, all in English, and you are supposed to
> read it all to find a small setting to customize.
>
> I tried a lot of multimedia managers in Ubuntu, and I had the
> suspicion that they have all been prepared by the "office for the
> complication of easy business"-

Well I guess it all depends. I like grip because it does things in a
very unixy kind of way: it gives you a clean way of using a lot of
smaller programs well. You can finetune a lot of stuff but it
basically works out of the box. In your case though, wouldn't the
following work (from the manpage):
-o [filetype][:filetypeoptions]
              Select output type. Can be "vorbis" (or "ogg"),  "mp3",  "flac",
              "spx", "mpc" or "wav".  Specify a comma-delimited list of output
              types to obtain all specified types.  See the OUTPUTTYPE config‐
              uration variable. One can pass options to the encoder for a spe‐
              cific filetype on the command line separating them with a colon.
              The options must be escaped with double-quotes.

So, just use 'abcde -o mp3'. It's true that manpages are kind of
unreadable. Having them all in the same type of format has the benefit
of being able to parse them much faster once you're used to it though.

Following the hint from the manpage, I found this in the config file
(just search for OUTPUT):
# OUTPUTTYPE can be either "ogg", "mp3", "flac" or "spx", or a combination
# of them separated with ",": "ogg,mp3".
#OUTPUTTYPE=ogg

Another Unixism, and maybe where you got stuck. All config files sort
of look the same. Here, all lines are commented so you should change
that last one to:
OUTPUTTYPE=mp3. (without the # that is) Of course you'll have to have
an mp3 encoder lying around. I think abcde does some probing but if
the encoder is not in your path just search for "# Paths of programs
to use". Didn't test this all but I see no reason why it wouldn't
work.

I hope all that will kind of give you an idea of how I usually figure
this kind of stuff out. I'm pretty used to it and usually takes me
less than a couple of minutes. As with windows I find it's usually a
matter of "getting" it. Most programmers go through a lot of effort to
give all console programs about the same look and feel so you can more
easily find your way around them, just as in gui programs. I often get
lost in windows too so can't really say which one is worse. And the
most popular windows media organiser is still an apple invention (and
thus not a native windows app). :-)

greets,
Wim