I have a collection of several hundreds audio CDs (strange as it might sound: yes, I really bought those ;) While in the past it was "convenient" to have them served using a CD juggler, that piece of hardware is too big to fit in today's rack. And finally, thanks to DLNA and Android tablets, there are much better ways to select the title/album one wishes to play. Which requires to rip the music off those silver plates, and store the titles in my library.
Which brings me here. Years ago, I've used Grip to rip some of my CDs for use on my MP3 player. That worked fine, but meanwhile there might be something "better" out there. So here are my...
Requirements:
Must run on Linux
Must (of course) be able to rip audio CDs
Must support MP3 encoding (can rely on e.g. LAME for this), other formats like OGG Vorbis are optional nice-to-haves but not strictly required
Must allow the user (me) to specify quality (bitrate etc.)
Should match CDs/titles against some online database (like CDDB, Freedb, MusicBrainz) with a high recognition rate – better support multiple of them, a bonus would be some kind of "auto-fallback" when a title/CD was not found in one of them; if no match was found at all, it should allow me to manually "fill the form" before starting the conversion (so ID3-tags etc. are cared for)
Should allow for a user-defined "file mask" for placing the files (so I can decide whether I want them stored as interpret/album/track_title.mp3, genre/album/track_interpret_title.mp3, or whatever structure. Bonus: possibility to define multiple file-masks to chose from via e.g. a drop-down1
Must integrate essential details with ID3 tags (optional: support multiple versions of the ID3 format)
Should have a nice, easy-to-use GUI
Should be free and open-source (ideally; if there's a "Wow!" product not matching this, I'd at least like to know :)
Optional, but nice to have:
fetch (and integrate) album art (user must be able to switch this on/off, especially for album art integrated with ID3 tags)
create playlists (bonus: multiple formats, custom file-naming and -location, use of relative paths with user-defined "base")
Not needed:
automatic disk burning
Not wanted:
the need to install a complete audio-management-suite just to have a ripper available
auto-upload to some cloud (e.g. Google-Play-Music)
auto-post to Twitter/Facebook "I've just ripped..." #D
Related:
CD Ripping Software for OS X: different target OS and shorter list of requirements ;)
1: Idea behind this is to use a different structure for e.g. samplers, audio-books, etc.