secure (audio) ripping under linux

Finally, somebody wrote an alternative to Exact Audio Copy, which now runs under linux (EAC worked fine with WINE under linux altough..). For those who don't know, EAC is THE well-known ripper, which supports accuraterip, and now finally there's a linux alternative!
..for those who don't buy music and only download, stop reading now, especially don't click any link, it might waste your bandwidth and your torrents take longer to complete.... pfff... :-D

Anyway, so quickly what's the secure ripping all about (and what does the job now for linux..?)...?

secure ripping?

People might say, an audio-cd contains also just 0 and 1, so where the heck is the problem..!? To get a brief overview over it, here are a two things to consider; first of all, nearly every drive has an read-offset, which depends on the cd-rom drive model (have a look here), which needs to be taken into consideration to get an ACCURATE rip. Second, lots of drives cache the audio data, which might be a nice idea for the day-to-day use, but sucks for ripping. Let me explain, you've got a scratch on a disk, when you're reading this area, the drive will 'complain' that there might be an issue with that part, so the software tries to re-read it, since the cd-rom is clever, you'll get the sector out of the cache, so all the re-reading is pointless. To still get a good copy, the SW is advised to empty the cache before every re-read, so you can afterwards guess the original content.
Anyway, if you really want to know about all the hurdles in detail, read this page.

the tool

MORITURI
Yes, that's the tool that does all the magic, even under linux! Well, the project page tells everything you need to know, maybe I'll just add another example:
[code lang="bash"]
rip cd -d /dev/sr0 rip -o 733 --profile=flac -O /home/user/data/ripping --track-template="%t--%n--%a--%d"
[/code]
-o defines the offset, --profile the format, -O the output-folder, and the --track-template is used for the filename.

The most essential functions are the following; musicbrainz support for tagging, accuraterip support to verify the checksums agains an online DB, and the 'templates' for the filenames.
A bit a downside of the program is that it stops ripping if there's a checksum-mismatch on one of the tracks, and I also couldn't find an option to use the cd-release-year within the filename. I'll open a bugreport, as time permits, with a reward ;-)

Thanks for reading!
Cheers,
Raphi