For many years I used to rip CDs to the media library on my NAS using the Windows media player. I still buy a CD occasionally, but I'm not using Windows very much anymore.

What's the best Linux application these days for ripping CDs to a library? My needs are pretty simple:

1 - High quality option is a must.
2 - Rip output to a remote library, not just /home.
3 - Create a folder on the remote share for each album.
4 - Album cover art is good to have, but not required.

Related: I also rip DVDs and BlueRay disks to my Videos share, using Windows software. If there are good Linux alternatives, it would save me from needing to fire up Windows to do the job. Any favorites here?

    I'm on plasma edition and I'm pretty sure K3b cover all your needs there. You can create and save your own presets for ripping CDs and DVDs. You can define your own folders for temp files and final end product. I've never tried pointing at remote folders but don't see why it wouldn't work.

      vyzle I'm pretty sure K3b cover all your needs there.

      Thanks. I used K3b years ago to rip some CDs, but not recently. I'll get a current version of it and give it a try. The worst that could happen is I'd need to delete some output that didn't work for me.

      A BIT LATER: I'm impressed. The k3b splash screen points out that it handles Blu-Ray now. I need to buy some more CDs and Blu-Rays (all of mine have already been ripped). For a quick test, I ripped a nearby CD to my ~/Music folder, and it created outstanding results. If it can handle the rest of its tasks as well as it handles CDs, I'm sold.

        synth-ruiner I'm also after suggestions for DVD ripping!

        Be sure you take a look at k3b. From what I've seen so far, it's the best I've ever used for this purpose. And it's in the Solus repository. Just use sudo eopkg it k3b -y to get your copy.

          I like Asunder. Asunder populates the information after reading the disk and allows output to two formats at once. I recently ripped my collection to FLAC for home and mp3 for the road. Made quick work of it.

          I have used Sound Juicer on Budgie for ripping some Audio CD's. It was quick easy and uncomplicated you can Install it from the Software Center too. I ripped them using .flac so it gets all the track metadata but you will likely know more about this stuff than I do. 😄
          I do know that WMP would not play the .flac's though 😅
          I have not ripped any DvDs so can't offer any insight on what would be the best software for that.

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          • Post #9

          WetGeek Exact Audio Copy via Wine. Not joking.

            funnily enough, it seems VLC can rip DVDs! giving that a try now.

              synth-ruiner funnily enough, it seems VLC can rip DVDs! giving that a try now.

              I thought I'd read that somewhere, but when I looked, I couldn't find anything in the menus about ripping.

              Have you tried it by now? Do you know whether it will also do Blu-Rays?

                  synth-ruiner you're right. I found this too. It's not in the repos. But actually ripping to .iso with K3B and transcoding to .mkv (or whatever) with handbrake is totally fine I found. You can batch process each end if your the organised sort and handbrake give do much more control over letterboxing and subs which was vital for me.

                      vyzle But actually ripping to .iso with K3B and transcoding to .mkv (or whatever) with handbrake is totally fine I found. You can batch process each end if your the organised sort and handbrake give do much more control over letterboxing and subs which was vital for me.

                      Had to really make a pro web quality dealio today. This is a great repo package, I use it for what it's meant for: DVD snippets. I don't think it has anymore than that to offer but inside of that, the math is limitless for composing those snippets.

                        WetGeek I thought I'd read that somewhere, but when I looked, I couldn't find anything in the menus about ripping.

                        Have you tried it by now? Do you know whether it will also do Blu-Rays?

                        It's under Media → Convert / Save. I tried it out but it was pretty clunky - I initially accidentally recorded hours of a looping menu intro. I had to figure out which exact title/chapter to rip, and it kept silently failing. No idea about blu-ray.

                        vyzle But actually ripping to .iso with K3B and transcoding to .mkv (or whatever) with handbrake is totally fine I found.

                        I had no idea Handbrake could deal with ISOs - good to know! I've found another solution for now but I'll remember that in future 🙂

                              synth-ruiner I've found another solution for now but I'll remember that in future

                              Me, too. I have a great utility called Leawo that does a fantastic job of Blu-Rays, and I have a lifetime license for it and all its features, bought years ago and still valid.

                              Problelm is, it's a Windows program. I can load my Windows 10 SSD into the workstation that has my Blu-Ray disc drive in it, and that's what I did this time. I was hoping for something in Linux, so I wouldn't need to shut down Solus to load Windows, but even that's not the end of the world.

                              With Leawo, ripping a Blu-Ray disc is as simple as ripping a DVD with other programs. And, by the way, it handles DVDs and CDs as well. If you have a need, and also have a Windows machine available, I recommend it highly. I would only change if there were a Linux program that's equally effective and easy to use, but so far I haven't found anything.

                                I tried to use k3b for the first time to rip a CD I just bought, with mixed results. On the good side, the sound quality was excellent, the ripping was quick, and the results ended up where I wanted them on a remote Music share.

                                On the bad side:

                                Every track came out as "unknown", and the album name was "Unknown-unknown." And yes, I did click on the [Load CD Info] button in k3b, but it had no effect at all. Is this a bug in this version of the tool, or is there some way I can get k3b to read the album and track names for the CD that it's ripping?

                                EDIT: What I can't understand is, how k3b can know the number of tracks on the CD and the playing time of each track, but not the names of the tracks or the name of the album. And it's done the same thing on both my workstation and my server. And "Read CD Info" does nothing at all on either machine. To my mind, that seems to rule out hardware issues.

                                In order to get the CD ripped to my Music share, I had to resort to the Windows Media Player, which did so with high quality, quickly, and thoroughly. As a Linux believer, that really offends me.

                                  6 days later

                                  bigrammy One of the big pros of makemkv is the fact that it handles multiple angles (often some small segments of the video are rendered showing some sign with some text for different languages). Most software stumble at this resulting in out of sync audio because length of audio and video do not match - So trying to tweak offsets does not help.