Is grip a piece of junk?

PowerFactor · Posted: Tue Jan 20, 2004 2:40 am Post subject:

cuban: Couple questions. Have you looked at what abcde uses for ripping? AFIK all gui rippers on linux are frontends for cdparanoia or cdda2wav.(or both) Try using what abcde uses in grip if you like grip's gui better.
Grip has its own cdparanoia implementation, but it can also use cdparanopia itself or ccda2wav for the ripping. Have you tried either of those?

timbo: The smiley face going bad means your drive is having trouble reading the disk. The only time I have had that happen is with a disk that was badly scratched or cracked. But it could also happen if the disk was simply unbalanced. It's not a problem unless there are skips or pops in the ripped file. You can usually get around the problem by forcing the drive to rip at a low speed. See the cdparanoia manpage.

mlybarger · Guru Joined: 04 Sep 2002 Posts: 475

grip has just been getting me completely wacked out.

anything ripped from it lately ends up as silent sound. it has worked for me nicely in the past. i've tried it on two machines with a total of 3 drives. so i don't really think that's the problem. i'm using the default settings i guess. i never really bother to change those things. i just want my mp3's!!!

i've considered it being the cd, but i can rip the same cd in a windows box ok. i haven't yet tried to boot the gentoo boxes to windows to rip the cd's though that's definately next. i'll also try this abcde. using the kdemultimedia ripper, also gives no sound.

last thing i may check is the dma on the drive, but shouldn't that be enabled by default now? i've tried at least 20 cd's and they're not ripping very well.... arggg.....

btw, i always get the smiley going sour too...

douglas_slac · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 29 Aug 2003 Posts: 89

I used grip a bit, and it hasn't caused any problems. Just the fact that something has a gui doesn't mean it will be slow, or slow things down. It does mean it is annoying to script the use of it, but it shouldn't be any slower in use.

You should check out the use of cdparanoia by itself and see if that is slow. I found that it can be slow with certain cheaper CD drives, and cdda2wav can be faster with these, this was true for me where cdda2wav was 2-3 times faster than cdparanoia with a cheap drive I have. Then on another drive I have they were the same.

But you should also check out the nice level of the rippers and encoders used, if they are running at nice 1 it might feel like they are slowing down the computer, and a nice value of '10' would make then run just a little slower, but the computer would feel like nothing was happening. It is probably true that abcde isn't any faster or slower, it is just that it probably has better default option for your system and what you want to do.

I played with the options in grip (which is pretty easy to do), and got things to work quickly for my system, and not slow down other interaction on the computer. The final tweek I did was in the use of two hard drives, one for holding the wav files from the ripping and one for the final mp3 or ogg files, so there isn't read and write to the same drive. And then I set the nice higher on the encoding than the ripping, so the ripping gets precendence and doesn't slow down from the reading on the encoding. Doing this I got the ripping and encoding of a CD down to 6-7 mins. (which was an obsessive amount of tweeking, I need to get a life.)

vonhelmet · Posted: Thu May 20, 2004 8:51 pm Post subject:

grip works fine for me.

Check the settings it's sending to the underlying commands. Try running the commands yourself from CLI. See what happens.

mlybarger · Guru Joined: 04 Sep 2002 Posts: 475

ok, so it's not restricted to grip, maybe i should start a new thread on this, but i can't rip any cd's. i don't have a audio cable from my cdrom to the sound card. i shouldn't think that i need that except for playing audio cd's and i only want to play digital compressed music (mp3's).

i can play cd's using xmms and some plugin stuff ok. otherwise i have to plug the headphones into the cdplayer itself as oppose to the sound card.

perhaps someone can explain if and why these tools appear to require a audio cable from the cdrom to the sound card?

update - i've installed an audio cable from my cdrom to my onboard audio, and am now ripping ok. i wouldn't think that a rip needs to use the audio cable though since we're extracting the digital sound to convert. i would still like to know why this appears to require a cable.