Why abcde?
Ordinarily, the process of grabbing the data off a CD and encoding it, then tagging or commenting it, is very involved. abcde is designed to automate this. It will take an entire CD and convert it into a compressed audio format - Ogg/Vorbis, MPEG Audio Layer III, Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC), Ogg/Speex, MPP/MP+(Musepack), M4A (AAC) or Opus format(s). With one command, it will:
Do a CDDB or Musicbrainz query over the Internet to look up your CD or use a locally stored CDDB entry, or read CD-TEXT from your CD as a fallback for track information
Grab an audio track (or all the audio CD tracks) from your CD
Normalize the volume of the individual file (or the album as a single unit)
Compress to Ogg/Vorbis, MP3, FLAC, Ogg/Speex, MPP/MP+(Musepack), M4A and/or Opus format(s), all in one CD read
Comment or ID3/ID3v2 tag
Give an intelligible filename
Calculate replaygain values for the individual file (or the album as a single unit)
Delete the intermediate WAV file (or save it for later use)
Repeat until finished
Alternatively, abcde can also grab a CD and turn it into a single FLAC file with an embedded cuesheet which can be user later on as a source for other formats, and will be treated as if it was the original CD. In a way, abcde can take a compressed backup of your CD collection.
Comments and Reviews
Since years this is my goto CD ripping application. Creating a .conf file takes maybe 15 minutes and from this point you just pop in a CD type abcde -N (for non interactive mode) and let it rip. When it is done it pops out the CD and you can continue. As command line app it can be integrated into bash scripts as well.