Before I get into the mechanics of ripping and burning songs, I’d like to spend a small amount of time discussing music formats. When you purchase a CD, the songs on that CD are in a format not generally used by your system. In fact, when we copy songs to disk from a CD, we always encode it into another, usually more compact format. The format we transfer to is identified by a three-letter extension on the filename. The most common format extensions are .wav, .mp3, and (more recently) .ogg.

The WAV format is one originally created by Microsoft. It is extremely common but not the most efficient in terms of compression. On the other hand, the MP3 format (from the Motion Pictures Experts Group, a.k.a. MPEG) owes its popularity to the high compression ratio it uses—about 12:1. The newcomer on the block is the OGG (or Ogg Vorbis) format. Like MP3, it boasts a high compression rate, but unlike MP3, it is completely unencumbered by patents.

To give you an idea of the compression values, I ripped a 3-minute, 46-second song to WAV format. It came in at 39,866,444 bytes, whereas the same song in OGG format required only 3,438,407 bytes. If you do the math, that is a ratio of 11.6:1. Pretty impressive reasons for not using WAV format files.

Every time you put in a new audio CD, every song is selected, either for play or for extraction by Sound Juicer. Earlier, I had you play the songs, but clicking the Extract button is pretty much all you need to do to get those songs onto your hard drive. Alternatively, you can select individual songs by clicking the check boxes to the left of each song.

When the process starts, the Play button is grayed out and the Extract button changes to a Stop button in case you want to cancel the process. At the bottom of the Sound Juicer window, on the left side, is a graphical progress bar. Directly to the right of that, the estimated time is indicated along with the speed at which the process is taking place (see Figure 18-6).

Figure 18-6 The Sound Juicer is a multiuse multimedia application. Aside from being the default Ubuntu CD player, it is also a CD ripper.

The resulting songs are saved in your home folder using the following format:

When it’s all over, you get a message telling you that your tracks were successfully copied. You can either close the dialog or click the Eject button to pop the CD out.

Now that you have all the basics of ripping songs with the Sound Juicer, let’s take a moment to revisit this whole notion of audio formats. Click Edit on the Sound Juicer menu bar and select Preferences. When the Preferences dialog appears (see Figure 18-7), look at the bottom of the dialog. There’s a drop-down box labeled Output Format with several formats available. They include two CD quality formats (lossless FLAC and lossy Ogg Vorbis) as well as two voice quality formats (lossless WAV and lossy Ogg Vorbis).

Figure 18-7 When ripping music to disk, you do have a choice of output format, selectable via the Preferences dialog.

If the music is going to stay on your home computer and you like the idea of patent-free compression format, choose Ogg Vorbis or FLAC. If you own a portable MP3 player and you want to take your music with you, you may still be okay with Ogg Vorbis because it is supported by a number of popular players.

Now, look at your Sound Juicer Preferences window again and click Edit Profiles next to the output format drop-down list. You see the current four formats listed. Now click the New button to the right and enter a name for the new profiles (for example, CD Quality, Lossy, MP3). You now have five profiles listed. Click your new MP3 profile and then click the Edit button. A dialog like the one in Figure 18-8 appears.

Figure 18-8 To rip your CDs to MP3 format, you need to create an MP3 profile.

It’s time to make a few changes. The Profile Name can be left alone, and you can pretty much enter whatever you like as a Profile Description (for example, Rip songs to MP3). Under File Extension, enter mp3. Because the GStreamer Pipeline information is a little long, I’m going to show it to you on a separate line:

Click the Active check box, and then click OK to close the dialog. At this point, I would tell you to select your new MP3 encoder from the Output Format list, but on my system, I found that I had to shut down Sound Juicer first and restart it before I could make the change. After that, I was able to rip MP3s without fuss.

Do you want to ignore this event, create a music CD, or create a data CD? Hmm . . . doesn’t that last choice sound interesting? We’ll cover making an audio CD shortly. For now, let’s click the Make Data CD button. When you do, something interesting appears. A special Nautilus window appears (see Figure 18-12).

Figure 18-12 GNOME’s CD/DVD Creator probably looks pretty familiar right about now. That’s right; it’s another view of Nautilus.

If you are looking to save some files and folders to a CD (or create a backup), the easiest thing to do here is to open another instance of Nautilus from which you can make your selections. Click the files and folders you want and drag them into the Nautilus CD/DVD Creator window. You can also create special folders in this window into which you organize the information you want to burn to a CD. As you add files, the window looks somewhat more populated (see Figure 18-13).

Figure 18-13 As you start to add files, GNOME’s CD/DVD Creator looks less barren. When you have all you need, click Write to Disc.

Repeat this process until you have everything you want, and then click the Write to Disc button in the top right of the Nautilus window. The Write to Disc dialog appears (see Figure 18-14). Before we move on, I should mention that everything I’ve mentioned up to this point is based on the idea that you started with a blank CD in the drive. If you haven’t yet put in a blank CD (that is, you started the CD/DVD Creator manually), this is the time to pop it into the drive.

Figure 18-14 Just a few last minute choices before you start burning your CD or DVD.

If you have more than one CD burner (perhaps a CD and DVD burner), you can select from the drop-down list at the top. Directly below that, enter the name of the project you are creating. You can also choose to accept the default of Personal Data followed by the date. The only other thing you might to modify here is the Write Speed. I don’t generally find this to be a problem, but sometimes, if I find myself creating more coasters than usual (bad CDs), I turn the burn speed down. This can be caused by CD media that can’t handle high write speeds. When you are happy with all your choices, click the Write button. A progress window appears with details of the current burn (see Figure 18-15).

Figure 18-15 The progress dialog tells you whether you have time to make yourself a coffee.

After the CD is complete, another dialog box appears, giving you the opportunity to make another copy or eject the drive.

By now you must be thinking, “Hey, if I can copy data directories to my CD, surely this is the perfect way to do backups.” It certainly sounds good. CDs allow you to back up roughly 700MB of data, and DVDs a whopping 4GB. Use CD-RWs, and you can create a rotating set of discs for backup purposes. So what’s the catch?

Well, for starters, the default Nautilus view does not show hidden files. If you want a complete backup, you need to make sure you get everything. When navigating Nautilus, make sure you click View on the menu bar, and then select Show Hidden Files.

The second problem has to do with permissions. If you are going to use this system to later restore your data, you need an intermediate step. You need to create an archive of those files. Let’s say you had selected a whole collection of configuration files, or email, or anything else for that matter. Right-click the selected files, then select Create Archive. The Create Archive dialog appears (see Figure 18-16).

Figure 18-16 An archive not only protects file permissions, but also takes up far less space on your backup device.

The Archive field is where you enter the filename in which you want all this information stored. To the right of the name is a drop-down box with .tar.gz selected. This is the default storage format, but several others are also available including .tar.bz2, .zip, and more. The Location is a folder where this archive file will be written. Click Create and a process dialog appears as files are added and compressed.

When the archive is done, drag that into the CD/DVD Creator window instead of the individual files.

That’s it. With your data safely backed up, you can sleep soundly at night.

Data is fine, of course, but I started this chapter talking about music. So let’s make ourselves a music CD, shall we? We can start this in two different ways. The first is to pop in a blank CD, wait for the “What would you like to do with this?” message (refer to Figure 18-11), and then select Make Audio CD. This fires up the Serpentine Audio-CD Creator (see Figure 18-17). The second method is to click Applications on the top panel, then select Serpentine from the Sound & Video submenu. Both methods take you to the same place.

Figure 18-17 Serpentine is Ubuntu’s tool for creating an audio CD of your favorite songs.

This is a standard interface with a menu bar along the top and an icon bar below. In the large central areas, tracks are listed along with their duration. As you can see, there are no tracks at this time. In the bottom part of the window, the disc usage is reported as empty with a total capacity listed based on the type of CD Serpentine identified. Notice the CD icon to the left. This a graphical progress bar of sorts, showing you how much of your disc is currently full. To add tracks to your CD, click the Add button. The standard GNOME file selector dialog appears from which you can make your selection (see Figure 18-18).

Figure 18-18 To add songs to an audio CD, use the normal GNOME files selector.

Remember, press <Ctrl> and click with the left mouse button to specify which songs you want. When you have what you want, click the Open button. Don’t worry about the order in which the songs appear on the list. When you have your selection complete, Serpentine displays the songs and works out the Artist and Title information from the filename (see Figure 18-19). Then, you can simply click on the songs in the middle pane, and move them up or down at will. If the song in position six would make a better opener, drag it up to position one. It is that easy.

Figure 18-19 As tracks are added, Serpentine keeps track of how much space you still have to add new songs.

Notice the disc icon in the lower left. It now shows my CD as being just slightly better than three-quarters full. Feel free to add more songs and rearrange them further. To remove a track, click it then click the Remove button in the icon bar. When you are done, click the Write to Disc icon at the top. A pop-up message appears asking you to confirm that you truly want to burn this music CD. Click the Write to Disc button on the confirmation dialog to begin the process.

As the window appears, you might notice that it looks a little different than the data burn window. For starters, a message appears telling you that the media files are being prepared. That’s because your OGG or MP3 files need to be converted back to CD audio first. After the conversion has finished, the same window displays the write progress (see Figure 18-20).

Figure 18-20 A status window keeps you informed on the progress of your audio CD’s creation.

You’ll find Rhythmbox (command name, rhythmbox) by clicking Applications on the top panel, then selecting Rhythmbox Music Player from the Sound & Video submenu. This program integrates nicely into the GNOME desktop, with a notification area icon to drop the application out of sight quickly. It includes support for your MP3 and Ogg Vorbis files, collection and playlist management, tag editing, and much more.

On first start, a Rhythmbox configuration assistant appears to take you through some basic configuration steps. The first of these screens is an introduction, so just click Forward and Rhythmbox asks for folders where music is kept (see Figure 18-21). Enter this information manually or click the Browse button to bring up the GNOME file selector, from which you can choose the locations of music on your system. In my case, I have a separate partition called /mnt/music where I keep all my music.

Figure 18-21 Start by adding the names of folders you want Rhythmbox to keep track of.

As the assistant indicates, you can Skip This Step and enter the information at a later time. Click Forward and you are done. On the next screen, click Apply and Rhythmbox starts. The program is smart enough to scan all of your subdirectories for songs so there’s no need to list each and every directory where you keep music. You don’t want to just scan the entire system, however, because you won’t have permissions for many directories. You can add as many folders or file systems as you want.

Rhythmbox starts scanning those folders and builds a base collection. It reads the information tags on each song to try to determine the title, year, and so on of each song. After the process ends, you wind up with a collection list similar to the one in Figure 18-22.

Figure 18-22 Rhythmbox creates a default collection list of all the songs in the folders you specified.

To the left of the interface, there’s a vertical pane labeled Source. Several choices are already filled in for you with your dynamically created selection of songs under Library. As the names in that list imply, Rhythmbox is also a way to listen to Internet radio stations, download and enjoy podcasts, and much more. For the moment, let’s concentrate on our local music. Most of the action with Rhythmbox happens on the left side with a two-panel music browser in the top half (Artist and Album).

Below is your list of tracks based on the results of your selections in the above browser. By default, all of your songs appear here in the default collection list. Because organization is key, you can create additional playlists by right-clicking the left column, and then selecting New Playlist. The new playlist appears in the Source sidebar without a name; click (or right-click) it and rename it to something more appropriate. To populate a new playlist, make sure you have your default playlist selected, then drag and drop song titles into your playlist folder of choice. The titles appear in your new playlist but remain in the master collection as well.

When you added that playlist, you no doubt noticed that there was also an option to add a New Automatic Playlist. This is cool because you can have Rhythmbox create playlists based on criteria you select. Let’s pretend that I want a playlist where every song is a song I have played at least 10 times. I might create a playlist called 10 or More that is automatically added to every time I play a particular song more than 10 times (see Figure 18-23). That selection criterion can be anything from artist to words in a title (all songs containing the word love) to play count, rating, and so on.

Figure 18-23 Create automatic playlists with Rhythmbox by selecting criteria based on artist, play count, genre, and a whole lot more.

As anyone with a collection of songs on their computer knows, the information contained in the information tags isn’t always perfect. To deal with this problem, we have Rhythmbox’s tag editor. Right-click a title and select Properties. A two-tabbed window appears (see Figure 18-24), from which you can change basic information about the current track as well as details such as your rating (0 to 5 stars) for the song.

Figure 18-24 Editing tags is easy. Right-click a song, select Preferences, then make the changes you need.