abcde

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.