Ripping CDs on Ubuntu

We want to convert our CD collection to flac so that we can free up some shelf space, and so that we have a backup of some of the more obscure CDs.  I did a trail rip on my fit-pc2 to see how long it took to rip an album and find a ripper I liked. The winner was Audex as it copes gracefully with problems and for configurable file naming.

Rhythmbox
There wasn't a dedicated ripper installed so I tried  Rhythmbox first.  It ripped a couple of tracks of Burn Out fairly quickly, but then got stuck about 15% of the way through track 3.  The percentage complete did continue going up, but painfully slowly. I couldn't see any way of cancelling the rip other than ejecting the CD or exiting the program.

Sound Juicer
Sound Juicer is Ubuntu's default CD-ripping application, but it wasn't installed on my box. I installed it and checked the settings and it was set to rip to flac. I tried ripping the same CD again and ripping progressed quickly, but it was ripping as ogg. I checked the settings and it still said flac, so I changed it to ogg and back to flac and then tried again. This time it did rip as flac, but again it hung on the 3rd track.

Asunder
The Ubuntu Documentation described Asunder as "an easy-to-use, plain CD ripper" which sounded good, so I tried that next. It ripped and then encoded as both ogg and flac. Again it got stuck on track 3. It has a nice progress indicator that shows the progress ripping and encoding. This that it showed that it hadn't finished ripping the track when it hung, so it looks like it's ripping rather than encoding which is the problem.

Audex
I wasn't totally happy with any of the rippers I'd tried so I used Ubuntu Software Centre to see what else was available and found Audex. It looks nice and it was obvious how edit the settings. I sett it going and again it got stuck on track 3, but brought up a dialog box telling me that ripping performance had been poor for the last 5 minutes, and asked me if I wanted to continue. I said selected continue, and it continued ripping extremely slowly. It has ripped a number of CDs without any problems; we've now finished 'A' with only a couple of CDs which ripped in less than realtime.

Update January 2012 - Audex passed a long term use test as we're still using it after ripping most of our CD collection.

Broken Ubuntu Packages

I was installing updates on my fit-pc when I accidentally killed the power, and ended up with some broken packages with Synaptic couldn't fix. I read the Package Manager Troubleshooting Procedure, but step 5 implied that this would get information about why it wasn't working rather than fixing the problem*, and I wanted to fix it.  I also wasn't entirely sure what all the commands did and I don't like running commands when I don't know the expected results.

I decided to look at the errors Synaptic gave when trying to fix the broken packages.  There were lots but the most interesting ones were things like this:

dpkg-deb: `/var/cache/apt/archives/libgomp1_4.4.1-4ubuntu9_i386.deb' is not a debian format archive

I did a bit of research and then downloaded packages manually, and copied them to /var/cache/apt/archives/ and this fixed the errors. There was one package I couldn't find so I just deleted that file, and hoped Synaptic would download it, which it did.  At this point I had no broken packages.

I then tried to install the rest of the updates and got similar errors. I was fed up with downloading packages manually so I deleted all the packages from /var/cache/apt/archives using the following command:

sudo apt-get clean

With hindsight that's what I should have done to start with.

I'm surprised that Synaptic doesn't handle this scenario so that non-techy people could resolve the problem without using the terminal.  Hopefully it does in a newer version.

*With hindsight I think it would have fixed the problem.