Ripping CDs with Grip

Selecting Tracks To Rip

Before ripping, you need to select the tracks that you would like to rip. This can be done by right-clicking on tracks in the "Tracks" tab, or left clicking on a track when your mouse is under the "Rip" column. In addtion, you can quickly select/deselect all tracks for ripping by clicking on the "Rip" column label.

Ripping CDs

There are number of buttons in the interface under the "Rip" tab. They function as follows:

• Rip+Encode — This will cause Grip to rip and then encode all selected tracks.

• Rip Only — This will cause Grip to rip all selected tracks, but not encode them.

• Abort Rip and Encode — Clicking this button will abort all active rip and encode processes.

• Abort Ripping Only — Clicking this button will abort ripping, but will leave encoding running.

• DDJ Scan — Clicking this button will insert all track information for the current disc into DigitalDJ's database (if it is installed)

• Rip partial track — If selected, Grip will configured to rip a portion of a single track (as specified by the "Start sector" and "End sector" values). The "Play" button can be used preview the selected portion.

In the bottom portion of the interface, Grip displays progress bars for the rip and encode processes. It also computes the speed of the processes as a function of normal playback speed (so 2.0x, for example, means that processing is running twice as fast as normal playback, on average). In addition, if Grip is using builtin cdparanoia to rip, there will be a "smilie" indicator next to the progress bar that reflects how much trouble Grip is having ripping the CD. The meaning of the different smiles are as follows:

• 

  Normal operation, low/no jitter

• 

  Normal operation, considerable jitter

• 

  Read drift

• 

  Unreported loss of streaming in atomic read operation

• 

  Finding read problems at same point during reread; hard to correct

• 

  SCSI/ATAPI transport error

• 

  Scratch detected

• 

  Gave up trying to perform a correction

In addition to the individual track rip/encode progress bars, Grip displays overall progress bars that indicate the overall progress of a multi-track rip.

Grip also places an indicator for both ripping and encoding the the LCD display. They show progress in %25 intervals, as can be seen in this example of Grip in "small" mode. In this case, we are almost finished ripping a track, and have encoded about a quarter of a track.

Increasing Ripping Performance

If you are using an IDE CDrom drive, using SCSI emulation can give a significant performance increase. Apparently, dma is not used by the IDE driver (at least in 2.4 kernels). To enable SCSI emulation, add "hdx=ide-scsi" (where the "x" in "hdx" is is replaced with the appropriate letter for your CDRom device) to end of the "kernel" line in /etc/grub.conf (if you are using grub), or as a line after "root=/dev/something" in /etc/lilo.conf (if you are using lilo)

You can also disable paranoia to get approximately a 2x speedup. This is not recommended, however, unless you are very confident in the ability of your drive to do rock-solid CDDA extraction (or unles you enjoy having pops in your audio)

Using a SCSI drive

If you are using a SCSI drive, or an IDE drive under SCSI emulation, Grip needs to access the generic scsi device in addition to the cdrom device. On most systems, the generic scsi device will be /dev/sgx, where 'x' is a number. Unless you have multiple scsi devices, the device would be /dev/sg0. Ensure that your user account has access to this device, and that this device is specified in your rip configuration (see the Section called The "Rip" config tab).