The Great Music Rip of 2012

“Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination

and life to everything.” 

― Plato

I have a problem with my CD collection - it's too flipping big. So recently I decided to import the entire collection onto my Ubuntu desktop computer in hopes of preserving, cataloging, and actually listening to it on a regular basis. Along the way I discovered a few things I thought I would share.

All of the software described below (including Ubuntu) is free and available form the Ubuntu Software Center.

Step 1 - Find a good music ripper.

This was actually a little harder than I thought. I use Ubuntu which has a large number of music programs for virtually every need. The default (as of 12.04) is Rhythm Box which has some good features but, at times, is very slow when it comes to ripping CDs. 

I tried several different tools but finally settled on Banshee. It pulls the music at a faster clip and has some other interesting features like its ability to download album art. It also links to the Amazon MP3 player. One word of warning, however: Banshee is no longer supported under the current Ubuntu and I had one really odd windows manager glitch after installing. It hasn't happened since but, for a brief moment, I remembered what it was like being a Microsoft Windows user.