Introduction
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Chapter 1. Introduction

kaudiocreator 1.12 is an audio CD ripper for KDE. With it you can easily rip your audio CDs to mp3 or ogg files or other formats, depending on whatever encoder you have installed on your system.

kaudiocreator 1.12 is a frontend to cdparanoia (vor ripping the CD data to wav files on your hard disk) and many encoders which encode (compress) these wav files. Currently lame for mp3, oggenc for oggs and flac (lossless compression) are supported out of the box (you may still need to install these encoder packages from your distro). But you can add more encoders with the program (if you have them installed).

In general ripping an audio CD is a 2 step process:

For the 1st step, the ripping of the CD, kaudiocreator 1.12 uses cdparanoia. Nearly every distro has a pre-compiled package, so install it, if you haven't done so already.

For the 2nd step you need lame (for mp3), oggvorbis (for ogg) or other encoders to be installed. All these programs are usually provided for whatever linux distribution you may have, so it is most likely not necessary to compile anything yourself. You just might need to install any of these packages. You only have to install the encoder package you want to need. If you for instance don't need flac, there is no need to install it.

What encoder/file format to use? The What encoder chapter gives you a small introduction about encoders, audio quality and compression factors.

One word to copy protected audio CDs: As already said, kaudiocreator 1.12 uses cdparanoia to rip the audio data from the CD. This program is not designed to crack any copy protection. So unless your CD/DVD-player firmware circumvents the protection, you will fail to rip protected audio CDs. In any case kaudiocreator 1.12 itself cannot handle/work around any protection mechanism. Your bad, just don't buy copy protected audio CDs and the market power will dry out this idiocy!

Hey, still reading? Even if you just punched the help menu entry after opening the program the first time, not having a clue how to proceed from this somewhat empty screen (especially when no audio CD is already in the drive when starting the program) and the unusual short menu?

Don't worry, this handbook will tell you how to rip a CD with this program. Beside the usual explanation of the programs commands/settings, there is a special section with a full walkthrough example. At first you will learn how to set the general settings. This includes your CD drive (device ID) the folder for temporary files, the main destination folder, in which a subfolder named according your choice from the CD parametes will be created for each CD, the encoder to use (like lame for mp3s or oggvorbis for oggs) and among other settings whether you want to use freedb to fetch the data for your CD from the Internet or (paranoia, not cdparanoia :-) ) whether you want to enter all data manually.

While the setup has only to be done once (you can however tweak it as often as you like until you find a suitable setup for yourself), you will then learn the daily business of ripping a CD to the harddrive. It is (hopefully) then when you will understand and learn to like the lean approach of the interface you may have stumbled over at first.

Last remark, kaudiocreator 1.12 is a very flexible program which can invoke many encoders. Therefore this handbook (currently) does not cover every possible command and setting. Use it as a starting point to explore the program yourself if you feel the need for more than what is covered here. Usually more information about the programs/encoders (app-name) which are called by kaudiocreator 1.12 can be obtained by opening a console and typing man app-name, app-name -help, app-name --help or app-name -h.

And now: Have fun...

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