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abcde - A Better CD Encoder

Grab an entire CD and compress it to Ogg/Vorbis, MP3, FLAC, Ogg/Speex and/or MPP/MP+(Musepack) format.

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.

Downloads

Older releases of abcde were hosted using Google Code, but Google removed the ability to push new tarball downloads there a while ago so we decided to move away. We're still using the Issue Tracker there (for now!), but the canonical place is now http://abcde.einval.com/download/ (here!).

We've also moved to git for development at git.einval.com.

Mailing list

The best place for discussion is the abcde-users mailing list.

Meet on IRC

If you prefer a more 'interactive' experience another place for abcde discussion is in the new Freenode channel #abcde where you can speak directly to the abcde developers or just chat about audio encoding in general with abcde.

Documentation

The abcde tarball contains comprehensive documentation including a detailed FAQ and a sample abcde.conf file. There is also some quality documentation to be found elsewhere:

• Andrew has written a really good overview, complete with several example config files.

• Comprehensive documentation has also been written for the getalbumart function, new for abcde 2.7

More documentation will hopefully appear soon in this wiki! If you'd like an account to help with that, please mail abcde-wiki AT einval.com to ask.

Authors

Over the years, abcde has seen contributions from Robert Woodcock <rcw@debian.org>, Jesus Climent <jesus.climent@hispalinux.es>, Colin Tuckley <colint@debian.org>, Steve McIntyre <93sam@debian.org>, Andrew Strong <andrew.david.strong@gmail.com> and many others. Steve and Andrew are the current maintainers.

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