First off, let me say that Solaris 10 rocks. Now that Sun has (re-)embraced the developer community, life is so much easier. Solaris 10 now includes many of the tools and toolkits that one would otherwise have had to find (and compile) and install oneself. I think that OpenSolaris has had a lot to do with it.

One of the utilities that is included in update 06/06 is cdda2wav along with a Paranoia library. cdda2wav is a nice command-line utility for extracting audio files from a CD. It can extract into WAV, AIFF, AIFT, and AU formats. Paranoia is a library for doing the same thing, only better. The purpose of paranoia is getting perfect audio off bad media and/or bad drives.

The next piece of the puzzle is LAME. LAME is (not²) an MP3 encoder. Given a WAV file, LAME will convert it to MP3 format. Unfortunately, LAME isn't included with Solaris yet. It is, however, available at RareWares. You just download the binary and unzip it, and you're ready to go. (For Solaris, go with 3.96.1.)

Having both pieces to the puzzle still isn't enough to be really useful. To stitch the two tools together in a user-friendly way, I wrote up a quick Perl script. The script uses the CDDB information downloaded by cdda2wav to construct a directory hierarchy and to generate track names. It forks off cdda2wav to rip the CD and then converts all the tracks using LAME.

What impressed me most was how well both cdda2wav and Paranoia work. I have a few CD's that are in less than pristine condition. Using iTunes on the Mac or WMP on Windoze, I can't get past certain tracks. cdda2wav with the Paranoia library has no trouble whatsoever producing perfect rips from those same CD's. I will now be using cdda2wav and Paranoia for all my MP3 production needs.

Footnotes:

1. rip -- verb; make a perfectly legal copy of music that I own for my personal use
2. LAME -- LAME Ain't an MP3 Encoder