Ripping CD feels a lot more 2005 than 2015. And it was probably already starting to feel old back then. However, I never got round to do a systematic, lossless rip of my entire CD collection. So before it’s too late I have bought a DVD-RW drive that will never get to write a single disc and armed myself with a 1Tb USB drive to hold all the data.
My weapon of choice is ABCDE, A Better CD Encoder, a Bash based CLI tool for ripping that has been in continuous development since before 2002 (!). ABCDE has many advantages over GUI CD rippers, the most obvious being that you don’t need to fiddle with the mouse, you just hit enter. This is important if you’ve got a case of hundreds of CDs to get through.
Another advantage is that the settings file allows you to string a piped line of stream editors together when forming the file name. What this means is that once you have determined how the file names should be formed, e.g. “Artist/Album/Track no. – Track title”, you can further manipulate it e.g. by making it entirely lower-/uppercase, removing slashes and other control characters etc. The genius of ABCDE is that rather than implement these features itself, it simply allows you to use tested and true unix utilities, like sed and tr and whatever else you care to throw at it to accomplish this.
Here I’m going to detail generally how this ‘filename munging’ works and specifically I’m going to show how to get file names that are universally OS-, URL- and command line friendly by only using numerical digits, the letters a-z, underscores (_) and hyphens (-).