Kaudiocreator is dead - long live Audex

Okay, after a week two weeks of dealing with the Jaunty Jackalope upgrade, I'm here to pronounce Audex a worthy successor to Kaudiocreator.

I used to rip a lot of CDs, in the past primarily wih Kaudiocreator- (Kaudiocreater was an app that ran under KDE 3.5). After the upgrade to KDE 4.2, it (along with several other apps) disappeared.

I was aghast. I loved Kaudiocreator: it was, in my opinion, one of the best Linux rippers out there. Then it disappeared!

I found Audex while googling at work (during lunch! I swear!) which promised to be more or less a replacement.

I installed with a mixture of skepticism and apprehension, but quickly became a fan.

Like Kaudiocreator, Audex has a clean simple mostly intuitive interface, which integrates well with KDE 4. It doesn't have its predecessor's annoying habit of failing to encode a CD if the tag editor doesn't like the genre/label pulled down by the CDDB lookup. One can set multiple encoding profiles using Ogg, MP3, Flac, WAV, and others, in various quality settings, and set the path for the ripped files on a profile by profile basis (put high quality MP3s in one directory, highly compressed ones in another).

When setting the naming mask, be sure and include the suffix mask; it won't give the ripped file an extension without it. I found myself going in and renaming a couple of CDs worth of files without the ".mp3" extension. Damned annoying.

It also does album cover lookups and previews these in the main interface when it does the CDDB lookup. You can set the filename to be used for the cover art either to use the tag editor masks (allowing you to set the cover art filename to part of the album or artist name) or just have it use a static name like cover.jpg.

Don't care for Audex? Another ripper I've seen references to is Asunder, which has similar functionality. I've installed it but am so pleased with Audex I hardly ever use Asunder.

Kudos to the authors for both applications!

Gentlemen (and ladies), start your engines.

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