Chris @ Olstrom (.com)

Another issue, another five pieces of software. Everything for your music-playback needs. Tools to get your music from disc to file (Grip), to sort your collection, and manage tags (Audio Tag Tool), to splice, crop, and edit (Audacity), and make mix discs (Serpentine). For those looking to expand their collections by sharing with others, that’s covered too (Nicotine).

Sound & Video -> Grip

“It has the ripping capabilities of cdparanoia builtin, but can also use external rippers (such as cdda2wav). It also provides an automated frontend for MP3 encoders, letting you take a disc and transform it easily straight into MP3s. The CDDB protocol is supported for retrieving track information from disc database servers. Grip works with DigitalDJ to provide a unified ‘computerized’ version of your music collection.”

While the interface to Grip can be a bit confusing the first few times you use it, the functionality cannot be denied. It handles everything you need to take those clunky compact discs, and bring the tracks from them into a much more manageable, compact format on your computer.

For those of you still using the MP3 format, Grip supports encoding to this format, and can even pull tags from online databases like CDDB. Vorbis and FLAC users enjoy the same features, and can rest easy knowing that their music is stored in a non-proprietary format that actually sounds good.

Once you’ve configured Grip (which the included help button does a great job of explaining how to do), ripping albums is as simple as putting in the disc, and clicking one “Rip + Encode”.

Score: 9/10

The interface, while simple once you figure it out… is less than intuitive at first glance. This needs to be fixed to get a 10. It would also be nice if it detected which encoders were available, and did not display the option for using encoders you don’t have installed.

Internet -> Nicotine

“Nicotine is a client for SoulSeek, a light and efficient file sharing system, written in Python and using the GTK2 toolkit, based on the PySoulSeek project. It features uploading, downloading, searching and chatting, with strict bandwidth control, and tries to look like PySoulSeek.”

Peer-to-peer networks are everywhere these days, but they are rarely very social. Nicotine is a SoulSeek client, a network that differs from many because of it’s social interaction. It functions very much like IRC (especially allowing users to form rooms, usually centered around a genre of music, making it easier to find people with similar taste to yourself), but with the added ability of browsing other users’ music collections. Next to each user’s name is the number of files they are sharing, the rate at which they can upload, and an icon indicating whether they allow anyone to download, or only friends. Due to it’s highly social nature, SoulSeek tends to frown upon leeches (those who download without sharing in return). This encourages the majority of users to share, which makes it easier for everyone to find what they want.

Score: 8/10

The interface can cause some serious resource consumption if maximized at high resolutions (1920×1440 is what I use, but it chokes at 1600×1200 too). I’m not sure what it can do to make this easier, but I find it annoying.

Sound & Video -> Audio Tag Tool

“Audio Tag Tool is a program to manage the information fields in MP3 and Ogg Vorbis files (commonly called tags). Tag Tool can be used to edit tags one by one, but the most useful features are mass tag and mass rename. These are designed to tag or rename hundreds of files at once, in any desired format.”

I can’t think of enough good things to say about this application. I love it. It has saved me hundreds of hours, if not far more than that. It is the core component I rely on to keep my music collection organized. The tag-editor is simple, the batch-rename feature is a godsend, and the option to guess tags based on filenames is handy. I don’t see terribly much use to the Clear Tags option, but eh…

The playlist creation is handy, for people who actually use playlist files. This thing also doesn’t choke on massive libraries (I’ve seen it take 5-10k of songs, and scan them without complaint).

Score: 9.5/10

Add CDDB/FreeDB support, and maybe a cover art search option… and I don’t think anything else would be needed. This is an awesome application. A must-have for anyone with more than 50 tracks in their library.

Sound & Video -> Audacity

“Audacity is a multi-track audio editor for Linux/Unix, MacOS and Windows. It is designed for easy recording, playing and editing of digital audio. Audacity features digital effects and spectrum analysis tools. Editing is very fast and provides unlimited undo/redo. Supported file formats include Ogg Vorbis, MP3, WAV, AIFF, and AU.”

I find Audacity to be a great tool, really. It’s not the easiest thing to pick up, but given that it’s audio editing, which is hardly a simple task, that’s acceptable. My skills in this area aren’t all that developed, but it does what I need to do quiet nicely. Splicing, mixing, fading… merging stuff, manipulating channels and all sorts of spiffy things. It’s also great for cleaning up defective segments of damaged audio tracks.

Score: 9/10

It’s fast, efficient, and effective. I don’t know enough about audio editing to know if it does everything anyone could want, but I have yet to find something I want it to do, that it doesn’t do. 9 seems like a fair score, given that. In my eyes, perfect. But how useful for other people with more complex demands than mine?

Sound & Video -> Serpentine

Ah, Serpentine. So simple, and so elegant. Burning audio discs could not be easier. The interface is sleek, intuitive, and does exactly what it needs to do: make audio compilations, and write them to disc. I have absolutely no complaints about this program.

Score: 10/10

A classy example of what software should be. Built for a specific task, and excellent at that one task.

This writing was originally featured here, on LiveJournal.