RipOff - FAQ

What is RipOff?

RipOff is a GTK+ based CD Ripper for Linux (and hopefully for other Unixy systems once some testing and fixing has been done) that sports a simple interface, CDDB lookups, and a plugin-based encoder architecture. It looks GUI-wise suspciously like Sound Juicer in some ways, although I've changed the parts I didn't like of Sound Juicer's interface (of course). It is currently in a pre-1.0 release cycle.

Why should I use RipOff?

It's purely a matter of opinion. Before the full release of RipOff you may find it buggy and not featureful enough. The reason it was written was because I found the interface of grip to be overly complex and Sound Juicer's interface has just became strange to me, if still simple. A nice thing is that RipOff doesn't depend on GNOME (unlike Sound Juicer), so for all you GTK+ fans who despise GNOME, and don't like grip, RipOff is something that hopefuly appeals to you.

How do I install RipOff?

If you are on RHEL 4, Fedora Core 5 or 6, you will find RPMs for your distro on the RipOff downloads page. Please note that you must have the libcddb and libcdio packages for your distro also installed. On FC5, you can find them in the Fedora Extras repository. On RHEL 4, you can find a libcdio package here and libcddb RPM here. The FC3 libcddb RPM should work fine for RipOff on RHEL4.

If you are on Gentoo you can put the RipOff ebuild located in the misc/ directory of the RipOff source distrbution into your Portage overlay and have Portage handle the dependencies for you. RipOff is currently in the application process to become a maintained Gentoo package.

If you are on any distros, make sure you have all of RipOff's hard dependencies ( libcdio and libcddb)correctly installed and do the classic from-source install after unpacking the tarball

./configure
make
make install

Other forms of packaging for the various distros are welcome if you are interested in contributing. Please just send e-mail me (e-mail info is at the bottom of this age) if you are interested or have questions about contributing.

Where's Mp3 support? (for binary installtion methods)

Unfortunately, due to US patent laws, RipOff binaries cannot be legally distrbuted with Mp3 support. The source code, however, is protected by free speech laws so you are welcome to download it and do what you will. You need to have either installed LAME from source, or installed any corresponding lame and lame-devel packages you might have found. To create the Mp3 plugin, download the RipOffMp3Plugin.tar.gz and any RipOff-devel packages for your distribution. from the RipOff downloads page. Install the RipOff-devel package, unpack RipOffMp3Plugin.tar.gz, and cd into the directory where it was unpacked. From there are two ways you can do two things

First, do a

./configure
make

and copy the resulting liblame.so file in the src/ directory to the ~/.ripoff/plugins directory of the user who you plan to use RipOff with. Note, the plugin will only be available to that user

For a global install such that every user can see the plugin you will need to do a

./configure --libdir=(name of the global library directory your package manager uses typically /usr/lib)
make
make install

What features are planned for RipOff 1.0 besides what's already there (as of RipOff 0.6.1)?

WAV ripping plugin (in RipOff as version 0.7)
Lame-based MP3 encoding plugin (in RipOff as version 0.7)
FLAC encoding plugin (in RipOff as of version 0.8)
The ripping dialog informs the user of nothing beyond what they are ripping. For RipOff 1.0 there should an estimate of how much time is left for their selected rip, and the speed at which they are ripping and encoding (improved as RipOff 0.8)
Some sort of RipOff icon

How do I report bugs?

Please see the bugs page

What are RipOff's dependencies?

>=GTK+ 2.4
libcdio with paranoia and CDDA support compiled in
libcddb
libogg and libvorbis if OGG Vorbis support is desired
LAME if MP3 support is desired
FLAC if FLAC support is desired

What license is RipOff under?

GPLv2

Any cool features for post-1.0?

Ideas:

Completely seperating the backend and frontend of RipOff. The only thing that makes this difficult is that all of RipOff's data structures that store info about the CD are in glib or GTK data structures. Thus, any attempt at a RipOff backend would need to be freed from those dependencies. This will only be considered if several people think it would be interesting to use the RipOff backend in a different frontend than the one it currently uses (i.e. implementing commandline interface).
Adding in CD Playback. Probably not a terrible idea and not difficult to implement
Adding in audio conversion functionality by adding an audio conversion tab to RipOff's main window. This would give it feature parity with CDex a VERY good audio extraction program available only on Windows.

Please e-mail me any ideas for RipOff's future that you may have, or if you think the above features ideas are feature creep.

How do I connect to the CDDB if I'm using a HTTP Proxy?

Simply set your HTTP_PROXY environment variable to something like "http://incrediblyproxy.com:1337" where 1337 is the portof the proxy

Who maintains this project?

My name is Ryan Newberry (brnewber on Sourceforge). I'm currently a Computer Science Senior at North Carolina State University. RipOff is my first Open Source project and was meant to teach me everything I needed to know about writing a decent-sized project in C. It has succeeded! Please contact me at brnewber__AT___gmail____dot____com