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Version: 1.5
License: GPL2
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Asunder is a word meaning “into separate parts; in or into pieces” — a capital name for a CD-ripping program. And, in fact, that’s what it is!

Today’s review is of a graphical audio CD ripper; an application for taking tracks from your CDs, converting them into one of the many digital audio formats commonly used on computers, and saving them onto your hard drive. And it has an extremely simple, efficient interface.

Asunder follows the standard GNU installation procedure: ./configure, make, make install. All very easy and straightforward. It does, however, have a few dependencies: but luckily they are all listed on Asunder’s homepage. Basically, you’ll need the development packages for GTK, libcddb, and cdparanoia. Not necessary for compilation, but required if you want to export your tracks to them, are the libraries associated with the various audio formats. Asunder supports wav, mp3, ogg, flac, and wavpack — wav being the only format internally provided.

After installation, you’ll probably find Asunder in your desktop environment’s menu (under Sound & Video, for GNOME users). Run it, and observe the beautifully simple interface. Across the top are three buttons, labeled CDDB Lookup, Preferences, and About. They all do just what you’d expect them to — only, you might not know what to expect from the first one, if you don’t know what CDDB is: so I shall tell you.

CDDB is an abbreviation for Compact Disc DataBase — a huge online catalog of audio CD titles, artists, and “digital fingerprints,” referenced by many media players and CD rippers. The program sends some information about the starting times of the tracks on the disk to the database, the website compares the data to its list of CDs, and then it sends back the appropriate track and artist names. Wikipedia has an in-depth explanation of the process that’s worth reading.

When you insert a CD into your drive, Asunder will briefly show Getting disk info from the internet . . . at the bottom of the window, and, if CDDB has your disk in their database, the names of the tracks, artists, and title will be listed in their respective places on the screen. Despite the fact that CDDB has over six million CDs cataloged, not every disk is covered. It didn’t detect my (extremely rad) Electronic Symphonica CD, nor, unsurprisingly, my homebrew copy of Tree Helicopter’s Moon Calf. Most disks will be recognized, but, if the one you wish to rip isn’t; you can click on the automatically generated titles for tracks and artists, and enter the correct info (which, in case you’re wondering what all the fuss is about, is used in naming the ripped files).

Then, to rend by main strength the poor defenseless tracks from the nurturing arms of the shining disk that harbors them, check their checkboxes (or, since all checkboxes are checked by default, uncheck the tracks you don’t want) and click Rip. The first time you do this, a subwindow will pop up asking you to specify which format and amount of compression you wish to use. Subsequently, it won’t — so if you wish to use a different audio format next time, change it under Preferences. Asunder supports multiple formats per session, as well; so, by checking more than one format in the Preferences window, you’ll get your tracks outputted to multiple files of different types.

And, then, another subwindow will appear to display the progress, and the tracks will be ripped. Asunder can simultaneously rip and encode tracks, which cuts down on the time somewhat, but unless you have a really fast processor or CD drive, the ripping process could take a while. When it’s done, it will tell you, and you can either rip another disk, or close Asunder.

If you navigate in your file manager to the directory it ripped the tracks to (your home folder by default; this can be changed in Preferences), you’ll find one last little treat courtesy of the folks who wrote Asunder — an m3u playlist, to allow you to easily play all the files you ripped at once!

It all makes for a very efficient and easy-to-use program, to allow you to quickly copy your music to your hard drive and get on with the rest of your life. Unless, of course, ripping CDs is your life, in which case it might just help you get to the end of it faster — which may or may not be a good thing. Hmm . . . but I guess that’s one not to think about for too long. Happy ripping!

This entry was posted on Friday, May 2nd, 2008 at 1:04 am and is filed under Audio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.