Backing up CDs with fre:ac to transfer to a phone

I recently bought some pre-loved CDs (mainly blues with John Lee Hooker, Ella Fitzgerald, Fats Domino) and wanted to transfer them to an old Android phone which I use as a music player. I use VLC for Android as a player, have uninstalled the other apps off the phone and there is no SIM loaded because Wi-Fi is either from the house or off my main phone as a Hot-Spot..

I previously used GRip a long time ago but it seems to be defunct now with not much apparent support (though there is a new maintainer, so there will probably be new updates soon). My search revealed 2 apps in which I was interested. "abcde" which is described a "A Better  CD Extractor" and "fre:ac". abcde is a command line tool and the progress status is delivered as text to the screen. fre:ac is a GUI based application with all progress status shown graphically in the GUI. I tried both and went with fre:ac because by default the CD information was retrieved more accurately. I would have preferred abcde as I prefer command line interfaces because automation is easier. The naming issues may just be due to the CD database selected so I will investigate options for changing the database later.

fre:ac works well and converted all the CDs I had bought.  There are lots of options to select. I used the Flac encoder as I wanted better quality. There were a couple of lock-ups with CDs containing a lot of tracks. This may be due to memory issues, perhaps with abcde not freeing memory up properly. Restarting the machine and invoking fre:ac to redo the conversion worked fine.

I will update the post once I have identified the cause of the fre:ac lock-up and changed the abcde database.  There is also an opportunity to try options for signal processing and filtering later but for now this will suffice.


Cheers

 

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