KDE, as of version 3.5.5 as found in Ubuntu 6.10, offers you two methods for creating ogg rips of your CDs. Firstly, you may use the Audio CD browser built into Konqueror (by choosing it from the navigation panel or typing audiocd:/ into the address bar). This rather cool plugin (known as an ioslave in KDE parlance) presents you with a virtual directory of the CD’s contents laid out as WAV files, MP3 files, OGG files, FLAC files, CD Audio files and CDDB information, all on a per-track or per-CD basis. It’s the level of integration that KDE is rightly famous for.

Encoding and ripping is just a matter of dragging and dropping files. The quality settings are controlled from System Settings -> Advanced -> Audio Encoding -> Ogg Vorbis Encoder.

The other ripping and encoding method is offered when the CD is inserted: you may choose “Extract and Encode Audio Tracks”, which fires up KAudioCreator. This is a more traditional ripping app and seems to be marginally faster, possibly because of the way it divvies up ripping and encoding jobs (although any modern CPU will be able to encode far faster than the track can be ripped). Unfortunately, and this is the bit that caught me out at first and made me write this post, the quality settings in KDE’s central System Settings control panel have no effect on KAudioCreator’s output! To create oggs of higher quality than the default 3 within KAudioCreator, you must go to Settings -> Configure KAudioCreator -> Encoder, select OggEnc, click Configure, and append --quality=6 to the command line. Mine, for example, looks like this:

oggenc -o %o –artist %{artist} –album %{albumtitle} –title %{title} –date %{year} –tracknum %{number} –genre %{genre} %f –quality=6

I am perfectly aware of the irony of being meticulously careful to use a Free codec to encode non-free content.

To me, Ogg Vorbis is a beautiful format. Lossless compression doesn’t appeal to me because I have neither the expensive playback hardware nor the audiophile’s ears required to appreciate it. I also enjoy that feeling known to every geek that I am using something efficient (a 160Kbit/sec Vorbis file is comparable to a 192Kbit/sec MP3). It’s the PNG of audio formats. All the other formats - WMA, AAC, MP3, the infernal RealAudio, and Sony’s hilariously broken ATRAC - are unacceptably patent-encumbered or unsupported outside their own niches.

There’s good hardware support too, although the iPod will only play oggs by hacking Rockbox into it. Still, it’s not like anyone buys iPods is it? Er…