whipper VS exhale

https://github.com/whipper-team/whipper

https://github.com/thomas-mc-work/most-possible-unattended-r...

Finding a good CD drive to rip them is the first step.

https://flemmingss.com/importing-data-from-discogs-and-other...

IME Discogs had the track data most often.

And obviously rip to flac

I have a music library on my home server that I use mopidy to play via the iris plugin integrated into my home assistant UI. It plays over Snapcast which streams over the network to multiple devices in the home with independent volume control. I can fire up the Snapcast client in my phone to get it going there as well, which does work over vpn if I'm away, though I generally just fire up the files from my phones SD card for out-of-home listening. I recently started using whipper on Linux to extract audio from craigslist cds.

https://mopidy.com/

https://mopidy.com/ext/iris/

https://github.com/badaix/snapcast

https://github.com/whipper-team/whipper

It's a Linux app that does CD Ripping. It runs in command line and can basically be semi automatic. https://github.com/whipper-team/whipper

A drive to read CDs and Whipper (automatic bit-perfect checks, conversion to FLAC, and playlist file creation)

(eg. It's the first listed option for Whipper, which is the closest open-source alternative to Exact Audio Copy and a Python project with a ton of C dependencies... and I say this as someone who dislikes Docker enough that I still went through the hassle of the "Building" section.)

https://gitlab.com/ecodis/exhale/-/wikis/faq https://gitlab.com/ecodis/exhale

https://gitlab.com/ecodis/exhale and apparently the FhG USAC encoder can be used in some programs.

There is a new lossy codec Exhale xHE-AAC, which is still in development. It is dedicated for low bitrate encoding (16-192kbps), and performs promising results at this range and even competes with opus. Encoding time is longer compared to opus, though. Their project page: https://gitlab.com/ecodis/exhale

Future? https://gitlab.com/ecodis/exhale is interesting and a few folks are hoping that it becomes an option in FFmpeg.

Good stuff, but let's hope it's not too long before support for the exhale xHE-AAC encoder is included.

[xHE-AAC is] Included in the AAC Patent Licensing Program by VIA Licensing at no extra cost. An early version of exhale was already on par with opus at 50kbps, quality has improved since. xHE-AAC should be ~30% less bitrate than opus.

Great answer -- it's also worth checking out the fairly new open source exhale "xHE-AAC" encoder -- this profile, "extendedHE-AAC" aka USAC is Fraunhofer's best attempt yet at a universal audio codec and shows really promising results so far (competitive with, or even beating Opus at low bitrates). Let's hope ffmpeg supports it soon.

In general (for now (until ffmpeg merge & suppoort the exhale xHE-AAC encoder ) Opus is the best all rounder -- but it's not supported on all platforms. If you need great quality, and easy playback support on Apple devices, it best to use libfdk_aac.