How to make an egg

Mike: "I love your eyes, they're like wine, yes wine, I'm so sad, I feel like rain...."
Crow: "Uh, yeah Mike, we got it. There's still a lot of smoke and water down here, but as far as we know it's out. Look, we're gonna make some nachos, OK?"
Mike: "Nachos?! Be right there!"
— Mike Nelson knows his priorities, MST3K ep. 1002, "Girl in Gold Boots"

I am sad. Sad because times have not stayed the same. Sad because the quality and speed of man's inventions are continually improving. I am sad because I have realized this weekend that I cannot continue using BeOS to rip music CDs.

Many years ago a legend, a god among men, named Scot Hacker decided that the BeOS needed a cool way to turn one audio CD into lots of little MP3 files. So he wrote a script, a BeOS-oriented shell script called "RipEnc" that had more bells and whistles than you could shake a stick at. (Why you'd want to shake a stick at bells and whistles in the first place is beyond me.)

Of course, times change. CDs got bigger and badder, and the companies that make the CDs decided that they don't need to work the way they used to. Scot's script started lagging behind, because he wasn't updating it to catch the rare exception of a CD that wouldn't quite rip the way it was supposed to rip. Scot eventually abandoned the BeOS for OS X pastures, and dare I say there is no one on this planet with the balls to write new ripping software for the BeOS that would be as good now as Scot's was back in the day. Those rare CDs started becoming more and more common. Now, they're the norm. Put any new CD into your Windows PC and you're likely to find something other than music: either some wicked copy-protection mechanism, or a binary executable that contains promotional material for the record label, videos by the artist, or companion animation for the album.

They don't make audio CDs anymore. They make multimedia extravaganzas. And, frankly, Scot's script starts to pale in comparison. Moreso, the BeOS itself doesn't always understand why it's getting Windows executable content instead of Track 01. In three years, the face of music media has changed just enough to make the cutting-edge technology of 2000 obsolete, and in many cases, barely functional. At worst, rarely functional, as more and more CDs become available that the BeOS simply shrugs off and says "I don't know what this is. I'm sorry."

Of course, ripping CDs is easy if you've got the latest gear. There are plenty of ripping software packages available for free from the Internet. They all seem to run on Windows. Getting the ones and zeroes written to your hard disk isn't exactly a hard problem, it's just one of those things where you need to take into account that some CDs won't want to play along with the procedure. Winamp can usually handle that. RipEnc usually can't.

So, for posterity, I include my homebrew method for turning audio CDs into Oggs. (You can substitute Ogg with MP3 if you wish; to each his own.)

1. Buy Winamp Pro. It's cheap, you can afford it. Do a Full Install.
2. Use the Winamp Media Library to rip your favorite CDs to disk. You can open the Library by pressing Alt-L.
3. Choose "Devices" from the Library menu and select your CD drive. It is usually "D:". From here, ripping tracks is rather straight-forward.
4. Once you have as many .WAV files on your machine as you wish, you are ready to compress them into Oggs.
5. Install Monkey's Audio. You will only be using it as a frontend for audio file compression, but it has some other very neat and sometimes very useful features.
6. Download the vorbis tools, most likely in the "Windows" category. At the time of this writing, the tools are at version 1.0.1.
7. Extract the file "oggenc.exe" from vorbis tools into "C:\Program Files\Monkey's Audio\External\".
8. Run Monkey's Audio on your previously ripped .WAV files. This means you'll be using the "Compress" operation on an external format. When using Ogg, you must change the default Monkey's Audio configuration. From "-m3" to "-b160" works quite well.

From here, it's a simple matter of double-checking that your files are exactly how you want them: that they are playable, properly numbered and titled, and that they're sorted into artist and album if you wish. Then copy them onto a handy-dandy USB memory stick and take them to work and put them onto your BeOS machine. It still plays music just fine, goddammit.