CD Rip / Burn Support

This is one of the features that most other media players have, that songbird unfortunately does not have yet. I am not sure why that is not the case, but go ahead and comment on the feature request for it so that we can hopefully convince the devs to add this incredibly important feature.

somebody please make this an add-on feature.

i know cd's are dying but alot of people still have fairly large collections

I'm one of those dino's that has a lot of CD's, and would love to see a burning feature added to songbird.

This feature was filed some time ago.

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you can t rip cd's, How much more of a Homer Simpson can a developer pull? I was looking forward to trying something new but I am unable to use a media player that can not rip my cd's. Doh! NEXT

I am disappointed that there is no cd ripping with this media player. Sorry , until one is added I will have to find another media player to use. What a shame

i sad coz i has to pass by WMP to rip my CD

Yes, they really need to put it in there already. It's driving me mad without it.

Hey everybody!

I know this is a work in progress, but I'm a little worried that CD ripping isn't even on the roadmap that Ian linked to! IMO that's a truly essential feature that MUST be there to be considered a viable alternative.... I can wait a while, but at least give me some hope here...

Is there some technical, legal, or other issue that makes this function difficult to implement?

(BTW I think Songbird is overall fantastic work)

need this asap

in a typical month i would probably burn about 5 CDs and i would Rip CDs as often as i buy them wihich would probably be 4 times a month. most of the time i would find a stash of CDs and Rip them all into my library so these numbers aren't really that accurate but hope they help. this is deffinitly a crucial feature that needs to be in songbird

Hi Rob,

Burning: Probably 3-4 a month
Buy/Rip: I have a large collection that I'm working through slowly (with iTunes now). Adding new CDs I probably rip up to 10 a month. I'd love to get away from iTunes (and quicktime!) completely.

Thanks!

I do about 15 CD's a month, ripping and putting them onto actual CD's.
ya im in the same boat as redpoint with iTunes, i have a large collection ad still dependant on it because of it's burning feature.

CD purchasing? about 9/month

This really shouldn't be a "feature" that you can get away with not doing, if you dont have it you can't really compete with itunes or WMP. i would like to see Songbird be successful, and take over the world's dependency on iTunes. show people that there is something better out there.

This should be a top priority if you want to take songbird to it's potential.

Can't agree more. I have just finished working on a festival with Itunes and I found them to be arrogant and ignorant about the music they were selling, I also resent the fact that a piece of software that I only need to listen to the CD's I have bought over the years is also a vapid tacky online shop that has no quality control. I honestly think that they need knocking down a peg or two, Songbird has the potential to be magnificent, and could take over the world just as firefox has, but ripping will need to be a fundamental feature in order to put a dent is Apples tinpot megalomania. Thanks for indulging my rant. T.

Like a few others who have posted here, I am still working through my music collection. I am probably ripping 8(ish) a month at the moment. When I've ripped them all I'll just have my CD purchases to rip...maybe 5-6 per month. I typically burn 3-4 CDs a month as well as 1 or 2 DVDs

After I download music i burn them to CDs to listen to in my car. So I burn maybe 5 cd's a month. It would be awesome if I could do it directly through songbird.

Hey Rob Lord:

Can you perhaps start a new comment to track this? Or perhaps a poll?

Obviously the rip/burn issue is the 800-pound gorilla in the room.

0.7rc3/vista-64bit

Well today I finally ditched office, outlook (now using Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, Scribus and Open Office.org). I'd really, really like to get rid of WMP11 and use Sunbird (Now why can't MS come up with great names like those, sorry forgot they're all robots.)

Now I discover SB can't rip my CD Collection (which I am still going through) and I'm a bit miffed. I got around 500 CDs and would prefer to carry around the MP3 version rather than the hard copy!!

So come on guys give us what we want so we can all stick our tongues out to those robots at Redmond.

Rip 5-8p/m
Burn 2-3p/m (for my car only use MP3s otherwise)
Buy 5 or so p/m (I still prefer buynig buy the physical album, I'm a bit old fashioned that way)

Stareagle

Rob, my goal is to use Songbird as a standalone program, NOT dependent on any other dominant programs for usage. ALL my music is stored on my CD's. So there's no way to play it using Songbird alone. I would like to be able to hold out for this development but I'm not sure that an indefinite date will work for me.

Theoretically the option to simply copy files from a CD into my Music folder, and then importing from Songbird should be a no-brainer for the simple user. Of course, I can't even do this; but even then, that would be a poor option. I could only store a minimum amount of those files on my computer, because as direct audio file copies, those individual song files are huge.

So if I have no means to import them in as smaller mp3's or the like, then I basically have a dusty library. No good. Conversion is a necessity. Rob, you wanted specifics as to how many CD's we burn, rip and buy. For me this is not the pertinent question.

What I need is to access the music I already own. I need to rip it in one big operation onto my computer as small files, press play, and boogie. After that I will be burning and buying, sure, and I go through several new CD's a month either online of in stores, but I always back them up to CD's. Proprietary issues always seem to be changing so this is where I'm coming from.

I was super-shocked after reinstalling OSX, immediately deleting iTunes, and trying this new player first that it wouldn't work for me. Oops. Now what?!! It looks amazing and I feel you guys have done a great job with other features; it looks like there are plenty of other users besides myself who feel if you can work out these kinks Songbird will be absolutely indispensable.

Till then looks like it's back to the other guy....

I burn CDs about 2-3 a month.
I rip CDs about 3-4 a month.
I buy CDs about 5-6 a month.

Try MEDIA MONKEY is similar Songbird with the ability to burn and rip CD'S, plus other neat things. For free.

Media Monkey = only for Windows

Media Monkey works with Firefox. I have been using it for six months.

Hmm, Firefox on what OS, randy? It says right on their site, "MediaMonkey runs on Windows platforms only" http://www.mediamonkey.com/download/

Yes, CD ripping and burning is definitely still a must for media players, although SB does a great job integrating the web (= future).

How about this as a temporary solution: I've seen watching media folders for new files is on the roadmap. Complete this soon. Then make a simple extension that offers a "rip CD" button and runs an external command line ripper (which can sure be found for any OS). The ripped files go into a watched folder and are thus quickly integrated into the SB library.

Maybe this is quicker than tightly building all the ripping stuff into songbird (which has then to follow, of course). Stupid?

I agree-- the point is not how many CDs we might be ripping, buying or throwing out in any given week, month, or year. The point is that without this feature Songbird is seriously crippled as media player, no matter how good its other functionality.

I really hope this "feature" (I'd prefer the term requirement) comes soon as I really like what Songbird has shown so far. Can the developers or some one else at least post a workaround? Is there a lightweight free app that can rip CDs to mp3 that's not WMP or iTunes, where the files could then be transferred into Songbird?

I have moved on to dBpoweramp for ripping. It is well-worth the price (yeah, yeah, it's not "free" anymore) and does everything a ripping program should (and more); I have also recently re-visited winamp (5.x I think?) and it's not bad, much quicker library interfacing than iTunes and SongBird (by a lot).

I'll keep tabs on SongBird, as I still have high hopes for it; maybe by version 2.0 or 3.0 it'll be ready for my 'puter. As it is, pre-1.0 release, it's looking nice but needs work.

-myrkat
(vista 64 / 8gb ram / 90+ GB music library)

I'm very disappointed that I cannot play CDs with Songbird. It does nicely importing iTunes libraries, but can't read CDs? WTF?

Add me to the list of ripping and burning being a must have "feature" for any media program I'm going to use. For me, the computer is pretty much just a storage mechanism. I'm not listening to music from my laptop with the tiny speakers. If I'm at home I'll still just pop in the CD 90% of the time (the other 10% would be streaming to the TV via TiVo). When I'm on the go I use my Nokia 800.

So all I need is a program that makes getting my music from CD into a well organized library easy, and then equally as easy to put those files onto a portable device.

I like what I've seen from Songbird so far on overall UI, but it seems to be lacking core features.

I've got a collection of 800 or so CDs, with maybe 200 that still need to be ripped. I don't buy a whole lot of new music anymore, maybe 10 CDs a year. I probably burn a couple CDs a month.

Songbird is a media player. CD ripping is certainly not a core feature for any media player. I use foobar2000 and Winamp as media players, but I never used their CD ripping feature. There are many rippers which can do it much better. Let's name EAC or CDex for Windows, there is Sound Juicer or Grip for Linux and Max for OS X (I never used it, but looks nice). I don't like all-in-one softwares. They usually do everything but they're limited in all the features.

The drawback for me is having to manually launch many programs to do what is essentially a single task. The example you use for the web browser is telling, because the few times I use IM it is with gmail through the browser window, email is largely through webmail (although I do have a seperate client as well), and most pictures I view are through the browser as well, for torrents I use a separate program, but it is launched automatically through the browser, so the process is mostly invisible to me. Perhaps I could use seperate programs for each, but with the exception of email there just isn't enough benefits to seperate programs for me to see the need for the extra clutter.

For music software I think the only area left for meaningful improvement is in the management side. Ripping, burning, and playing are all commodities and I'd be hard pressed to understand how one could be meaningfully better than another. (EAC is great for dealing with scratched CDs, but this isn't something I've had to deal with for years).

If you implement this, PLEASE make it an addon to keep Songbird lightweight! I am one of those people who absolutely despise cds, I never buy them and I rarely burn them -- and when I burn them I use other programs.

For burning, there's an excellent burner in Ubuntu and for Windows you can use burrrn.

For ripping, I'm absolutely certain there are better programs then iTunes. If you are using iTunes for ripping, you are making a mistake. Exact Audio copy for example let's you get a much higher quality and rip to mp3 instead of m4a or whatever iTunes is using.

i go for rip/burn addon, please don't include this feature in the original program

"Do one thing and do it well"

Please make ripping and burning add-ons. The excess created by two features that people only use a few times a month would be a waste of resources over as an overall core feature.

If you need alternatives to wmp or itunes to rip or burn music, download CDex for ripping and InfraRecorder for burning. Chances are, these two apps accomplish this with better quality than any extension of Songbird will. Just because iTunes and WMP do it all in one application doesn't mean that's the way to do it.

Why do people want to switch from iTunes and WMP so bad? Because both are sluggish and overly bloated. ::fingers crossed:: I hope Songbird doesn't go down the same path ::/fingers crossed::.

Ok. To everybody that ripped their first CD in iTunes... People were commonly ripping cd's a long long time before iTunes ever existed. They used programs called... You guessed it, rippers. If you want a ripper go download CDex, it's free, Open Source (so no nagging advertisements), and it works great. Demanding that the devs focus on features that aren't necessary will only increase the time until SB is a completely functional/working application.

I understand that people still use CDs (I still rip them all the time too) but CDs are on the way out. I know it sounds like crazy talk but what happens when you have a music player that has built in support to handle a technology that is obsolete? You point your finger and laugh.

Why am I so against this feature? Because I really really like being to get on Skreemr to search up a favorite artist and have a full playlist of good music to stream online (No library needed). It's like Rhapsody (BTW Rhapsody spells shody-rap which sounds like shoddy crap, coincidence... I think not) without the subscription fees or annoying advertisements. Not to mention that, I can also hook into the web interface of my remote FTP server (running on a NSLU2 thin client NAS) that holds my music collection and stream my own library on demand from anywhere.

IMHO, making the music playing and browsing experience the best it could be, while trimming all the excess is the most important thing. Once this thing hits 1.0, go ahead and create a 'lil ripper to bring all the automatons over from the 'bad neighborhood' but, until then... I want to see this thing have unbreakable stability, better perf, and the full functionality. The rest is just window dressing and neon signs that attract the people who like pretty things (like butterflies, ahhh).

You wouldn't open iTunes or WMP to rip DVD's now would you? nuff said...

Remember, CDex to rip CD's and InfraRecorder to burn (they're both Open Source so no adverts or spyware). They you all can happily uninstall iTunes and WMP without having to worry about losing rip/burn support.

For Mac use Max
http://sbooth.org/Max/

For Linux
If you don't already know then how can you honestly call yourself a respectable 'nix user... Really...

Who knows, maybe a few will just get what OSS is all about in the process. "I knows them skulls are thick but I got meeself a pretty big mallot."

There is one thing I don't understand. Why people who are still using obsolete CDs (I haven't ripped or burned a single CD for months) are looking for a player like Songbird? Songbird is strong in filters, dynamic playlists and music organizing. This only useful for a huge collection of media files stored on harddrive.

If I only play CDs, I don't need any player with music database. Also how difficult is to start ImgBurn, CDBurnerXP, InfraRecorder or other free burning application and burn the CD I want? It is not any harder then using a SB addon would be.

Anyway if someone decides to make an addon, I suggest to use cdrtools. It is a set of multiplatform commandline tools to rip and burn CDs/DVDs/BDs. So all you have to do is create a GUI and integrate it with Songbird. It won't be easy, but the more difficult part is already done.

So let me ask this: Why the hell don't you use EAC for ripping? You won't find a better ripper, everything will be tagged correctly and your files won't vanish. Not to mention that the MP3s will have much higher quality since EAC uses lame.

If you want to batch tag your music, why don't you use mp3tag? You hardly find anything better.

And if you want to organize, search and filter your music collection, then use Songbird. With the switch to GStreamer, Songbird will be able to offer high quality sound too. So it will be the ultimate player. Not ripper, not burner, not tagger, not image editor or spreadsheet calculator. It will be the best music player and organizer.

Why don't you blame Microsoft because their image editing in Word sucks? You will probably use Photoshop or Gimp to edit you images and then paste them in Word. Wouldn't you?

if fully agree to both of JeChs replys.
For the first, CDs are a dino medium like some people here mentioned before. I think the way to success is not to integrate those features every music player has else than concentrating on new things and make those things good, better the best.
A good software can make a step to the future letting the dino times passing by (i just have enough of useless cds not readable anymore, etc).
There are a lot of solutions for cd ripping (for those dinos outta there)

Listen folks, we're all really impressed at how forward thinking you lot are regarding the future of domestic audio, and the smelly cr*ppness of CD's. However the less technically interested of us buy CD...from shops... and listen to them...after having paid for them...and like to own things recorded at 44.1khtz at 16 bits or more, not poorly encoded mp3's, then, if we choose we can encode them, poorly, as mp3s, or even MP4as ourselves. Which, at the moment, we can't do on songbird. So back to evil I tunes we go, where we are forced to endure their cr*ppy direct marketing practices. Or some irritating peace of shit freeware that crashes or bores us. However, if songbird had a ripping facility it would mean that we, the old, wouldn't use Itunes...simple as that. And guess what space cadets, if you don't want to rip prehistoric CD's...Then don't, simple we are all happy and, for once apple is beaten, And seeing as there are more of us old f*ckers than you younguns someone better had start listening to us. On an other note, If people don't start paying for music, folks like me are going to have to stop making it, and whilst you may not like what I make, you might like the music of someone like me. So spare a thought. bye for now. T.

to be honest,
Its not about the never ending war about youngguns and oldguns :), like sigmund freud mentioned in his rebellion theory.
Were talking about digital media playback, Tom is talking about analog and professional(B&O is not even that) audio record/mastering tools. We are talking about a open source audio playback software, which will (or i cant see the goals in the roadmap) not ever be used to record/master LPs. Vinyls are beautifull and even if the most DJs switched to digital tools, i will never do even with my 8mm, my rolleiflex, and so on, because the process in creation is much more important for me. And even on that stand to analog media i will ever wish, cds vanish in digital environments because they are one of hybrid medias i never will pay attention to, not fully digital not analog.
Anyway most of todays music even those before 2000 have been recorded digitial from analog microphes (yes they are great), and have been down converted to fit on cds (sad but true)
Btw.. use a looseless audio codecs(flac) if you want quality playback, which could come to new version of songbird with gStreamer plugins(i do not know how to deal there with legal issues, but it should be able). Mp3 is most common crap, but most of the headphones, speakers attached to a regular workstation are crap too, so why not combine crap output mediums with crap sources?In most common ways the human ear has (exept that from babys) not the possibilities to get the differences between the quality.

But that folks, is completely of topic (and im afraid i pushed that), i thought the discussion is between inventing new things or invent the wheel again, and in some ways you can do both, but why ?

I do appreciate that some people want to rip/burn cds and use that, but i would love to see elegant new features in songbrid. And Yes, the only thing useful in most of those theories is to get rid of iTunes.

I think the songbird team is excellent in inventing simple, good new things.
Otherwise its a problem for sure to port that on all platforms, i just have to think to get cd ripping/burning on open solaris *ihhg*.
Huge bloat for things you can do better in other software designed strictly for that.
There are lot of tools to rip and burn cds, why not use them?

So to answer some of the questions and comments here:

1) Why would anyone of you want to use WMP or iTunes for ripping CDs? There are plenty much better and not over bloated rippers. Many of theme were already mentioned in this discussion. By using a standalone ripper, you'll get full control over the ripping process.

2) If you want the highest quality, there are formats which can offer it. Have you ever heard about flac? It's lossless so it has the equal quality as original recording. But even on good amplifier and speakers, most people (over 90%) won't recognize an MP3 at ~128 kbps (VBR) from original. Of course such MP3 must be created by high quality standalone ripper, not by WMP or iTunes. For a portable player, where you usually hear a lot of surrounding noise and it's sound quality is mostly not very high, it's absolutely sufficient. If you need higher quality, increase bitrate or choose better formats such as Ogg Vorbis or flac.

3) If you wnat to play CDs, then Songbird isn't for you. It is designed to manage large music collection on hard drives and on Internet. To play CDs use any simple CD player, there are hundreds of them. You don't need the features Songbird offers if you only want to play CDs. But I suggest you to rip the CDs to HDD, because it is much more reliable and comfortable. You'll find the song you want to play in seconds. You don't have to search and switch CDs. HDDs are quite cheap today and if you want the same quality that CD offers, choose a lossless format (such as flac or WavPack).

4) If you won to burn music CDs, there are plenty burners which can do it for you. And again you'll get much better results compared to WMP or iTunes.

Now some comments to EAC:
a) It's configuration is quite simple and automatic today. You'll only need to get lame.exe from here.
b) You can choose between speed and quality. It's up to you. If you have good CD-ROM, the speed is good.
c) You don't have have to reinstall most programs after reinstalling Windows. Certainly not EAC or CDex. Only poorly designed programs or the ones that needs to be hooked into the system (DS filters, firewall, antivirus etc.) must be reinstalled.

JeCh, are you involved in the creation of songbird in anyway?

No. I'm just an addon developer and enthusiast. :-) I'm not related to the company in any way.

@mlp
Well Songbird is IMO mainly useful if you want to listen to music through your computer. It's the most comfortable way. You can quickly find the music you want to listen to, you can easily create playlists etc.

Of course you should have good speakers attached to you computer. Active speakers like these for example can do a pretty good job (nothing for an audiophile, of course) and cost only $50. And the setup is as easy as possible, just plug and play.

Btw. if you have any questions regarding EAC and lame, look at HydrogenAudio. There is a lot of useful information and they have a nice discussion forum too.

Thanks for the links to the speakers, unfortunately my current set-up doesn't really accommodate an external speaker setup, as I don't have a desk for my notebook. I've occasionally thought about getting something that streams music to your stereo, but I've not had much luck with streaming without getting at least the semi-regular buffering issue.

Thanks again for the help with EAC. I'll probably give it a try this weekend if I get some free time.

I do think that this is a really important feature for Songbird to add to its armory. For now though don't forget that Other programs WMP (Yes I Know It's Awful) can do these things and it isn't too painful just to switch to using this programs for the few minutes it takes. I don't tend to burn CD's as much as I rip them but I do tend to rip them A LOT... To be honest the Windows Media Ripper in WMP isn't too awful so i make do with that. If and when it does get added to Songbird that would be a big improvement!

Honestly I think prioritizing cover arts over Ripping/Burning is just plain out stupid. I burn MP3 CDs to play in my car stereo all the time, and 70% of my music collection is made of ripped content from my actual CDs. I couldn't care less about cover art, since people already built several plugins for that

I would much rather use a dedicated CD ripping program (for example, dBpowerAMP on Windows) and let the developers concentrate on player features. Just my two euros worth.

Wow.... this is something that I had never imagined... I bought my wife an iPod and I was getting ready to put her collection of about 100 CDs into her iPod when I found I have no support.

This is something that should be there. Not everyone has an ipod or listens to music on the computer. How about drivers? they mostly rely on CDs!!!

I burn cds about 5 times a month or more, and rip like 10 times a month...So songbird won't let you burn cds? what a drag...

By the way, for Windows users looking for a separate CD Rpper that works with Songbird, I tried a few and the best by far that I tried was Free CD Music Converter from poikosoft.com. Does the ripping, looks up CDDB data, adds ID3 tags, creates folders per CD according to the same naming conventions I use, downloads Album Art. Nice.

Download.com

Ogg (default)
mp3 -optional

To: Erik Ch
FLAC (default)
Ogg and MP3 optional

To: Christianpalacios

Ogg vorbis and theora is a deault to the HTML 5
And Mozilla is supporting Ogg vorbis and Ogg Theora by deafault
Flac is not a deafault to music today.

But i like your idea
ogg, flac and mp3 to rip (but ogg at first as deafault)

look at the mozilla blog
http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2009/01/...

I HATE Itunes and have spent the last week looking for an alternative that does everything I want it to. When I found songbird I wet myself a little I was so excited, til I started importing music... WHAT IN THE HELL KIND OF MEDIA PLAYER DOESN'T SUPPORT CD RIPPING!? I don't burn CDs at all anymore but I still have a large collection that I would like to put on my Ipod an am immensely frustrated at having to go back to Itunes to do so... I hope this happens soon; I'm getting tired of searching...

Good point, Tom.

For what it's worth JeCh I think this argument is a moot point. It's not like one crazy wacko is asking for Songbird to do something utterly irrelevant. Fact is enough people have this expectation of Songbird as a viable media player that it's an idea with clout. And apparently they're working on it because they know this? Songbird is a better player for every additional thing that it can do as well or better than other programs.

BTW, I fricken love people who hate iTunes as much as I do. Just sayin.

I don't use Songbird anymore. I want one program that can play/burn/rip cds and that program is Winamp. Yes I have to pay but I don't care. Even Windows Media Player is more competent than Songbird.

"The people who say that they won't use Songbird because it doesn't support ripping or burning are just foolish. "

No, they just want a level of convenience from Songbird, that equates with more established, competing media players, which doesn't concern you because you choose to use different programs to do that. The point of this discussion- in my opinion- is to answer Rob Lord's question to those people who who actually do want to rip & burn, about what we do with our CD's, and why we want Songbird to do it.

I began using Songbird back in earlier versions... maybe 0.6 or something - when iTunes finally was too much of a memory hog. I found Songbird and was excited about it's light memory use, its Mozilla roots, and potential for future improvements. Then when the next major update came, although the UI was much improved, due to it's sluggish performance, I no longer used it.

After tiring of foobar2000 being a bare-bones type player, I updated Songbird to 1.0 to see if the new version was better. I have been waiting for major performance improvements before I would try to use Songbird again. I must say that I am very impressed with the usability, performance, and wonderful add-ons like mashTape.

This being said, I am still disappointed that Songbird still does not have cd-burning capabilities. This would close the deal with me. Once song bird has this feature, it will certainly be my only player, and I guarantee this is the case for many other users.

I, like others, have a huge library that I use to create mix CDs. I frequently go on trips where I would like to listen to a new playlist on a CD (I don't own a mp3 player, though my girlfriend has an iPod). I also like to make playlists for my friends and significant other. And it is still more convenient to just burn them a cheap CD. I would typically burn about 5 CDs a month.

Please work to allow the cd-burning/ripping to at least be an optional add-on. You will greatly increase your customer base.

I see that the May 09 update has finally recognised the need for CD ripping. I can't believe it has taken this long as without this feature the software has a serious Achilles heal. In every other respect it works a treat.

I don't agree with JeCh ;)

I know you built a CD ripping feature, but any chance you can upgrade it by integrating this great program called: "exact audio copy" (EAC) into it? its made for songbird fans!! and is just dying to be integrated into songbird. It is free (for non-commercial purposes), but is available for licensing for commercial use (is songbird commercial if its also free??). The SDK consists of a DLL that can easily be integrated into a variety of programming environments like Visual C++, Delphi or even Visual Basic. It comes with interface definitions for these environments and a detailed documentation

CDex could provide a solution for the implementation of the cd-ripping feature.
Its functionality is similar to EAC + its available under GNU General Public License (but I'm surely not an expert in these legal matters).

Implementation via an official add-on could be the way to go:
in this case, the user would be able to decide on first install if they want this feature or not, so nobody would have to install something they deem unnecessary.

I think Songbird could profit a lot from the implementation of an already existing, well-tried program, instead of going to the trouble of developing their own ripping feature.

transcoding between differnet formats like flac,ogg, and aac would also be nice.

Check that (and wait with patience!): http://wiki.songbirdnest.com/Roadmap

Since this feature is going to bel delayed a little
I`d humbly like to advertise my idea here to make this feature optional !!!
I do want it, but I think users should have a choice to install it !

IF you agree head here:
http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/t...

Hey guys: seems to me that there are funny devs working. Leaving a rip-functionality outside is like offering a car without steering wheel - doesn't make really sense. Sure: pointing out that someone should deliver an add-on is another way of that silly thoughts... lol

Is it me or they keep pushing CD-Ripping off the charts for the iteration? It was supposed to be on the next one and now it's been pushed to the 3rd or 4th next iteration. This is one of the hottest topics on GetSatisfaction for songbird, yet the devs seem to think that Transcoding, iTunes integration, Equalizer and Library File Management are more prioritary than this. I urge you all to reply to this comment so we show them how important Ripping/Encoding is, and that is more so than these other features they have prioritized.

I'm astonished how far developed the people in the USA are: seems that CDs are from stoneage and everybody purchases his music online in a digital format. Wow, we "underdeveloped" Europeans (I'm from Bavaria) handle with old silver slides - hello? CDs are part of my life and yes, sometimes I go out and buy some of them (even today). I collect this stuff and enjoy reading the inlay with the perfect print. I don't like printing out the cover by my own on lousy office paper! I want the whole thing including the cover and additional information...

;-)

Just my two cents here:

CDs have higher audio quality than MP3s, generally speaking. So even though I spent a great deal of time ripping my collection, I'd do it again if I could rip to lossless.

I didn't rip to lossless before because I didn't have a player that could handle it. So far songbird looks like it's going to do the right thing (.cue support for flacs, e.g.)

The power of this program is not that it's a good player. Those are a dime a dozen - I could be using VLC if I just wanted a good player, and it would handle video too.

The power here is in the utility of the program as a solution for organizing and cataloging. And any cataloging tool that doesn't allow for easy additions isn't really a cataloging tool at all.

Bit ridiculous to release a media player that doesn't rip CDs, to assume that CDs are going away and that a user doesn't need to rip CDs is quite silly, sorry.

In the meantime, there are plenty of ripping solutions in the wild that can rip to a folder watched by Songbird with the proper tags. Audiograbber on Windows, for instance.
Then the file is uploaded in Songbird automatically.

Ill suggest to identify CD by Musicbrainz FreeDBGateway http://musicbrainz.org/doc/FreeDBGateway by default. It would be first steps to integrate MB with SB

Good to see cd ripping is on the road map (thumbs up on that), however I'm worried cd burning is not. It is easier/ move convenient to burn playlists rather than browse through several folders to find those songs to burn them using nero or whatever. So it should be added to Songbird, to the core or as an add-on doesn't really matter to me.
I like burning audio cds because they are easier to use while driving, and It isn't the safest thing to navigating through folders (on mp3 cds), or changing playlists/ albums on an mp3 player while trying to pay attention to the road at the same time. Songbird developers it is up to you to stop avoidable traffic accidents, lives are at stake here... ok maybe I'm being a bit too dramatic but you get the idea.
To many people I have recommended songbird not having cd burning/ ripping is a deal breaker.

"The company has this in progress."

*bah*

I solved it by moving to Linux.

This should be two separate requests -- one for ripping and one for burning.

I can see ripping as useful, but I doubt I'd ever use burning.

Brilliant idea, so glad to see it is on the roadmap now

Last time I used Songbird I gave it up because it didn't have the "Managed mode". Now it has it and I'm happy to use it, but I am missing a cd rip tool. When this one is added songbird becomes the perfect music program.