Version 3.8.2, released December 28th 2009 fixes hopefully the somehow persistent bug that encoder qualities were not read out of the config file. Furthermore, installation should not overwrite the config file anymore.

Version 3.8.1, released November 28th 2009, has fixed cd.toc generation. One new feature is: ghost songs that have a slash in the filename will get the second part of that track name and not the prefix "Ghost-Song".

News of 3.8.0 are: --mb allows access to the MusicBrainz DB not using the cddb-protocoll (like in older versions) but using the perl module WebService::MusicBrainz. One needs the DiscID calculation tool, either the DiscID-command or in addition the perl module MusicBrainz::DiscID (recommended).

Ripit now supports the formats mp4als (lossless m4a) and Musepack (encoder 4 and 5) and executes just before ending a command: --execmd. This option accepts as arguments the same variables as --dirtemplate and --tracktemplate, including the new one: $trackno giving the number of tracks of the CD.

Other new options are --overwrite to overwrite an existing directory instead of adding a counter to the directory name; --quitnodb to end the process if no DB entry was found; --span to rip only portions of each track (only supported by cdparanoia und cdda2wav); --book merges all tracks into a single track (when using faac) with suffix m4b and creates a chapter.txt file; --inf creates similar to the cd.toc file for cdrdao inf-files to burn the wav-files in DAO-mode with CD-text using wodim (or cdrecord).

As usual use option --save once after an update to renew an existing configuration in $HOME/.ripit. Check the config file for new options and switch them on if desired.

Version 3.7.0, released May 6th 2009, has two new options: --normcmd to specify the command to be used for normalizing the audio-CD and --uppercasefirst to modify CDDB entries in uppercase only.

Other options have been enhanced:

• --dirtemplate : Additional variables like $quality and $suffix are accepted to define different output directories for each format, variable $iletter can be used to have the first character of the artist name in the path.
• --coder : This otpion may accept the same format more than once! See examples in the manpage.
• --ghost : will try to trim lead in/out of a track when arguments to options --extend and --prepend are small, e.g. 0.3; to be used with caution. Furthermore this option wil delete very short tracks (< 300KB) if empty.
• --disable-paranoia : can not only be switched on and off (1, 0), but also set to give up a ripping process that lasts too long because of scratches and restart that track without paranoia (argument 2).
• --threads : has been renamed and was called --core in earlier versions.

Find out more with the option --help.

Beside that some bugfixes were done:
Problems with very long filenames and certain settings not being read from the config file were reported and should be fixed now. The problem with very special characters in Lame-tags should be solved too. Note that id3v2.3.0 does either accept ISO-8859-15 or UTF-16, but not UTF-8. I don't know how it will work in the future, when id3v2.4.0 will be better integrated (see e.g. this changelog about id3v2.4.0). RipIT will try to transcode non ISO-8859-15 characters, like e.g. ŵ to w, if one uses option --noutftag. Else, these characters will stay as is, and tags (only) may look corrupted in some other applications when using Lame.

New preliminary versions of 3.8.0 should arrive soon. With each enhancement I intend to upload a test version. Please check from time to time, thanks.

A few people asked to set the artist tag not to "Various Artists" in case of multi artist releases, but to replace it with a possible artist given in the trackname.

One other point are data tracks. Wouldn't it be nice to automatically save the content (videos and/or pictures) as files in the same directory?