Ripping Media/Audio CDs in Debian with Sound Juicer

A few weeks back I was re-ripping my entire CD collection into a less-politically charged format (okay okay it was ogg) and I ran into a few issues with ripping several of my CDs.

If any of you have a CD collection of any substantial size and run Linux, you've likely encountered the very frustrating issue where the CD publishers, out of the kindness of their hearts, provided you with a multi-partition CD-ROM, one partition having a proprietary music player so you can play it on any windows (or mac I suppose) without another media player. This unfortunately tends to hork (a very technical term) rip operations performed through Sound Juicer in Linux. You'll find that when you play the CD through VLC, it plays from /dev/cdrom. This is all fine and dandy, but when you boot up Sound Juicer with -d /dev/cdrom from the command line, Sound Juicer says Sound Juicer could not use the CD-ROM device '/dev/cdrom' HAL daemon may not be running. What makes this even better is that HAL is something that has been deprecated (likely because it wouldn't let Dave back into the ship) and replaced with udev, so it isn't installed on newer Debian systems (Debian Sid and Wheezy). So, how do we get this to work?

Well, after some playing around, I realized that when I opened the audio portion of the CD from my file manager, the path was /dev/sr0. With that, I ran the command sound-juicer -d /dev/sr0 and sure enough, it worked!

Now, I can't guarantee that this will work with all of your CDs. Some may have the music on /dev/sr1. I will edit this post later once I've ripped the remaining 10 CDs of mine and let you all know whether or not all of them were sr0.

EDIT I went back and ripped the remaining CDs and sure enough, this worked! The only step I missed was that you have to mount the CD first. To do this, just go into your file manager and select the audio CD portion of your disk. That should auto mount it for you. Then just follow the steps I mentioned above.