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Rip a CD to MP3 format for your Nokia phone

And add it to your phone's music player

DISCLAIMER: Please note that the legality of this operation varies from country to country. In some places it is authorised under "fair use" rules, in others it is considered copyright infringement and/or an act of counterfeit. Please check local laws before proceeding.

The idea here is to start out with an audio CD and end up being able to listen to it on your mobile phone using your GNU/Linux computer. There are five simple steps involved:

Extracting the audio data from the CD and saving each track in a file on the computer.

Converting that audio data to MP3 files

Adding ID3V2 tags to the MP3 files so that the phone can sort them by album, artist, genre and track number, and display album art in the music player.

Copying the tagged files over to the phone.

Refreshing the music player's library so that it indexes the files just copied.

If you think 5 steps is a lot to have to go through, then there's nothing stopping you from scripting the lot together to turn them into a single step. However, I'll not be doing that here because the steps really are simple. Very simple. Also, while the whole thing may appear long-winded at first sight, remember that most of this (installation of software, saving scripts etc…) only has to be done the first time round. Second and subsequent CD rips will be much faster because all of the infrastructure needed has already been set up.

Extracting the audio data

This is the second easiest step. All you need to do is bung the CD into your CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive and run:
$ cdparanoia -B 1-number-of-tracks
So, taking the example of the 2002 release "The Best Of Peter Green's FLEETWOOD MAC" on which there are 20 tracks, that'd be:
$ cdparanoia -B 1-20
If you're unsure about the number of tracks on your CD you can always use cdparanoia's "-Q" option to list them out:
$ cdparanoia -Q
cdparanoia III release 10pre0 (August 29, 2006)
(C) 2006 Monty <monty@xiph.org> and Xiph.Org

Report bugs to paranoia@xiph.org
http://www.xiph.org/paranoia/



Table of contents (audio tracks only):
track        length               begin        copy pre ch
===========================================================
  1.    14412 [03:12.12]        0 [00:00.00]    no   no  2
  2.    12975 [02:53.00]    14412 [03:12.12]    no   no  2
  3.    28143 [06:15.18]    27387 [06:05.12]    no   no  2
  4.    13405 [02:58.55]    55530 [12:20.30]    no   no  2
  5.    13052 [02:54.02]    68935 [15:19.10]    no   no  2
  6.    20700 [04:36.00]    81987 [18:13.12]    no   no  2
  7.    12875 [02:51.50]   102687 [22:49.12]    no   no  2
  8.    17728 [03:56.28]   115562 [25:40.62]    no   no  2
  9.    12880 [02:51.55]   133290 [29:37.15]    no   no  2
 10.    40920 [09:05.45]   146170 [32:28.70]    no   no  2
 11.    15825 [03:31.00]   187090 [41:34.40]    no   no  2
 12.    18748 [04:09.73]   202915 [45:05.40]    no   no  2
 13.    13275 [02:57.00]   221663 [49:15.38]    no   no  2
 14.    15642 [03:28.42]   234938 [52:12.38]    no   no  2
 15.    24285 [05:23.60]   250580 [55:41.05]    no   no  2
 16.    12575 [02:47.50]   274865 [61:04.65]    no   no  2
 17.    10593 [02:21.18]   287440 [63:52.40]    no   no  2
 18.    13272 [02:56.72]   298033 [66:13.58]    no   no  2
 19.    14679 [03:15.54]   311305 [69:10.55]    no   no  2
 20.    24497 [05:26.47]   325984 [72:26.34]    no   no  2
TOTAL  350481 [77:53.06]    (audio only)
You should now have a collection of 20 (or how ever many tracks there are on your CD) individual files in Microsoft .wav format named track01.cdda.wav, track02.cdda.wav etc…

Conversion to MP3

This is one of the areas where you must check local law. MP3 audio encoding is a patent minefield. To be within the law, either the user or the developer of software able to encode audio into MP3 format has to pay royalties to the Fraunhofer Institute.

Once that hurdle is behind you, you must decide what bitrate you want to use. A higher bitrate means better audio quality, but it also means a larger MP3 file after conversion. When dealing with stereo files, 160 kbps is a good starting point. If the original isn't very good to start with then there's little point in trying to conserve as much detail in the sound as possible if there's none to start with. In this case, 128 kbps should be enough. On the other hand, if your original has plenty of dynamic in it and you want to lose as little quality as possible then you can go for higher bitrates like 192 or 224 kbps. The human ear won't notice any change in quality at bitrates above that so there's no point in encoding at, say, 320 kbps.

Two of the many tools commonly used on GNU/Linux to encode into MP3 format are bladeenc and ffmpeg. bladeenc is probably easier to use since it is a stand-alone, self-contained MP3 converter while ffmpeg is more of a general-purpose audio/video conversion tool which relies on external libraries (libmp3lame in the case of MP3 audio conversion), but I'll describe how to do it using both tools. The instructions below assume you're using the 160 kbps bitrate. Obviously substitute as necessary.

Using bladeenc
$ bladeenc -160 track??.cdda.wav
That's all there is to it! bladeenc will batch process all the .wav files and produce a corresponding .mp3 for each one.

Using ffmpeg

This tool is a little more complicated to use since it cannot batch process files on its own, so we have to feed it each file individually in a loop. the "for ... in" loop in the shell's syntax is a real timesaver here:
$ for wavfile in track??.cdda.wav; do \
ffmpeg -i $wavfile -acodec libmp3lame -ab 160k ${wavfile%wav}mp3; \
done
This loop simply iterates through all of the files identified by the track??.cdda.wav glob, assigning each filename in turn to the variable $wavfile. It then invokes ffmpeg saying "use $wavfile as your input" (-i $wavfile), "encode the audio to MP3 format using libmp3lame" (-acodec libmp3lame), and "use a bitrate of 160 kbps" (-ab 160k). We then construct the name of the output file using basic text manipulation functions in the shell. "${wavfile%wav}" means "take the value of the variable $wavfile and chop the 'wav' off the end", so this will leave us with track01.cdda., track02.cdda. etc… We simply tag "mp3" on the end of that to get our track01.cdda.mp3, track02.cdda.mp3 etc…

Regardless of the conversion tool used, we now have a collection of files called track01.cdda.mp3, track02.cdda.mp3 etc…

ID3V2 tagging

This step is what's required to get the music player on your phone to see the music tracks as anything other than "unknown". You will need id3lib to do the actual work and a front-end tool called id3v2, but before installing id3v2 you'll need to apply a patch that I wrote, without which id3v2 segfaults when trying to create a TRCK frame (track number) and cannot add an APIC frame (album art) to an ID3V2 tag.

First, create a simple text file listing out the details of each track on the album, the artist's name, the album name, the release year etc… We're going to feed this file into a loop that's going to tag the MP3 files and rename them all on the fly. Your album information file should look like this example, which we'll save as fw.alb:
Artist: Fleetwood Mac
Album: The Best Of Peter Green's
Year: 2002
Photo: cover.jpg
Genre: 17

01 Albatross
02 Black Magic Woman
03 Need Your Love So Bad
04 My Heart Beat Like A Hammer
05 Rollin' Man
06 The Green Manalishi (With The Two Pronged Crown)
07 Man Of The World
08 Something Inside Of Me
09 Looking For Somebody
10 Oh Well (parts 1 and 2)
11 Rattlesnake Shake
12 Merry Go Round
13 I Loved Another Woman
14 Need Your Love Tonight
15 Worried Dream
16 Dragonfly
17 Stop Messin' Around
18 Shake Your Moneymaker
19 I'd Rather Go Blind (Chicken Shack)
20 Albatross (Chris Coco featuring Peter Green)
The first 5 lines are common to all tracks. If you don't have the information for one of the lines (eg. you don't have the release year or you don't have an album cover) then simply leave that line out. There must be one space between the header name and colon and the content of that header, so:
Album:     Parallel lines
WRONG! (more than one space)
Album:Parallel lines
WRONG! (no spaces at all)
Album Parallel lines
WRONG! (colon missing)
Album: Parallel lines
RIGHT!
The genres are numbered from 1 to about 150, although the Nokia music player doesn't seem to recognise all of them. Genre number 17 is "Rock". Run this to get a list of genres that id3v2 supports:
$ id3v2 -L
  0: Blues
  1: Classic Rock
  2: Country
  3: Dance
  4: Disco
  5: Funk
  6: Grunge
  7: Hip-Hop
  8: Jazz
  9: Metal
  ...
  ...
143: Salsa
144: Thrash Metal
145: Anime
146: Jpop
147: Synthpop
Other headers you can use that are more commonly seen in classical music are "Conductor:" and "Composer:".

Each of the lines for a track is of the form:
nn track title
The line starts with the track number over two digits, so with a leading '0' for the first nine tracks. Then there's a space, then there's the track name itself. The track name will be used to construct a new filename for the MP3 file, so don't use characters here that are not recognised both by your Linux filesystem and Microsoft FAT32 filesystems (used by the memory card or mass memory in your phone!). Avoid things like the colon ':', the semicolon ';', the ampersand '&', the exclamation mark '!', the question mark '?', the asterisk '*', the "less than" sign '<' and "greater than" sign '>', and any others you should be aware of. Spaces in the title name are converted into underscores for the final filename.

Now, copy & paste this script into a text editor and save it as "tagmusic.sh". Don't forget to "chmod +x" it to make it executable.
#!/bin/bash

showusage() {
        cmd="`basename \"$0\"`"
        echo "$cmd: usage" > /dev/stderr
        echo -e "\t$cmd <album_information_file>" > /dev/stderr
        exit 1
}

# If no album information file was given then bail out
if [ "$#" != "1" ]; then
        showusage
fi

# If the file given can't be found then bail out
if [ ! -f "$1" ]; then
        echo "$1: File cannot be found" > /dev/stderr
        exit 1
fi

# Parse the file for the artist's name
artist=""
data="`grep -i \"^Artist:\" \"$1\"`"
if [ "$?" == "0" ]; then
        artist="`echo \"$data\" | cut -d ' ' -f2-`"
fi

# Parse the file for the album title
album=""
data="`grep -i \"^Album:\" \"$1\"`"
if [ "$?" == "0" ]; then
        album="`echo \"$data\" | cut -d ' ' -f2-`"
fi

# Parse the file for the album release year
year=""
data="`grep -i \"^Year:\" \"$1\"`"
if [ "$?" == "0" ]; then
        year="`echo \"$data\" | cut -d ' ' -f2-`"
fi

# Parse the file for the cover art
photo=""
data="`grep -i \"^Photo:\" \"$1\"`"
if [ "$?" == "0" ]; then
        photo="`echo \"$data\" | cut -d ' ' -f2-`"
#       cancel the photo inclusion if the file can't be found
        if [ ! -f "$photo" ]; then
                photo=""
        fi
fi

# Parse the file for the music genre
genre=""
data="`grep -i \"^Genre:\" \"$1\"`"
if [ "$?" == "0" ]; then
        genre="`echo \"$data\" | cut -d ' ' -f2-`"
fi

# Parse the file for the composer
composer=""
data="`grep -i \"^Composer:\" \"$1\"`"
if [ "$?" == "0" ]; then
	composer="`echo \"$data\" | cut -d ' ' -f2-`"
fi

# Parse the file for the conductor
conductor=""
data="`grep -i \"^Conductor:\" \"$1\"`"
if [ "$?" == "0" ]; then
	conductor="`echo \"$data\" | cut -d ' ' -f2-`"
fi

# Now that we have the parameters, loop through each of the track??.cdda.mp3 files

for mp3file in track??.cdda.mp3; do \

#       Clear any pre-existing ID3V1 and ID3V2 tags
        id3v2 -D $mp3file

#       Isolate the track number
        trck=${mp3file:5:2}

#       Now grab the relevant track information from the album information file
        trkdata="`grep \"^$trck\" \"$1\"`"
        if [ "$?" != "0" ]; then
                continue
        fi

#       Isolate the title
        title="${trkdata:3}"

#       Construct the new filename
        filename="`echo \"$trkdata\" | tr ' ' '_'`.mp3"

#       Insert the track number and title
        id3v2 -T $trck -t "$title" $mp3file

#       Insert the artist's name if we know it
        if [ -n "$artist" ]; then
                id3v2 -a "$artist" $mp3file
        fi

#       Insert the album name if we know it
        if [ -n "$album" ]; then
                id3v2 -A "$album" $mp3file
        fi

#       Insert the genre code if we know it
        if [ -n "$genre" ]; then
                id3v2 -g "$genre" $mp3file
        fi

#       Insert the release year if we know it
        if [ -n "$year" ]; then
                id3v2 -y "$year" $mp3file
        fi

#	Insert the composer if we know the name
	if [ -n "$composer" ]; then
		id3v2 --TCOM "$composer" $mp3file
	fi

#	Insert the conductor if we know the name
	if [ -n "$conductor" ]; then
		id3v2 --TPE3 "$conductor" $mp3file
	fi

#       Insert the album art if there is any
        if [ -n "$photo" ]; then
                id3v2 --APIC "$photo" $mp3file
        fi

#       Finally, rename the file
        mv -v $mp3file "$filename"

done
Now we have to feed this script the album information file fw.alb we created earlier and watch it do the work:
$ tagmusic.sh fw.alb
Stripping id3 tag in "track01.cdda.mp3"...id3v1 and v2 stripped.
`track01.cdda.mp3' -> `01_Albatross.mp3'
Stripping id3 tag in "track02.cdda.mp3"...id3v1 and v2 stripped.
`track02.cdda.mp3' -> `02_Black_Magic_Woman.mp3'
...
...
If we now look at what we have:
$ ls -1s *.mp3; ls -1s *.wav
3800 01_Albatross.mp3
3428 02_Black_Magic_Woman.mp3
...
...
33144 track01.cdda.wav
29840 track02.cdda.wav
...
...
If you're not planning on doing anything else with the .wav files you can delete them:
$ rm -v track??.cdda.wav
removed `track01.cdda.wav'
removed `track02.cdda.wav'
...
...
Copying the music to your phone

This bit's really easy. Start by connecting the phone to your computer via a USB cable in "Mass storage" mode. You already know how to do this if you've been copying photos and videos to/from the phone. Let's assume your phone is attached to a mount point called "/mnt/phone". Substitute in the following instructions as appropriate for your system.

Make sure there's a directory called "Music" in the storage space published by the phone and now mounted on /mnt/phone, and create a directory inside it that reflects the album you're copying over. The phone itself doesn't need the files to be organised this way (other than the files have to be in the "Music" directory), it's just so that we silly humans know what's there and where it is:
$ mkdir -p "/mnt/phone/Music/Fleetwood Mac/Best of Peter Green's"
Copy the MP3 files to this newly-created directory (don't forget that tab auto-completion is your friend when typing in names of directories and files that already exist):
$ cp -v *.mp3 "/mnt/phone/Music/Fleetwood Mac/Best of Peter Green's"
`01_Albatross.mp3' -> `/mnt/phone/Music/Fleetwood Mac/Best of Peter Green's/01_Albatross.mp3'
`02_Black_Magic_Woman.mp3' -> `/mnt/phone/Music/Fleetwood Mac/Best of Peter Green's/02_Black_Magic_Woman.mp3'
...
...
Unmount the phone from the filesystem and you're done.

Indexing the music

Now we have to tell the phone that the music is there and that it should list it in what's available to the music player. The way to do this varies from one phone model to another − the instructions given here apply to Nokia S60 phones such as the Nseries and Eseries devices. This is the easiest step and it's an N96 that I used here.

Fire up the media player and then press "Options" and select "Refresh library":

Once the indexing process is through you'll be notified how many tracks have been added:

Done!

Enjoy the album you've just added!

So, what needs to be done for the next CD?

Rip the audio tracks to .wav files with cdparanoia

Convert the tracks to MP3 format using bladeenc or ffmpeg

Create an album information file and feed it to the tagmusic.sh script

Delete the .wav files and copy the MP3 files to your phone

Refresh the phone's music library

Other than the processing time in step 2, the lot should take you no more than 2 or 3 minutes. And if you're feeling creative you should be able to cobble together a script which takes care of absolutely everything except creating the album information file.

NAVIGATION:
>> /nokiafaq
>> /

Last update: 27-OCT-2013 08:27:40 UTC
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