Tyler Oderkirk's Blog

I recently decided to rip all of my music CDs to a more reliable medium: my hard drive.

One of the software tools I’m using to do this is called cdparanoia. It’s a solid little app from the venerable Xiph.org multimedia project with an entertaining but informative console interface. An excerpt from `cdparanoia(1)`:

OUTPUT SMILIES
:-)  Normal operation, low/no jitter
:-|  Normal operation, considerable jitter
:-/  Read drift
:-P  Unreported loss of streaming in atomic read operation
8-|  Finding read problems at same point during reread;
     hard to correct
:-0  SCSI/ATAPI transport error
:-(  Scratch detected
;-(  Gave up trying to perform a correction
8-X  Aborted read due to known, uncorrectable error
:^D  Finished extracting

PROGRESS BAR SYMBOLS

    No corrections needed
-   Jitter correction required
+   Unreported loss of streaming/other error in read
!   Errors  found  after stage 1 correction; the drive is
    making the same error through multiple re-reads, and
    cdparanoia is having trouble detecting them.
e   SCSI/ATAPI transport error (corrected)
V   Uncorrected error/skip

The interface is a testament to the poor reliability of the little plastic discs. I’ve found, however, that I’d rather learn of a fatal scratch on some rare dub reggae disc from it rather than by a Zsh core dump message.

The UI also uses an interesting variation on the throbber/baton: main.c – cdparanoia-3.10+debian~pre0.

Long live the console.