            Ripping, Normalizing, Encoding, and Tagging Scripts

Why:  I wanted a ripping system that normalized the entire CD, rather
than a track at a time.  This is so that quiet songs from a CD don't
get made as loud as other much louder tracks.  

This is hacked together with perl and depends heavily on external
programs.  It will require modification to make it work for your
system.  The required programs are:
* a ripper of some sort (I use CDCOPY, http://www.cdcopy.sk)
* normalize (http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~cvaill/normalize/, I have
  a Windows port if you are interested...the author didn't seem to
  be)
* an encoder of some sort (I use wm8eutil from the Windows Media Resource
  Kit)
* a tagger of some sort (I use a modified version of 
  id3tag from the Windows Media SDK Samples)

There are two programs running for this procedure:
* the ripper - rips the CD into the wav directory
* normencode.pl - normalizes and encodes the music and drops the 
results into the code directory

Directories and some file naming controls are in the top of the two
scripts.

Both programs are running all the time, but never work on the same CD
at the same time.  That means that you can be ripping one CD while the
system is normalizing the previous one, and encoding an even earlier
one.  On my system the CD-ROM ripping speed (my 6plex rips at about
6.5x) is the limiting factor.

alex@phred.org
