
AUTHOR'S NOTES

  This perl script named 'rip' is a wrapper for CD, MP3,
Ogg Vorbis, and FLAC tools (cdparanoia, bladeenc, lame, gogo,
flac, and oggenc) that are freely available on the web.

  The script 'rip' will not run if at the very least
cdparanoia and one of: bladeenc, lame, gogo, oggenc,
or flac are not installed and available on your PATH. 
Also, the Perl modules MP3::Info and CDDB_get need to 
be installed before the script will even run.

  Note, to find out what dirs are on your PATH, do the
following at a shell prompt:

  echo $PATH

  Your shell will only look for binaries to run in the dirs
that are mentioned by your PATH which are all the dirs in the
output of the above commmand.



HOW TO INSTALL

  Here we shall use the UNIX way of refering to one's home dir
as  ~  rather than $HOME or /home/greg or the like.


  To install rip, simply cp the file to a bin on your PATH, example:

  cp rip ~/bin


  The command above will install rip in the bin dir of your home
directory. If you do not have a bin dir in you home dir, I
highly recommend creating one there and storing binaries there.
This is a good organizational practice which is quite common.
Of course, you will have to make sure that ~/bin is on your PATH.

  If you don't want to worry about the PATH, you can also
do the following assuming rip is in the current directory:

  ./rip

  This explicitly uses the file rip in the current directory
(which is short-handed to just ".").

  If you have root access, you can do

  cp rip /bin

OR

  cp rip /usr/bin


  Note that the included CDDB/CDDB_get and MP3::Info perl modules are 
here only for convenience as they're readily available elsewhere, such as
on http://freshmeat.net. Installation instructions for those modules
can be found in rip's README file. Please read the README. It is useful.


HOW TO MODIFY YOUR PATH

  To add that bin dir to the PATH that your shell script looks through,
add the following line to your start up script (which is probably the
file ~/.bashrc if you are using the bash shell):

  export PATH=$PATH:~/bin



HELP

  To get a help screen from rip do:

  rip -h

OR

  rip --help


  That's all there is to it.
  Enjoy!


Greg
