Present Perfect

It's two weeks shy of a year since the last morituri release. It's been a pretty crazy year for me, getting married and moving to New York, and I haven't had much time throughout the year to do any morituri hacking at all. I miss it, and it was time to do something about it, especially since there's been quite a bit of activity on github since I migrated the repository to it.

I wanted to get this release out to combine all of the bug fixes since the last release before I tackle one of the number one asked for issues - not ripping the hidden track one audio if it's digital silence. There are patches floating around that hopefully will be good enough so I can quickly do another release with that feature, and there are a lot of minor issues that should be easy to fix still floating around.

But the best way to get back into the spirit of hacking and to remove that feeling of it's-been-so-long-since-a-release-so-now-it's-even-harder-to-do-one is to just Get It Done.

I look forward to my next hacking stretch!

Happy ripping everybody.

It's two weeks shy of a year since the last morituri release. It's been a pretty crazy year for me, getting married and moving to New York, and I haven't...

The 0.2.1 release contained a bug causing "rip offset" find to fail. That's annoying for new users, so I spent some time repenting in brown paper bag hell, and fixed a few other bugs besides. Hence, my bad.

I can understand that you didn't all mass-flattr the 0.2.2 release - you tried it and you saw the bug! Shame on me.

Well, it's fixed now, so feel free to pour in your flattr love if you use morituri! Just follow this post to my blog and hit the button.

The 0.2.2 packages are in the Fedora 17-18-19 repositories. Enjoy!

The 0.2.1 release contained a bug causing "rip offset" find to fail. That's annoying for new users, so I spent some time repenting in brown paper bag hell, and fixed...

I finally managed to set aside a few hours this weekend to fix some smaller issues in morituri and put out a new release. (For those who don't know, morituri is an accurate CD ripper for Linux)

Life's been a little busy lately and my spare time hacking has been suffering. But I'm happy I got a nice stretch of hacking hours in on morituri, and hope to repeat it in the next few weeks to knock out some more complicated issues, like tackling the reports of problems with latest pycdio releases.

The most important change is probably the filtering of non-FAT and other special characters, which I ended up doing a lot like sound-juicer does, because I trust Ross to have looked at this in detail.

In addition, after curiously reading Lionel Dricot's posts about Flattr, I decided to get a little more serious about trying Flattr again (I had only flattr'd about 4 things so far due to lack of content). I integrated Flattr in my wordpress install, upgrading it in the process, and installed the chrome extension which should give me many more options to flattr other people's content - for example, github repos.

So if you like morituri, go to this post on my website and click the Flattr button you see at the bottom of this post or on the morituri homepage!

I don't expect to get rich off it, but I think it's a nice way of showing you appreciate someone's work.

I finally managed to set aside a few hours this weekend to fix some smaller issues in morituri and put out a new release. (For those who don't know, morituri...

I have tomorrow (saturday) blocked out for a whole day of morituri hacking as I will be home alone.

One of the things a lot of morituri users are puzzled by is its relentless drive to extract every single sample of audio from the CD. Currently, even if it's a really short pre-gap, and most likely just an inaccurate master or burn, with no useful audio in it.

For me, that was a design goal of morituri - I want to be able to exactly reproduce a CD as is. That is to say, ripping a CD should extract *all* audio from the CD, and it should be possible to make a copy of that CD and then rip that copy, and end up with exactly the same result as from the original CD. (I'm sure there's a fancy scientific term for that that I can't remember right now)

To a lot of other people, it seems to be annoying and they don't like having those small almost empty files lying around.

So I thought I'd do something about that, and that it might be useful as well to analyze my current collection of tracks and figure out what's in there. Maybe I can find some hidden gems that I hadn't noticed before?

So I added a quick task to morituri that calculates the maximum sample value (I didn't want to use my own level element in GStreamer for this as I wanted to make sure it was actual digital zero; this should be done in an element instead though, but I preferred the five minute hack for this one).

And then I ran:

rip debug maxsample /mnt/nas/media/audio/rip/morituri/own/album/*/00*flac

Sadly, that turned up 0 as the biggest sample for all these tracks!

Wait, what? I spent all that time on getting those secret tracks ripped just to get none? That's not possible! I know some of those tracks!

Maybe the algorithm is wrong. Nope, it works fine on all the regular tracks.

Oh, crap. Maybe morituri has been ripping silence all this time because my CD drive can't get that data off. Yikes, that would be a bit of egg on my face.

No, it works if I check that Bloc Party track I know about.

Ten minutes of staring at the screen to realize that, while I was outputting names from a variable from the for loop over my arguments, the track I was actually passing to the task was always the first one. Duh. Problem solved.

As for what I found in my collection:

• a cute radio jingle that brought back memories from a live bootleg I had made myself of Bloem. That's from over ten years ago, but that must have been around the time I learned about the existence of HTOA and wanted to get one in
• found unknown HTOA tracks on Art Brut's Bang Bang Rock & Roll, Mew's Half the world is watching me; not their best stuff
• soundscapey or stagesetting tracks on QOTSA's Songs for the Deaf, Motorpsycho's Angels and Daemons at play And Blissard; not that worth it (the Blissard track was ok, but really quiet)
• Pulp hid a single piano chord in a 2 second pre-gap on This is Hardcore; very curious. It's not an intro to the first track, because it doesn't fit with the sound at all.
• Damien Rice hid a demo version of 9 Crimes (the first track) in the pregap; instead of piano and female vocals, he plays guitar and sings all the parts.
• Got reacquainted with my favourite HTOA tracks: the orchestral quasi-wordless medley on the Luke Haines/Das Capital disc; the first Bloc Party album with a beautiful instrumental (up there with the hidden track at the end of Placebo's first album; both bands delivering an atypical but stunning moodscape; the beautiful cover of Ben Kenobi's Theme by Arab Strap on the Cherubs EP (no idea why that landed in my album dir, that needs to be fixed); the silly Soulwax skit for their second album.

Of course, Wikipedia has the last word on everything

I note that they think Pulp recorded a cymbal, not a piano. And now that I see the title of the QOTSA hidden track, I get the joke I think.

In total, on my album collection of 1564 full CD's, I have 171 HTOA's ripped, 138 tracks of pure digital silence, and only about 11 are actually useful tracks.

I expected to find more gems in my collection. I'll go through ep's, singles and compilations next just to be sure.

But with this code in hand, maybe it's time to add something to morituri to save the silent HTOA tracks as pure .cue information.

I have tomorrow (saturday) blocked out for a whole day of morituri hacking as I will be home alone. One of the things a lot of morituri users are puzzled...

A new year, a new morituri release.

I got informed some people wanted to use morituri with a different log output, so I made the logger pluggable.

For my personal use, I have now gotten to ripping all my singles and ep's, and so instead of having singles with the same name as an album overwrite the album, I added template variables for the release type. I've also changed the default templates to use it, so if you were relying on the default template for your collection, you may want to either move those files or use the previous default template.

morituri now has a config file, so once you've run rip offset find to find your drive's offset, it will save it and automatically use it for ripping. Same for checking whether cdparanoia can defeat the drive's caching. morituri saves it by drive information, not by device node, so it will work with different USB drives too.

See the trac page for more info and download links. You can also download it from my package repository for Fedora 17 and 18 if that's your distro.

For the curious, here's some more info:


This is morituri 0.2.0, "ears"

- 89: Fails to rip track with \ in its name
- 105: Backslash in track names causes "Cannot find file" during rip
- 108: Unable to find offset / rip
- 109: KeyError when running "rip offset find"
- 111: Python traceback when config has no read offset for CD
- 76: morituri should allow for a configuration file
- 96: rip image retag: allow specification of release ID
- 107: Backslash in track name confuses AR step
- 112: add MusicBrainz lookup URL to generated logfile


A new year, a new morituri release. I got informed some people wanted to use morituri with a different log output, so I made the logger pluggable. For my personal...