St. Paddy's weekend is always a good time for tinkering. I recently learned that the ancestors of my paternal grandmother originated around Campbeltown, Scotland:
Campbeltown and its lake are the subject of a fairly well-known Scottish ballad
Campbeltown Loch, which laments in various fashions that the town's lake is filled with water and not scotch whisky. I did a quick search on discogs and discovered the venerable Andy Stewart did indeed cover the song at some point in his career (it's available on YouTube but in terrible quality, presumably from a vinyl rip) but mostly on vinyl and a few early greatest hits CDs. Being so prolific, sometimes the compilation albums are difficult to discern from each other due to lots of similar album titles with different track-lists, so it did take some serious hunting to find a legitimate copy, but luckily I eventually found one a couple of months ago...and it was lost in shipping.
Meanwhile CD ripping support for Linux on MC was released so I went ahead and bought the cheapest CD ripper I could find in preparation of hearing
Campbeltown Loch in full fidelity:
It comes with a built-in cord, which is nice:
Plugged it in and it's recognized as a USB 1.1 device
. OK, it's going to be slow, luckily I only plan on ripping a few CDs I need for archiving.
Meanwhile I find an even better remastered Andy Stewart greatest hits CD on eBay with
Campbeltown Loch from the UK. Luckily this one shows up, albeit with a few cracks:
As I pull the CD out I can't help think about its data density compared to modern storage technology, truly a relic. Anyways, I insert it and GNOME files opens and prompts me to open the disc in VLC (I wonder if I can change this in installJRMC):
Switch to MC and it's there!
Unfortunately the MC ripper couldn't find details on this CD, so I had to enter the data manually from the jewel case. The release is
available on discogs so it would be nice to be able to enter the disc ID somehow and scrape this data if its available. It would also be nice to be able to enter the Album Artist and disc ID at this stage. Regardless I did my part and submitted the track info and the album art I found elsewhere to YADB.
And we're ripping:
Took about 30 minutes to rip the entire CD, incredibly slow as expected, but no errors. Thank you MC for ejecting it as well.
My listening device (Sony MDR-1AM2 + Youkamoo balanced cable + Fiio BTR3K w/ LDAC and improvised headlight mount):
Worth the effort! And thanks for bringing this capability to Linux. Once I have a varied enough Celtic Best Of list I'll be able to share the song with everyone on Cloudplay as well! I don't think it would pass the licensing requirements yet.