It has been a while since I transferred CDs to an audio player. As a result I have a number of CDs bought in the last few years that I need to copy to my recently purchased Sony NW-A45 music player. It seems that the tool I used 16 years ago, A Better CD Encoder or abcde, is still going strong so I stuck with it.

The command I used was:

abcde -B -o flac -x

-B tells it to embed the album art into the file, -o flac to output flac files and -x ejects the disc after reading it.

One thing that I discovered today (demonstrating there is always something new to learn, even for things we are familiar with) is that when multiple results are found from the CDDB database(s), when prompted to choose which one you want abcde allows you to enter two options, comma separated, to see a diff of them before prompting again. This has proved to be very helpful when the differences are not obvious.