BeRip v0.6 Alpha
----------------

This application offers a nice GUI interface to ripping (and eventually
MP3 encoding) audio tracks from CDs.

Tracks to encode can be selected by left (or right) clicking on them on the
"Track Selection" tab.  Left clicking exclusively selects the track, while
Ctrl-left clicking or right clicking toggles the track (and leaves the other
tracks selected).  Shift-left clicking is also present, but works a bit odd
at this time (selects tracks towards the table top until it encounters the
first track or a previously selected track).

The Options tab allows you to set storage preferences.  If you include the
track number in the filename, you can start numbering the tracks as desired
using the text control.  This is useful if you want to combine multi-disc
albums in one directory, and still maintain ordering.

Ripping the tracks to Microsoft WAV format is as simple as selecting the
desired tracks on the "Track Selection" tab, and clicking the Begin button
on the "Rip Tracks" tab.

*** Notes ***

I haven't YET figured out a good way to locate a CD-ROM drive under BeOS,
so the software currently looks at the master device on IDE1 (a pretty standard
location for ATAPI drives).  If this isn't how your computer is configured,
BeRip won't work for you.  (I still wonder how DriveSetup identifies all the
drives, darn it.)

*** Warnings ***

Since this software is still in the Alpha release state, it is far from
perfect.  One major note: don't begin ripping CDs on the "Rip Tracks" tab
and attempt to switch tabs while the process is ongoing.  Due to what I
believe is a BeOS bug, this causes the application to crash.

Once you press the Begin button on the "Rip Tracks" tab, you can't stop
the process (I know there is an Abort button... it just doesn't work yet =).

Make sure that if you enter a value into a Text Control on the Options tab,
you press enter to have the new value take affect.  Due to a different BeOS
bug, changing tabs without doing this causes the control to NOT inform the
application that its contents have changed.  (If Be doesn't fix this bug in
the near future, I can recode the software to work around this, but I'd rather
have it work as advertised =).

CDDB (CD Database) support is present, but a little limited.  The interface
I have written does not handle the CDDB server returning multiple results for
a query (yet).  This happens when some CDs have multiple entries in the
database.  While this doesn't occur often, it will prevent you from using
CDDB to identify that particular CD.

*** Future Plans ***

The CDDB interface class needs to be expanded to properly query the main
CDDB server (cddb.cddb.com) for server locations, and query the user as to
which one to use (currently us.cddb.com is hardcoded).  The interface also
needs to query the user for their email address, used to say hello to the
CDDB server.  And finally, the CDDB interface needs to query the user as to
which database entry to use when inexact/duplicate matches are encountered.

The TableView class (seen on the "Track Selection" tab) needs to have the
ability to add a scrollbar, in case you have a CD with a LOT of tracks.

Pressing the Begin button should cause it and other widgets to be disabled
(grayed out), so you can't repress it.  Also, the track ripping process should
be performed in another thread, so that the main application is free to
receive the Abort button (or termination) notifications and abort the
process.

And of course, most critically, I need to add MP3 support (who wants 40MB
sound files hanging around?).  I plan on porting the BladeEnc DLL to BeOS
as an add-on to this application.  After this is done, I think BeRip will
be a very useful application.  Until then, it's just mainly a front-end to
a standard MP3 encoder. *sigh*  But I thought I'd release it now, because
it *is* still useful.

John Whitney
jwhitney@sands-edge.com
