Configure CDDB for abcde

I use abcde to rip my CDs because it's an easy to use shell application. A very nice feature is that it sets metadata like artist, title and so on automatically. Such information is queried from an online database. The default settings use MusicBrainz to get the metadata of a CD.

But I had some problems to query these metadata for a while. So I changed my abcde configuration to use GnuDb instead of MusicBrainz which solved my problems.

The steps

Step 1: Copy the configuration file

cp /etc/abcde.conf ~/.abcde.conf

Alternatively you can create a new empty file of course.

Step 2: Activate and overwrite the following settings

CDDBMETHOD=cddb
CDDBURL="https://gnudb.gnudb.org/~cddb/cddb.cgi"

Additionally you can add the following line to provide random hello information instead of your real username and hostname. ;-)

HELLOINFO="`tr -dc A-Za-z0-9 < /dev/urandom | head -c 8`@example.com"

Some links

Wiki article about abcde configuration in German

Solutions to generate a random string in bash