Ripping a side

Before the first side

ripdoctor probe

Records twenty seconds and says what arrived — music, silence, or an empty input. A wrong input costs twenty seconds this way instead of a whole side.

Recording

Open the Rip panel.

1. Leave the selector on — new album — for a new record, and type the Artist and Album. The slug shown underneath is the directory name it will use. For a record already in the list, select it and the names are filled in for you.
2. Pick the Side. For a new record it starts at a. For a record that already has sides, the control offers the sides it has — choosing one of those is a re-rip — plus the next free letter, which is what you want when carrying on with the same record.
3. Check Device, Rate and Depth on the right.
4. Press Start recording, then drop the needle.

The meter

Two bars: the full-band level, and the level in the 1–3 kHz band.

The band bar is the one to watch while cueing. Arm-up handling rumble is loud full-band but nearly dead in 1–3 kHz; a silent groove is quiet in both; music is loud in both. Drop the needle when the band bar sits in the groove zone, not below it.

Listen plays the input in your browser, about two seconds behind. It works whether or not a capture is running. The monitor slider changes only how loud it is in the browser; it cannot affect the recording.

Stopping

Stop at the run-out is ticked by default. The capture ends by itself when the 1–3 kHz level has sat far enough under the music for long enough.

Before it stops it asks, with a twenty-second countdown:

• Keep recording — this was a quiet passage; the clock restarts.
• Keep recording & turn auto-stop off — for a record that is quiet throughout.
• Stop now — do not wait out the countdown.

Untick the box before you start for an ambient or very quiet record. A 35-minute hard cap applies either way.

Stop & encode ends the capture and writes the FLAC. This takes a moment on a full side; the button shows it is working.

Abandon throws the capture away without encoding it. Use it when the take is already wrong — wrong speed, wrong input, mistracking. It asks first, and it cannot be undone.

After the side

The record appears in the selector and the side under the side tabs. Flip the record, pick the next side letter and go again.

Captures on disk under the Rip panel lists what the record has, with a size for each and a Discard button per side. Discarding removes that capture and the measurements taken from it.

An interrupted capture

If the process died mid-capture — a crash, a reboot, a Ctrl-C — the audio is still there but was never encoded. Unfinished capture appears in the Rip panel with two buttons:

• Keep it — encode to FLAC finishes the job and the side joins the record.
• Discard deletes it.

From the command line the same thing is ripdoctor salvage <album directory>, with --dry-run to see what it would do first.

Bringing in audio recorded elsewhere

You do not have to record with RipDoctor. A side it did not capture is treated like any other, as long as it is a FLAC in the right place with the right name:

<vinyl>/raw/<slug>/side-a.flac
<vinyl>/raw/<slug>/side-b.flac

Encode first if what you have is a WAV — flac side-a.wav will do it. One file per side, whole and uncut; the letters are what the interface shows as side tabs.

Then say what the record is, which is what a rip would otherwise have recorded:

ripdoctor name <slug> --artist "..." --album "..." --date 2015

and carry on from the first pass.

Next

First pass — find the release and fit the boundaries.