Choad was written in 2000 to allow me to rip all my CDs easily. I ran NetBSD on the desktop. CD ripping and encoding was a fairly manual process, especially if you wanted to do it on the command line.
Not long after I finished Choad and successfully devoured my entire CD collection with five cheap unix boxes, OS X came out. With iTunes.
Aside from adding a few patches I received through mid 2001, Choad sat in mothballs until around 2006. I wanted to rewrite it to support distributed encoding and decoding, as well as multiple encodings (e.g., encoding to both FLAC and MP3).
Sourceforge wouldn't let me host a project named 'choad', so instead I wrote Cretin, the CD Ripper, Encoder, and Tagger with an Inoffensive Name. That one is even mildly useful today. https://github.com/gamache/cretin
It's here mostly so I can chuckle at code I wrote in a rave warehouse when I was 21. Feel free to join in!
-pete gamache, June 2013