MP3 Ripping and Tagging In VB.Net

[honeybee]

Can anyone point me to a good resource/sample code that will tell me how to rip audio CDs to MP3 and tag the MP3 files?

Here's my problem:

My uncles have a large collection of audio CDs. They have now purchased audio systems which support USB input, and so want to get the songs from the CDs to the USB sticks. A free MP3 ripping software is too much to handle for them, because of the complexity of the interface.

Also the MP3 ripping and tagging is entirely based on how the Western albums are designed. If there's something to take care of how music CDs are designed and marketed here in India, it would be great for them to understand and use. For e.g. a single audio CD can contain songs from as many as three different films (which would be the Album Titles), in each film the songs would be from different artists, different lyricists and in some cases even different music directors/composers.

MP3 tags may not allow for capturing all of the above, but whatever can be captured, needs to be in a way which is friendlier to the Indian film music.

So my options are pretty much limited to writing a custom app with fewer and very intuitive buttons/options which can rip an audio CD, create the MP3 files and either during creation or afterwards allow the user to edit the tags in a friendly manner.

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[DeanMc]

I am actually in the very parliminary stages of writting such and application and I can tell you it is not nearly as easy as first glance. Currently I am working on a .DLL that will pull tagging information from AAC files but ultimately I have decide to go the route of using a databse to store the tag information. The issue seems to be that current tagging implementations are extremely light in terms of what information they store.

There is the possiblity of using iTunes with an application called tuneup which will search gracenote for missing artwork/tags but as you say its issue is that it bases it on western and often incorrect albums. I tend to have a lot of singles which cause the whole thing to choke. Unfortunatly it will be well after christmas before my application is done simply because it is taking a lot of time to perfect the storing of tag data in a format thats both consistant regardless of the music type and also that is normalised enough to be searchable without pulling up a lot of false positives.

[honeybee]

I know the amount of information you can store in the current MP3 tags is limited. My major issue is the interface used by the existing softwares to present these tags to the users.

The other question is about reading an audio track and converting it to MP3.

I would like to have something that allows the users to enter the tag info in batch mode for the whole CD or for selected tracks or for individual tracks, then rip the tracks in either Best Quality, Medium Quality or Low Quality (instead of asking the user to select the bitrate) and then just completing the job. Preferably with big buttons and 3-4 wizard steps.

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[NickThissen]

I've used TabLib Sharp in the past. It can read and write tags of most audio files. It's just a simple matter of creating a new TagLib file, set its properties (== the tags) and Save it.

No idea about ripping music from a CD.

[DeanMc]

Yeah taglib sharp is pretty good. I've actually never seen a c# coverter. Your best bet is probably to find a wav ripper and then use lame to batch convert to mp3

[honeybee]

Yeah taglib sharp is pretty good. I've actually never seen a c# coverter. Your best bet is probably to find a wav ripper and then use lame to batch convert to mp3

Can you point me to any resources that explore this? I have ran some searches on VB.Net ripping audio cd mp3 etc. but have come up with precious nothing. And I can't believe it isn't possible. There must be some way out there that this can be done through VB.Net.

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[DeanMc]

I'm out at the moment (on my phone). Il check when I get back. In the mean time you will have more luck searching for c# instead of vb. The code is pretty much the same. Also do a search for lame encoder.