Wagtail

Wagtail is a CD-ripping and encoding wrapper that is designed for bulk encoding and large collections. It's perfect for people who take their encoding seriously. However, it might not be suitable for everyone. Although the learning curve might seem steep, it's actually not that bad. To get started, you can read the quickstart guide and delve into the details later.

If you're installing or setting up Wagtail, we strongly recommend starting with the quickstart guide before moving on to the full manual. Some key features of Wagtail include handling CD ripping, CDDB encoding (including submission), tagging, and moving of files. It also supports re-encoding of existing files/playlists, user choice of software for each stage of processing and encoding, and a client/server architecture.

With the client/server architecture, clients send files to the server to be encoded. Both tasks can be performed by a single machine. Files to be processed are queued on the server, so there's no need for the client to wait for the server to catch up before sending more files. The server can support multiple formats and quality levels, and it also supports multiple 'tasks' which define the encoded file naming scheme, arbitrary re-processing instructions, and format choice restrictions.

Wagtail also has flexible naming rules for files and directories. Names can be based on file properties, and multiple requirements are needed for installation. These include a UNIX-like operating system, Perl version 5.who-can-tell, cddb.pm version 1.12 or later, MailTools, and a CD ripper, TOC identifier, and encoder.

In the latest release, ';' has been added as a comment character in configuration files, duplicate keys in config files now specify multiple/alternative values, and a bugfix was made for ` not being escaped before being passed to commands. Overall, Wagtail is a great software for those who need to bulk encode and have large collections of music.