I used to have Suse 10.0 on old server machine which I used as music media server with Twonky. I used Kaudiocreator to rip my CDs to mp3 format and everything worked very well.

I particularly like Kaudiocreator because it is simple to configure and use, with solid and consistent results using Lame as the encoder.

Unfortunately patches for Suse 10.0 dried up and it became clear I should upgrade so did a new install with OpenSuse 11.1. Since then I have been unable to re establish the above working setup with Kaudiocreator.

On the original server, which had two drives and used to work well, I have been unable to get Kaudiocreator to recognise which drive it should be ripping and behave consistently or complete ripping and encoding even one CD.

With a brand new IBM x3400 machine with only one drive, the tracks on the CD are shown and the CDDB lookup is OK but if I select all tracks to rip, I get error messages. If I select just one track then sometimes it will be ripped and encoded but other times not.

In desperation I tried Grip which has "built in" cdparanoia, version 9.8 I believe. This requires setting the generic scsi device (/dev/sg4 on my machine) but once this is done all works as it should. I am going to try using grip with an external version of cdparanoia 10.2 which should not need to use the generic scsi setting as it is supposed to have SG_IO interface support.

Meanwhile, what does Kaudiocreator use for ripping to .wav and should I be defining the drive somewhere in KDE?

I went through the bugzilla archives in KDE and Suse and it seems that my problems or some very similar indeed have been reported several times from as long ago as 2004 but no definitive fixes posted. It does appear that Kaudiocreator is given a very low priority by the KDE team which is a shame as it is an excellent program. I shall post a detailed bug report when I can but I am not a coder and new to Linux so I shall need some help, but I am willing to put the effort in to get this problem sorted if somebody in the KDE team is able to give it some time.

Budgie2