Grip
====

Grip is a cd-player and cd-ripper for the Gnome desktop.. It has the ripping
capabilities of cdparanoia builtin, but can also use external rippers (such
as cdda2wav). It also provides an automated frontend for MP3 encoders,
letting you take a disc and transform it easily straight into MP3s. Internet
disc lookups are supported for retrieving track information from disc
database servers. Grip works with DigitalDJ to provide a unified
"computerized" version of your music collection.


Requirements
============

To use Grip, you must have:

 o The Gnome desktop
 o POSIX thread support (http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/linuxthreads)
 o a net connection (if you want to use disc database lookup)
 o a CD player (surprise, surprise)

Grip requires that you have at least a basic version of the Gnome desktop
installed on your computer. In particular, make sure that you have libghttp
installed. If you can't find it, I have mirrored a copy here:

  http://www.nostatic.org/grip/libghttp-1.0.9.tar.gz

If you wish to have builtin cdparanoia support, or id3v2 support, you must
have the appropriate packages on your system. You can find them here:

 cdparanoia: http://xiph.org/paranoia/index.html
 id3v2: http://id3lib.sourceforge.net/

Grip is designed to work closely with DigitalDJ, my SQL-based mp3 jukebox
system (although it does not require it). DigitalDJ can be obtained from:

  http://www.nostatic.org/ddj


Installation
============

If you obtained Grip from the RPM distribution then they are already
installed. If you have the source distribution, you need to compile it.

To install Grip, simply go through the following steps:

 o after unpacking Grip, cd to the extracted directory
 o './configure'
 o 'make'
 o become root if you are installing in a non-user directory
 o 'make install'

For information on options to the configure process, run:

  ./configure --help

Grip adds the following options that can be specified to configure:

  --disable-shared-cdpar  -- This will force Grip to link statically, rather
                             than dynamically with cdparanoia

  --disable-cdpar         -- This disable linking with cdparanoia entirely

  --disable-shared-id3    -- This will force Grip to link statically, rather
                             than dynamically with id3lib

  --enable-gettext-location -- This will build po/grip-2.2.pot with filenames
                               and line numbers for each string

Note that if Gnome is installed in a non-standard place (such as /opt), you
may need to use the '--with-gnome' configure option for all libraries to be
found correctly.


Running Grip
============

Grip's usage is:

  grip [options]

  where the available options are:

    --config=CONFIG             Specify the configuration file to use
                                (defaults to .grip, relative to home dir)
    --device=DEVICE             Specify the cdrom device to use
    --scsi-device=DEVICE        Specify the generic scsi device to use
    --small                     Launch in "small" (cd-only) mode
    --local                     "Local" mode -- do not look up disc info on
                                the net
    --no-redirect               Do not do I/O redirection
    --verbose                   Run in verbose (debug) mode


Getting More Help
=================

For more information, see the online documentation within Grip. It can also
be accessed locally in the source distribution. Load doc/C/grip/grip.html
into an html viewer.

If you need more help with Grip, your best resource is the Grip mailing
list. You will find it at:

  http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/grip-users

Be sure to check the mailing list archives for answers to any questions you
may have.

To report a bug with Grip, or to submit a patch. Please do so at the Grip
section on sourceforge.net:

  http://sourceforge.net/projects/grip

---
Mike Oliphant (oliphant@gtk.org)

http://www.nostatic.org/grip