I’m looking to replicate an old workflow
I had an audio editor that would allow auditioning/extraction of a region of a CD
Not interested in iTunes solutions or audio capture … looking to rip small .wav chunks from CD tracks
Anyone know of a neat free utility to do this OSX (mavericks), nothing too bloated, this is all I want to do with it ?
We talking like a sample CD?
Have a look at Iced Audio Finder
That’s an interesting product in its own right, but it’s bloated and paid for, so doesn’t fit my purposes
Conceptually what I’m after seems straightforward … this issue being that nobody uses CDs, so solutions may be thin on the ground … just an extractor to preferably audition but mainly to specify small chunks of audio CDs to extract the data
So free, ideally lean and clean to make it a pleasure to use
Sure I can get big full tracks of lossless audio out of itunes, but then my soul gets a beating from dealing with all sorts of other crap and iTunes just went berserk this week with the 12.6.1 update crashing at every launch … cost me hours and hours and nearly all my metadata … luckily some internet genius found a way to trick it open in the meantime … so I don’t want to be messing with iTunes as it’ll try to put stuff in its fragile database
XLD is no good either as it presents no preview / track info / selection range … though it is free and lean and hand for other tasks
I may have to dig out the old powermac 
Not sure if it fits the bill (definitely not in respect to pre-defining regions of an Audio CD), but you can rip audio from CD using Audacity, edit the WAV and write disk. It is free, and lightweight.
Edit: OK, Audacity does only sorta rip, probably not quite as envisioned… but I also found a link to “Max” https://github.com/sbooth/Max
Yep, Max on full paranoia 
Then edit somewhere else
I also have Max installed already (as well as Max/MSP), I’ll revisit that one thanks … I have audacity on a retired machine, but its optical drive is bust … may revisit, cheers
I suppose editing a ripped full track is not the end of the world, but it becomes a tedious process if it’s not all done in one spot (like my earlier workflow) … I’m using Wave Editor these days
I think these days you are just gonna have to rip the full track (using max or xld - both have their own issues). After that though, Audacity is really great. Cmd+I to split the sections then export that selection - really easy workflow for me.
https://www.dbpoweramp.com/cd-ripper.htm
There’s a MAC Version TRIAL for 21 days (licence 36 euro)
XLD (Mac, FREE Software)
http://tmkk.undo.jp/xld/index_e.html
been a few years since I even touched a CD tbh lol…
but yeah would probably use XLD
May need to get the song data side of XLD sorted … when it’s not named it’s just too much of a chore … ripping tracks and editing 3 or 4 seconds of a beat will probably have to do
My fall back may be to pipe it in by SPDIF from an audio player to my Motu, this way I can just have the recorder in my editor running and play all the snippets I want to capture
An old favorite of mine, exact audio copy.
Not on OSX though !
this seems pretty simple?
hardest part is probably installing an up-to-date Python and that library.
I’m a noob with Python but if you wanna go that route I can maybe help you out.
edit: ah sorry that PyMedia library apparently isn’t available for macOS…
but there’s gotta be some alternative…
Thanks, but I now think it may be easiest to record into my editor direct by SPDIF (or even via DAC/ADC), it’ll be the most natural, therefore least irksome to do … handling lots of CDs on mac has its own drawbacks
I’d been moving all my CDs and got a bit nostalgic for some of the iconic intros and moments for a bit of OT fun : )
