Goobox For Linux

Goobox is an open source project that provides users with a straightforward way to rip Audio-CD discs and encode the tracks to popular digital audio formats. It allows acts as an Audio-CD player application.

At first it looks like a simple Audio-CD player application, but it can also be used to rip tracks from a given CD media and encode them to various digital audio file formats, including OGG, FLAC and WAV.

As mentioned, the application has been specifically designed for the GNOME desktop environment, with which it integrates very well, allowing users to quickly change the play mode (play all, repeat and shuffle), as well as to access its preferences directly from the panel.

The application is distributed as part of the GNOME project. It can be downloaded as a source archive, which means that it can also be used as a standalone application on other open source desktop environments. Users can install it from the default software channels of their Linux OS.

From the preferences dialog, users can choose a CD/DVD-ROM device (if more than one are available), enable automatic playback of newly inserted Audio-CDs, enable creation of playlists, select the destination folder for ripped tracks, as well as the preferred audio encoder.

Users can set the compression level or quality for each of the supported audio encoders. More specifically, they can choose between a smaller or higher quality for the OGG Vorbis open source lossless audio codec, and a faster or higher compression level for FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec).

The Audio-CD playback functionality of the application is pretty basic, providing users with the ability to play previous or next tracks, as well as a Play button that also acts as a Pause and Stop one.

Goobox is a very nice, stable and responsive Audio-CD player and ripper application for the GNOME desktop environment. Unfortunately, it doesn’t provides support for the MP3 audio file format.