CD ripping not recognising any disks ?

[EricJ]

Hi,
I've upgraded to VB 2.5 on Fedora 25 successfully.
Now when I rip new cd's none of the disks are recognised, they all come up as unknown. I can edit manually in MP3tag or similar but it is a lot of extra work. Have I done something wrong with the upgrade ? or are all my disks so obscure that they are 'unknown' (seems very unlikely) ?
Any advice welcome, thanks, Eric

[Mr. Bill]

Same issue here, I tried a CD that worked previously and now just get the 'Unknown Artist, Unknown Album' also. It was working correctly in March so this must be something recent. I'll try sending an e-mail to Andrew at his Small Green Computer address and hope that he can look into it but I think the Vortexbox software is sadly on life support.

Has any other Vortexbox user been able to successfully rip a CD recently?

Mr. Bill

[Mr. Bill]

I did contact Andrew and he replied back that the ripping has not been working well on the Vortexbox as the free metadata service is not working well (his words) but offered no solution.

I did check the 'Freedb' site which I believe is (was) used to get the metadata and found the following information:

Wikipedia Quote: 'freedb.org and its services was scheduled to be shut down on March 31 of 2020. As of May 28, 2020 the site was still operational. On the 13th of June 2020 it was observed that the URL used for lookups, freedb.freedb.org, no longer resolved to a host name and as a result the service no longer appears to operate.'

So it looks like ripping on the Vortexbox using the internal ripper has come to an end without using some type of 3rd party software. I guess it will be time to investigate either EAC (Exact Audio Copy) or dbpoweramp for future ripping.

Finally, given the outdated version of Fedora that Vortexbox uses is now 7 releases behind (Vortexbox is on release 25 from 2016, current version is 32) and the internal ripper no longer supplies metadata it looks more and more like the future of Vortexbox is dim.

Perhaps someone with some Linux software skill can convince Andrew to turn the Vortexbox project into an open source project that others can continue to maintain. We can always hope I guess.

Mr. Bill

[EricJ]

The current situation is disappointing. I mainly value Vortexbox for it's ripping and backup facilities and it's been a valuable tool over the last few years.
I do hope that there is a way forwards that keeps Vortexbox as a viable platform.

Looks like he way forwards would be with https://musicbrainz.org/