discid is a small Program, written in C++ to generate a disk-ID by reading the track-info of a compact disc. The disc-ID is used to identify discs at CDDB-Servers (e.g. http://www.freecddb.org) and send queries to CDDB-Servers to get information about Disc-Title, Artist, Track-Titles and more.
The discid program has been tested in Linux and Windows 32 native and Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com) environments. Windows 32 users can compile discid using Visual C++ or gcc although ready compiled executables for all platforms are included in the distribution. So the average user don't have build the executables himself.
Macintosh OS X support was added by Jeffrey C. Jacobs and has been tested with OS X 10.2.6. It requires the BSD SDK and gcc for OS X to compile; a binary is also included for Mac. Since the original author does not have a Macintosh, support for this platform can not be guaranteed for future releases.
discid can be used by PyCDDB http://pycddb.sourceforge.net to generate the required format of the disc-ID.
There are several ways to install the program:
Install the RPM-Distribution for Linux systems
Copy the TGZ distribution contents to your local computer and compile.
Copy the executable discid-file (discid for Linux and Macintosh OS X platforms and discid.exe on Windows 32 platforms) to a directory, within the current path. On Linux and Mac OS X platforms, this might be /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin. On Windows 32 platforms, this might be C:\WINDOWS\system32.
$ discid [device]
If no device is given, the following devices are taken as a default:
/dev/cdrom on Linux systems
cdaudio on Windows 32 native and Cygwin systems
/dev/rdisk1 [Note: for Macs with more than 1 hard disk the CDROM may be locatated at an alternate device location. If unsure, check the /dev directory when a cd is inserted to see what rdisk<n> is created.]
The output of discid has the following format:
8HexDigitID NumberOfTracks Track1StartFrame Track2StartFrame..TrackNStartFrame DiscLengthInSeconds
This format contains all information needed to make a query to a CDDB-server and is compatible to the one of other disc-ID generating programs like cd-discid by Robert Woodcock http://frantica.lly.org/~rcw/cd-discid/
discid is hosted at http://sourceforge.net
The homepage of discid is http://discid.sourceforge.net
The latest version of discid can always be found on http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/discid
The authors homepage can be found on http://homepage.sunrise.ch/mysunrise/rschaeuble/