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I've been building a dedicated audio ripper/transport. I'm trying to reach the highest possible fidelity in computer audio. This has taken over a month in building. I have built it around a Pentium M Dothan chip in a full ATX motherboard. It is completely fanless, has 1Terabyte sorage and works great sofar.My greatest and last challenge so far is trying to figure out what is the best way to start ripping my collection in EAC. I have over 1000 cd's and want to do this once. Different sources give different ways of doing it. Some say single wave file with a cue sheet. Others, multiple files with gap detection and cue. I would rip as one wave file with cue but does that limit me to making custom playlists. Say one song from this album, two from that album etc...
I thought I knew what I was going to do but the more I read the more confused I get. And there is this .m3u thing. Still trying to figure that out. When I pull some sample rips in Foobar2000 the .m3u file brings up the CD's songlists nicely but no one seems to mention .m3u.
Also the naming scheme has gotten me a little confused when it comes to setting up Foobar2000. I'm using %B - %D- %C[%Y]\%N- %T right now but don't know if this will creat problems in setting up Foobar with columns type playlists. I want to one day set up foobar with album cover pictures and some fancier type setup but don't want to be limited by how I ripped and named my CD's.
I plan to rip 20 cd's into WAV files and then batch convert them to Flac overnight. Any help would be greatly appreciated as this is the last step to computer audio nirvana for me. Thanks in advance.
Follow Ups:
I was looking into the same questions you have but finally decided it would take too long and be very tedious. I've decided to let awaken.com do it for me. It costs more money but is done in a few days.
Hi,I see nobody has responded yet. My collection of about 950 CDs does not use WAV/Cue Sheet, so I can't be of help there. I got a bit confused reading your post, as you were referring only to WAV files, but at the end you mentioned batch converting to FLAC. So I wasn't sure if the FLAC files were for some other application such as an iPod-like device or if that was the final form you wanted your files to be in.
At any rate, batch conversion to FLAC is not really necessary, and is probably more error-prone than using the standard techniques for having EAC launch the FLAC encoder automatically when ripping. That technique is described on this page in step 8 part way down the page. When you use this approach, the tags in the FLAC files are grabbed automatically from the EAC edit boxes for Artist, Album, etc. It may appear that ripping will take longer with this approach, but there is an option which speeds it up a lot. In EAC, EAC options, Tools tab, choose "On extraction, start external compressor queued in the background". So after ripping the first track, the compressor will be launched, and ripping of the second track will occur simultaneously with encoding of the first. This doesn't seem to slow down extraction at all. After the last track is ripped but before the last track is encoded, you can remove the CD from the drive and put the next one in. By the time you do this, the FLAC encoding of the last track will usually be done. So in practice, having EAC launch the FLAC encoder in this way will not slow down ripping at all.
If you really want to end up with FLAC files, the file naming convention becomes somewhat unimportant. This is because all relevant information about each track such as Artist, Album, etc is now put inside the file, so the application software no longer needs to parse the file name to get it. In my view, this is a much more robust solution than having to depend on file naming convention to get this info. My experience with the Squeezebox has shown that there is no need to worry about gaps between tracks (say, for live albums) even when the CD is ripped to individual tracks. This is a problem for MP3, and special software has to be written to fix it, but for FLAC, I get perfect joins when playing back individual tracks from live albums.
Thanks for your response Andy. Yes, I wanted to first rip as Wav's then mass convert to Flac then delete the Wav's. Your advice to convert to Flac as I rip seems sound. Naming method doesn't seem so important now. I understand now that converting while ripping inputs all the descriptive info into the Flac files. I was just hoping to avoid the extra time involved if any by doing it overnight.So if I understand correctly, I rip in multiple Wav's and convert to Flac while ripping but Do I create a cue sheet or detect gaps before? Does the flac conversion also edit the Cue sheet (i.e. change 'wav' to 'flac' in text) as needed. Or do I do this manualy in notepad?
Joseph
So if I understand correctly, I rip in multiple Wav's and convert to Flac while ripping...Yes, that's correct. Once you set up EAC compression to automatically launch the FLAC compressor when ripping (per the link I posted earlier), you tell EAC to convert to FLAC automatically by choosing "Action, Copy Selected Tracks, Compressed" (Shift+F5) or "Action, Test and Copy Selected Tracks, Compressed" (Shift+F6). The second technique takes twice as long but allows you to compare the CRC codes of the test and the copy to make sure no errors occurred. To get EAC to automatically delete the WAV file after compressing, go to EAC, compression options, External Compression tab, and select "Delete WAV after compression".
...but Do I create a cue sheet or detect gaps before?
If you rip to individual files (one file per song instead of one file per CD), the cue sheet becomes unnecessary. However, you can still make one if you wish. If you tell EAC to create a cue sheet, it will automatically detect the gaps. I actually create a cue sheet for each CD even though I don't need it for playback of the music. The reason I do this is as a "double backup" strategy. If the original CD becomes damaged, I can convert the FLAC files to WAV and burn a new CD with EAC using the cue sheet. But most people don't do this.
Does the flac conversion also edit the Cue sheet (i.e. change 'wav' to 'flac' in text) as needed. Or do I do this manualy in notepad?
The FLAC conversion does not change the cue sheet, so it will still list the file(s) as having a ".wav" extension. But now the cue sheet is not really necessary anyway. When your playback software scans your collection, it creates its own intelligent database which allows it to find music by artist, by album, by song, etc. For example, the SlimServer software that is used by the Squeezebox internally uses a freeware relational database called MySQL for this. Only now, instead of getting the information from the cue sheet, it scans each file and retrieves the artist, album, song title and so on from the tags . So the cue sheet is out of the picture now.
Let's say you are using Foobar and you found a mistake such as a misspelling of an artist's name. You can fix this using the tag editing feature of Foobar. To do this, drag and drop the FLAC files by this artist onto the Foobar window, select the files, and choose "Properties". This will allow you to edit the tags and write the changes back into the files on disc. Then you can have Foobar rescan your library. In this example, the artist's name in the database will now show up with the correct spelling.
If you rip to individual files (one file per song instead of one file per CD), the cue sheet becomes unnecessaryI thought the advantage of the cue sheet was that it could recreate an album, where as individual files would just show up as well, individual files?
I thought the advantage of the cue sheet was that it could recreate an album, where as individual files would just show up as well, individual files?For file formats like FLAC that support tags, the cue sheet isn't necessary. Here's why. The tags in each file might look like this:
Artist = Allman Brothers Band, The
Track number = 3
Album = Eat A Peach
Title = MelissaWhen the playback software scans a collection, it retrieves all of this information into its own database, along with the full path name of each corresponding file. Picture this database as a spreadsheet, where each row is a file (song). Each column might correspond to a tag field above, such as album, artist, etc. with an additional column for the full path of the file name. If you were to sort the spreadsheet by artist name, then by album name, then by track number, the files corresponding to each album would be in consecutive rows of the spreadsheet, with track number 1 first, track number 2 second and so on.
This probably isn't exactly how an actual database is implemented, but you can see how this can easily work. And indeed it does work, both in Foobar and in SlimServer as my collection shows.
The cue sheets may be necessary for untagged WAV files though. I haven't messed with that.
Hey,You are right about the need for them with .wavs.
One nice thing is that with cue sheets, you can just show the artist and album, not the 10 songs:
-Rem Document
-Rem MurmurAns still have a drop down if you want to see the songs too.
As opposed to the none cue sheet option that I am guesing looks something like this:
Rem Document Finest Worksong
Rem Document Welcome to the occupation
Rem Document Exhuming McCarthyWhich appears to be the norm of most players. Song based vs. album based.
I guess I am just old school
I think the restrictions you're referring to only apply to WAV files though. My collection is FLAC, and all the cue sheets I have point to nonexistent files (the original WAVs that were deleted after the conversion to FLAC). Here is a screen capture of a portion of my library. The full hierarchy is there.
I don't use Foobar much though. Since I have SlimServer, I usually just use SoftSqueeze to play music over my dinky computer speakers.
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