[Sentient]

Currently my library is a rather large collection of all mp3 files all organized nicely in their albums with artwork and all the metadata kept as close to perfect as possible. When I recently heard about flac (or rather understood), the part of me that organized all my mp3's immediately decided that I needed to get all my cd's into flac. I've been reading some and I think I've got a plan for how my library is going to be structured, however, if anyone could point out problems or suggestions in my plan I would greatly appreciate it.
 
Tentative plan:
Use EAC to burn CD's to FLAC
Use foobar2000 to set FLAC metadata (haven't tried this, and I don't even know if keeping metadata on flacs would be worth the effort, or possible)
Use foobar2000 to convert to mp3 (only for CD's I don't have in my library)
 
I'll keep all the FLAC music I have in a foldert, and keep all the mp3's (even the ones that overlap with the FLAC copy I have) inside of another folder.
 
I'll be using a Dell Inspiron 1525 as my source as soon as my new FA-002w get here, and on that I'll use foobar2000 to play my music. I'll also keep all the mp3's on my zune for portable listening.
 
Anyone knows of a pmp that would allow me to play flac, and would organize music based off my folder hierarchy as opposed to any sort of metadata? I already have foobar2000 organized based of my folder structure and I would much rather have it that way.
 
Well, that's the long and short of it.. any pointers from people more experienced with this stuff would be great. Thanks!
 
Edit: Also, are CD's the easiest way to get high quality recording? I've seen some sites for hd music but know of their collections seem too big and I would rather just stick with amazon.

 

[Head Injury]

What are you planning to convert to MP3 and why?
 
You can get CD info from freedb with EAC, and that will save metadata to the FLAC files. You tag FLAC pretty much just like you tag MP3s.

 

[Sentient]

Oh, that was kind of unclear. I just meant I have some CD's I have put on my computer yet.. Thanks for the info about FLAC, I saw a low mentioned about cue sheets when I was reading about FLAC and I was hoping they didn't need the data stored in a separate file.
 
Quote:

What are you planning to convert to MP3 and why?
 
You can get CD info from freedb with EAC, and that will save metadata to the FLAC files. You tag FLAC pretty much just like you tag MP3s.

 

 

[Henry Flower]

That's basically exactly what I did, and you should have no problems.
 
For a player which reads flacs from a folder hierarchy (drag and drop), AFAIK all the current Sansa players do; you can also use any player on which you can use Rockbox.  I'd go for a used 5G ipod for the storage capacity, but Rockbox also works on many Sansa and Archos players.  Rockbox on newer ipods works, but is still a bit flaky.
 
Miscellanea: you rip CDs with EAC, you don't burn them.

  Cue files involve ripping the CD as one file, with a separate cue file to tell the player where each track starts.  As far as I can tell it's more hassle for no gain whatsoever.  I wouldn't.
 
FreeDB metadata is hardly ever exactly to my taste, so I still use foobar2000 for tweaking genres, composers, capitalisation and so on.  For bulk editing metadata on multiple files, the masstagger plugin is invaluable for me.  It's no longer part of the standard install.

 

[Sentient]

As soon as I got into head-fi I started hearing about Rockbox a lot, I might just be buying myself a 5G iPod to try it out. Plus my new car stereo has a nice little slide in tray meant just for iPods. 
 
My bad about rip and burn, I know the difference buy my mom's constant usage of the two in the wrong way must of rubbed off on me more than I realized when I was living at home. Or maybe I'm just getting converted into a senile old person.. which would be bad given my job is computer programming.
 
I also took a look at that masstagger plugin and I can't believe I didn't know about that before. I had started writing programs and scripts to do exactly what that does.. I love foobar, it's the only program I have ever known that meets my expectations for good design/usability and goes beyond.
 
Thanks a lot for your input.
 
Quote:

That's basically exactly what I did, and you should have no problems.
 
For a player which reads flacs from a folder hierarchy (drag and drop), AFAIK all the current Sansa players do; you can also use any player on which you can use Rockbox.  I'd go for a used 5G ipod for the storage capacity, but Rockbox also works on many Sansa and Archos players.  Rockbox on newer ipods works, but is still a bit flaky.
 
Miscellanea: you rip CDs with EAC, you don't burn them.

  Cue files involve ripping the CD as one file, with a separate cue file to tell the player where each track starts.  As far as I can tell it's more hassle for no gain whatsoever.  I wouldn't.
 
FreeDB metadata is hardly ever exactly to my taste, so I still use foobar2000 for tweaking genres, composers, capitalisation and so on.  For bulk editing metadata on multiple files, the masstagger plugin is invaluable for me.  It's no longer part of the standard install.

 

 

[calaf]

based on personal experience (I am about 1/3 of the way through ripping my CD collection to FLAC) I would recommend using http://code.google.com/p/quodlibet/ over foobar to tag your collection. It is much more flexible and easier to use, particularly if you want to customize your tags over what you get from freedb. One of its most interesting features is its ability to automatically rename files based on your favourite tagging scheme. This allows you to have a consistent naming scheme already in your file system, something that may help greatly with future migrations.  I should add quodlibet  is also a very good music player.

 

[Henry Flower]

Quote:

based on personal experience (I am about 1/3 of the way through ripping my CD collection to FLAC) I would recommend using http://code.google.com/p/quodlibet/ over foobar to tag your collection. It is much more flexible and easier to use, particularly if you want to customize your tags over what you get from freedb. One of its most interesting features is its ability to automatically rename files based on your favourite tagging scheme. This allows you to have a consistent naming scheme already in your file system, something that may help greatly with future migrations.  I should add quodlibet  is also a very good music player.

Quodlibet's a nice player - I use it too - but foobar's file operations dialogue does exactly this.  There's not a lot more flexible than foobar.