Questions about Archiving using FLAC

[gdpeck]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Drewpy .cue files are used to define where a track begins and ends within a larger compilation. So something like a live or classical album that doesn't contain "tracks" per-se. When you rip the album you end up with a single large track, and you can't skip to a part of the performance (unless you have the time code memorized). You can have a .cue file that says track 1 begins at 00:00 and ends at 05:30, track 2 starts at 05:30 and ends at 15:10, etc... MAREO (Multiple Applications Runner for EAC and Others) will do multiple encodings from EAC.

I'm currently in the midst of re-ripping all of my CDs to FLAC for my Squeezebox, and AAC for iPods. I am using EAC then using to MAREO to call FLAC and ITUNESENCODE. It works great. I also set up foobar to use ITUNESENCODE so that I can encode from FLAC to AAC. I'm not creating cue sheets because the squeezebox doesn't need them. Is this going to come back to haunt me in a few years?

 

[Chri5peed]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Wikipedia Transcoding is the direct digital-to-digital conversion from one (usually lossy) codec to another. Transcoding can also refer to recompressing files to a lower bitrate without changing formats. Compression artifacts are cumulative

It may well technically also mean converting lossy files, it is primarily used to describe lossy conversion, where its a derogatory operation.

Compression artifacts don't accumulate converting lossless files. It is usually associated with portable applications.


I'm not arguing it has other meanings.

 

[Chri5peed]

Whoops dp.

 

[egglick]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Drewpy EAC is a ripping and encoding prog, why are you trying to uncompresss FLAC with it? The FLAC frontend can decode your files if you wish, but then you lose all the tagging info for when you want to encode the files into another format. Which I don't think you want to do. If you want to decode/transcode your FLAC files, just create a playlist in Foobar, and use the converter tool. Select the entire playlist (CTRL+A), right click>Convert>Convert to... Then select the appropriate options for the format you want the files to be converted to (WAV, MP3, OGG, AAC, etc...). You should give MAREO a shot for all new albums you rip. Once you've got it setup correctly (there's a thread at HydrogenAudio), its a simple one click process from EAC to get FLAC for archival purposes, and MP3 (or other format) for portable listening.

I gave the "convertor" in Foobar a shot today, and after some tweeking to the settings, it seemed to work pretty well. I guess I just don't trust it as much as I do EAC, because it doesn't have a command line. I've only ripped a handful of my albums to FLAC for testing purposes, so it's not like I have very much to convert though.

I'll be giving that MAREO a shot, once I work up the courage to do it (it looked pretty complicated from a glance).

 

[mcryptic]

if you need to keep all the tagging info just use dbpoweramp, it saves the tags no matter what you convert it to, lossless to lossless or lossless to lossy. So long as the file format can be tagged, if you convert it to wav it would lose the info but if you do like flac to alac it will keep the tags.

 

[Drewpy]

Quote:

Originally Posted by egglick I gave the "convertor" in Foobar a shot today, and after some tweeking to the settings, it seemed to work pretty well. I guess I just don't trust it as much as I do EAC, because it doesn't have a command line. I've only ripped a handful of my albums to FLAC for testing purposes, so it's not like I have very much to convert though. I'll be giving that MAREO a shot, once I work up the courage to do it (it looked pretty complicated from a glance).

See my post above about using the custom setting in the converter tool. It allows you to specify your command line options rather than just the encoder presets normally presented. I've never had an issue with the new fb2k converter yet. Used it to create MP3s from my FLAC library for use on my ipod, and it worked flawlessly. I Just set the LAME -Vx preset to my desired level, and let it go about its business.

This post at HA, claims to have the correct setup for FLAC/MP3/M4A. Obviously you'd need to alter the "FULLNAME" variables to where you want your files stored (and remove the unnecessary lines for your needs), but all the command line parameters are there for you. Linky