EAC command line options question Options

[convergent]

Hi all.

For a while now I have been using EAC (v1.0 beta 3) to rip CDs to flac. Today I checked my settings against this guide and noticed that it recommends setting the additional command-line option field to:

-8 -V -T "ARTIST=%artist%" -T "TITLE=%title%" -T "ALBUM=%albumtitle%" -T "DATE=%year%" -T "TRACKNUMBER=%tracknr%" -T "GENRE=%genre%" -T "PERFORMER=%albuminterpret%" -T "COMPOSER=%composer%" %haslyrics%-tag-from-file=LYRICS="%lyricsfile%"%haslyrics% -T "ALBUMARTIST=%albumartist%" -T "DISCNUMBER=%cdnumber%" -T "TOTALDISCS=%totalcds%" -T "TOTALTRACKS=%numtracks%" -T "COMMENT=%comment%" %source% -o %dest%

...whereas I seem to have been working with mine set to

-T "title=%title%" -T "album=%albumtitle%" -T "date=%year%" -T "tracknumber=%tracknr2%" -T "genre=%genre%" %source%

I'm a bit hazy on the implications of this. Can anyone explain how the rips that I have made using the latter options will differ from ones made using the recommended ones? Thanks.

[mixminus1]

The "recommended" command line primarily adds many more tags (if they're present in the retrieved metadata) - if you haven't been missing those, then you don't need to add them.

It also specifies a higher compression level - -8, vs. the -5 you're getting by default - and adds the verification switch - -V - which performs real-time decoding of the just-encoded data in a parallel process within the encoder and verifies it against the incoming PCM data.

Whether or not either of those matter is up to you. Personally, I use the -8 compression level just because it saves a tiny bit of space and can still be compressed far faster than my CD drive can rip, and I've never bothered with the -V switch, but there's no penalty to using it other than a slight slowdown in encoding speed.

[convergent]

Thanks for the reply. Here's where I display the depths of my ignorance...

The reduced compression is not ideal but not a real worry as I'm not short of disk space, so it's not worth reripping because of that. The missing tags issue is annoying, but I can just write them manually, no?

Not having included the -V option sounds worrying though. All my discs have ripped without errors/with CRC values matches, but by having failed to switch on verification might I have ended up with some imperfect flac files due to errors in the encoding?

[JJZolx]

The reduced compression is not ideal but not a real worry as I'm not short of disk space, so it's not worth reripping because of that.

In reality there's only a very small amount of extra compression achieved by using -8 vs -5, at the expense of a fair amount of extra processing. I use the default setting, as do many others. I think there was a recent poll in these forums regarding this.

The missing tags issue is annoying, but I can just write them manually, no?

If there's something there that you think you need. I like having DSICNUMBER and ALBUMARTIST, but the rest of it is pretty useless to me. I always add additional tags after ripping a CD, anyway, so EAC's tagging will likely never be complete for my purposes.

Not having included the -V option sounds worrying though. All my discs have ripped without errors/with CRC values matches, but by having failed to switch on verification might I have ended up with some imperfect flac files due to errors in the encoding?

Highly unlikely, unless you have hardware problems or some other strange issues. Otherwise, you can expect the files to be encoded
and written to disk exactly as expected. Don't worry about it.

This post has been edited by JJZolx: Aug 30 2012, 23:38

[greynol]

The reduced compression is not ideal but not a real worry as I'm not short of disk space, so it's not worth reripping because of that.

That's good. Savings from -8 over the default won't likely be more than a percent or two.

The missing tags issue is annoying, but I can just write them manually, no?

Yes, you can write them manually. If you have the artist name in the path or filename and it is delimited somehow then you can have tagging software add it to your files automatically.

Might I have ended up with some imperfect flac files due to errors in the encoding?

Extremely doubtful. In the event that you had a hardware problem that would have most likely caused such an error, -V is still no guarantee that the file will decode back to the original wave file. Don't let paranoia get the better of you!

This post has been edited by greynol: Aug 30 2012, 23:51

[convergent]

Thanks for the replies: it's reassuring that you guys are saying similar things.

I didn't realise that the savings in space between -5 and -8 were so small! Definitely not worth reripping in that case.

I definitely need to sort out the tags as at the moment there is no artist tag, but as you say hopefully I can get some tag software to do this for me en masse.

Just wondering if you might be able to help me get my head around the verification thing. How does this differ from the CRC checks? Is it that the CRC values are taken from two reads of the disc in order to check that reads are consistent?

And (this is probably a daft question) is there any way to test the flac files without reripping the CDs?

[trout]

is there any way to test the flac files without reripping the CDs?

CUETools or foobar2000 File Integrity Verifier plugin






This post has been edited by trout: Aug 31 2012, 01:41