Need FLAC ripping advice, Total newbie Options

[marvel]

Hi folks,

Years ago I ripped my entire CD collection to high bitrate VBR MP3 using EAC. These days drive space is dirt cheap and I have Squeezeboxes connected to some decent audio equipment, so I want to re-rip my entire collection to FLAC in hopes that I'll never need to rip these CDs again (lossless is lossless, right? So I can re-encode to anything else at will without pulling the CDs out of storage again?). I'm looking for some basic information:

1. A link to a good guide for EAC to FLAC ripping to help me get the various settings right.

2. I want to know more about ripping an entire album to a single file. I didn't even know this was possible until literally 5 minutes ago. How does this work? It sounds ideal but I still have some concerns, mainly:

2a: Can my Squeezeboxes see and play individual tracks this way?
2b: Can I drag & drop individual tracks into a program like Nero for making custom CDs?
2c: What other possibilities does this open up? Embedded album art, id3 tags, ??
2d: Other pros / cons to this method vs. individual tracks?

I thank you in advance for your responses to these generic newbie questions.

This post has been edited by marvel: Oct 19 2008, 00:26

[HotshotGG]

1. A link to a good guide for EAC to FLAC ripping to help me get the various settings right.

2. I want to know more about ripping an entire album to a single file. I didn't even know this was possible until literally 5 minutes ago. How does this work? It sounds ideal but I still have some concerns, mainly:

2c: What other possibilities does this open up? Embedded album art, id3 tags, ??
2d: Other pros / cons to this method vs. individual tracks?

Check out the EAC Lossless Backup wiki page and also check out this wiki page:

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=EAC_and_FLAC

To answer your second question you can rip to a single file use a CUE sheet to index it and even embed your album art in it, but that seems like quite a handful. FLAC uses Vorbis comment tags it does not use ID3 tags. Rohangc in the post below suggested in the past the only reason to do this would be in case of corruption in the archive or bad data with individual track's. I personally don't see any reason to do this unless of course it's something like DJ set where there is a continous stream of music.

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=59345

This post has been edited by HotshotGG: Oct 19 2008, 07:57