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

[marvel]

Excellent!! Thank you very much for the replies. This is exactly what I was looking for. I've decided to stick to individual files. I played with the single file a bit and like the idea, but it's just too non-compliant. I can't drag & drop individual tracks into players, or Nero, etc, filename searches won't turn up individual tracks, and so on and so forth. Too many downsides for me. I'm not paranoid enough about my CD backups that I need an image file; I can burn all of the FLAC files in the correct order and have a "perfect" CD back (OK, track gaps might not be identical, but I just care about the songs...).

Again, I appreciate the responses and links. I didn't realize there was a wiki here, I'll make good use of it from now on.

[JJZolx]

I'm not paranoid enough about my CD backups that I need an image file; I can burn all of the FLAC files in the correct order and have a "perfect" CD back (OK, track gaps might not be identical, but I just care about the songs...).

One additional recommendation: Whenever you rip a CD to multiple Flac files using EAC, take a moment to also generate a non-compliant CUE sheet (this is the default CUE sheet type that EAC creates). Then, to create a nearly identical copy of the CD you can use a little program called Burrrn just by double-clicking the CUE sheet file.

http://www.burrrn.net/?page_id=4

Makes duping CDs very simple and your gaps will be identical to the original. The one thing Burrrn doesn't do is use adjust for a drive offset when burning the disc, but it doesn't sounds like that would be an issue for you.