Main Objective: Transfer the most listened to tracks of my 100+ CD collection to 6 or 7 MP3 CD-Rs to play on my DVD player. (Have enough disk space to keep WAV files on hard drive.)

After reading the guide at MP3.radified.com and some of the sticky posts here, I'm convinced that for the best audio quality, I should use EAC and LAME.

So far I have used EAC to create WAV files for 6 Springsteen CDs. Under the Bruce Springsteen folder were separate folders for each album, each album had the tracks listed: [track#]-title.

Next, I used easyLAME to encode to MP3. The problem I have is that the Album, Artist, Year and Genre info are missing. I tried using Tagger/Tag, but nothing was found.

My DVD player is a Panasonic F85. It is capable of reading MP3, WMA and highMAT. When I encoded a CD into WMA using WMP9, all of the Album, Artist, Year and Genre info stayed intact.

I prefer to go the MP3 route, but I must be doing something wrong. Thanks for your help.

The missing information you entered in EAC (album, artist...) aren't there because WAV files normally have no tags. It's possible to add them, but it creates some problems in some programs. If you set up EAC for encoding and do Copy+Encode instead of encoding yourself, it should automatically add all necessary info. I don't think you can add it automatically from EAC database after that point (not sure). Just tag those files manually and do Copy+Encode from now on.

Thanks. That worked as far as carrying the info over to the MP3 file. My plan was to keep WAV files separate from the MP3 files. I was thinking of transferring all tracks from the CD to WAV, and only encoding the songs I like best to MP3.

Maybe now I'll be more selective from the start. That would save space, but prevent me from recreating a complete backup.

Another question if I can..
I'm imagining creating a data CD of MP3s from various artists. I would like to normalize the volume of all the tracks on the data CD. If I use MP3gain (or other suggestion) will this be applied so that the adjustment is contained on the data CD itself, so that it plays level on my DVD player? (I'm thinking -yes, but it occurred to me that it might only work that way on the PC.)

double post. sorry.

• I personally prefer not relying on any tag system for my archive and enter all the info on CD's (album, artist, year, lyrics, lots of things not available on ID3) in a text file (with a format I made up) stored with the FLAC files, and then generate any kind of tag (ID3v1, v2, APEv2, Vorbis, FLAC) whenever I want. This makes it very flexible. If you know basic programming in a script language you could do that. But it takes time and has no cddb support. Try finding a tagging program that can save and load the tags in a similar way. The famous TAG program generates nfo files but AFAIK doesn't read them back. If you want to use method I do (text file) and can't program, I can help.
• The Replay Gain method (which is used in codec-specific implementations like mp3gain, vorbisgain..) stores the information calculated for volume-adjusted tracks in a seperate field instead of changing the audio data itself (contrary to normalization), so that the original info is not lost. In Ogg or FLAC files, that is in a special tag. I am not sure about mp3gain, the format originally didn't have that feature and I think it is somewhere like the ID3 comment maybe. The result is that the decoder/player must have special support for this (mp3gain) feature. AFAIK this is something relatively new and not so common, so I don't expect it's supported on most portables. However, there shouldn't be any problems, it just won't be normalized but will be played back as if no replaygain was done.

Not quite.

There are TWO kinds of ReplayGain implementation to MP3:
1.- The Foobar2000 Method: It calculates the appropiate gain (in album and track modes) and stores it in APE2 tags. Then, the gain adjustement is applied in real time when the file is played. Obviously, this method only works in this player. No change is done to the files themselves.
2.- The MP3Gain Method: MP3 gain is a program that calculates ReplayGain values for MP3 files and IT APPLIES the correct gain adjustements. The files are changed permanently (altough, if you apply the exact same gain but with an opposite value you will restore your files to what they were, that's why this is a LOSSLESS method). The newest versions of MP3Gain have an undo feature, I think, but I don't know for sure.

So that's the real deal about MP3 and ReplayGain, sinan and BullishDad

You could find more info to this subject and many others in the FAQ

Sorry, I couldn't state it clearly and caused confusion. I told the original concept of ReplayGain (correctly AFAIK) and assumed that mp3gain would adhere to it (I had read replaygain site before) since many people might refrain from its use because it changes the original sound therefore thought mp3gain used the same method as foobar2000. But I stated that ID3 (v1) doesn't support that, because I thought it would be obvious to the reader that mp3gain would either change the file or add a special info field. But it wasn't clear maybe - sorry if was misunderstood.

EDIT1: removed the accidental quote
EDIT2: You could store all info in the file name and use a program that guesses tags from file names. Another recent thread suggested that; but I didn't advise this method because you had named the files with only track+title. If you don't want to keep separate tag info files, you could use this method for future, though. It would be easier (if you want few fields)

For now, I plan to use EAC to Copy and Encode (w/LAME). Once I have all the tracks that I want for the data CD, I'll use MP3gain to normalize the volume. I haven't used MP3gain yet, so I hope I use it properly.

In EAC, when I click on the play icon to preview a track, I'm not getting any sound on my PC speakers. The time counter moves thru the song, and the CD drive is being accessed. Windows sounds and Media Jukebox play fine. I checked the soundcard settings and nothing is muted.

Does anyone know why I'm not getting any sound from EAC's preview mode?

Edit: Thanks to AstralStorm's reply in the Hardware Forum, I now get sound after selecting Alternate Play under EAC options, General Tab.