Hello,

I'd like to make archive copies of my CDs and I think I will use APE for that. The format of archive, since not intended to be played, is just CDImage.ape + CUE sheet. Then I can transcode to any format, depending on the needs.

Do you know how I can use these files as only input and generate n MPC files (the n tracks), with their tags info coming from CUE sheet and (this would be the extra feature) a M3U playlist file (or another format). In other words, an automatic conversion tool....

Thanks!

-ec

Not automatic in a sense, but I think this solution is good:
How to convert one CUE+WAV to multiple WAVes?

Yep. But this way, I'm loosing tag info - if i'm correct (and I'm lazy enough to find it annoying). Meanwhile, I tried foobar2000. If you open the CUE sheet , it is interpreted as a playlist and using diskwriter functionality set to MPC compression, you can get n MPC files with tags. But remaining problem is that an extra-step is required to export the playlist... But the really annoying step (re-enter tag info) is now gone!

-ec

You will be better off using separate files per album, instead of sqashing each album into one file. Especially for transcoding to other formats, this method is much superior. (Also for tagging - if you use one large image file per album, you won't be able to apply user-defined tags such as COMPOSER or PRODUCER to the tracks.)

With the help of various batch files, shell extensions, dBpowerAMP, Tag and Sweep *g*, I've created quite a cool solution for transcoding from lossless to lossy. I have dBpowerAMP encode the lossless files to MPC (copying over all tag information) and put them in one folder. Then, I use my custom shell extension (an entry in the folder context menu which calls a batch file) to have the MPC files sorted into album subfolders and ReplayGained (each folder being treated as an album). It would only take adding one line to the batch file to have a playlist created for each album, too.

If you like, I'll post the .bat and .reg files you need for this.

That would be nice

Yes, this makes sense actually. I had first decided to go with one file to totally avoid gap issues. It was just for extra-security since EAC should take care of these gaps, normally.

BTW, I'm also interested in your script files...

-ec

Sorry for not replying to this, I had forgotten about this thread.

OK, here goes. (It's not at all as spectacular as my previous post made it sound like )

1. Make sure mppdec, replaygain, tag and sweep are in your PATH or your Windows folder.

2. Paste this into a text file and change the file naming scheme ("A - [Y] - L\N - T") as well as the playlist naming ("*L") according to your needs. Save it as processtranscode.bat in any folder, preferably your Windows directory:

(Remove the second-last line if you don't want a ReplayGain report created in each album's folder. Personally, I like it. )

3. Save this as a .reg file whereever you like, including the empty last line (modify the path to the batch file first, and note that you have to escape each backslash with another backslash):

Then double-click it to import it to the registry.

This will create a new entry in the folder context menu ("Process transcoded MPC files"). If you use dBpowerAMP to transcode your files into one single folder (preserving the tags), then you just have to right-click this folder and select the new context menu option.

There's one caveat: If you do this with Monkey's Audio files, you have to convert their tags to APEv1 first, because dBpowerAMP currently doesn't read APEv2 tags from them. You can do this by opening a DOS box in the folder you want to transcode, and running tag --force apev1 *.ape (add --recursive to include all subfolders).

If you want to transcode several folders of lossless files, right-click the root folder, choose Search, and search for *.flac (or *.ape or whatever). You can then right-click the files in the results list to transcode them with dBpowerAMP.

Thanks!

-ec