Hi,

Some months ago I decided to start ripping my cd-collection. My first thought was to go with mp3 och Ogg Vorbis. But I never really started, since I couldn't decide on quality settings and other user options.

Then a few weeks ago I first heard of lossless encoding, and decided that would be they way to go, both for sound quality and the possibility to transcode to other formats later on. I have spent some time reading about it, but for the same reasons I never started to rip into lossy I haven't started to rip into flac yet either.

But this morning something occured to me: Since flac is lossless I don't need to bother about learning everything and making the right decisions before I start. Since it's lossless I'll get exact copies. Settings are just for tuning filesize and other things that doesn't affect sound quality. Also, I don't need to be 100% sure that flac is right for me, since I always can convert to other lossless later on, without re-ripping my cd's.

1. Am I right about these conclusions?
2. If I don't tag my flacs correct at rip-time, I can always fix that later?
3. Since sound quality already are perfect with lossless, in which fields are developing of the lossless codecs being performed?

//Anders

1. Your conclusions seem to be OK.
2. You can tag your flacs later just like mp3s.
3. The developers are concentrating on the compression effiency. They are trying to squeeze the files to smaller files without loss of quality. Some developers are implementing a semi-lossless mode which gives almost the same quality as the completely lossless mode at bitrates ranging somewhere around 350 kb/s.

For differences that matter... I've never seen a shorten file (.shn) with tags so I don't think they are supported. Some don't seek to arbitrary positions well. FLac is good on both those points.

New work? I don't know what people are doing in lossless, but potential things, and that are being done in some lossies:

1) more channels, like 5.1 support.
2) less computer resource needed for encode or decode, esp for use on portable players.
3) DRM

isn it the definition of "lossless"?

Not really, quality is a subjective term whereas lossless is an objective term. A codec is (mathematically) lossless if the decoded audio is identical to the source audio. You could argue that if a codec is transparent on all samples, there is no loss of quality.

I have a few observations

1) You haven't mentioned what you are using to rip your CDs? EAC? Are you ripping as a CD image w/cue sheet? or just as individual tracks?
1.5) If you rip as CD image (which I suggest) you might want to look into the drive offsets of your CD-R in order to make an exact copy of the CD. If your CD is in the FreeDB you can also do the tagging right into the cue sheet.
2) I suggest you tag your files properly the first time around - if left undone very few people go back to do it, and ultimately information is lost about which CD the tracks actually came from. It is much easier to do it when you are in the process then to go back years later and fish around the internet for info because you no longer have that CD and can't remember anything about it - other than some cryptic file name (CD666.flac )
3) You might also want to consider how to organize your CDs - my directory/folder structure and naming scheme has change a few times
4) Have you considered your space requirements and backup considerations?
5) Other things you might want to add to your rips? I do a MD5 check to my rips so I can determine if the file has been corrupted in anyway

Thats all I can think of at the moment - I should have been smart enough to ask your question when I started

I don't see any real advantage to the single image + cue sheet, plus there is a hazard in that if you lose the association between image and cue sheet you are hosed... some player or tagger you are trying out decides to rename your image file or move it to where it thinks your music should be. If the tags are in each track you can still search your disk to get all the tracks of an album back together.

You are also limiting yourself to software that knows how to deal with image and cue sheet.
I've had to do enough tweaking of cue sheets when the software reading it wasn't quite compatible with program that wrote it.

Well - That is what I do - copy image & cue sheet
The advantage is that I can re-create the CD exactly (including lead-ins, gaps, live albums, etc). If you pull tracks you will never be able to put humpty back together again unless you have the cue sheet.
And the fact is that I think a good percentage of people here use foobar & winamp which handle cue's fine.
If you are paranoid about loosing the cue then so a search through your music directory and make a copy of all cue's and then you can even compress them if necessary - wild guess is that 1000 cue sheets might take a floopy? You can also include all the info (including cue) into the flac so again tripple redudency.
Not sure what software should need to touch the flac besides foobar,winamp, maybe replaygain (foobar should cover it)?

To me if you have already invested the time hanging out here, learning the proper way to do things, you might as well do it properly the first time, instead of 6-12 months later saying "well I guess I should have copied the CD image". If you start with the exact image then all other operations can be done on that image - extract lossless tracks, transcode to other formats, lossless & lossy. If you have just extracted the tracks then you have the information but not the structure of the CD. Not a tragic loss but given the choice I would want to have an exact copy not a hacked together version.

I'm ripping to individual tracks using EAC. I've read alot about cue sheets and ripping as cd-images, and haven't seen a good reason for me to go that way. I'm not doing this as to backup my collection, but rather have easier access to it. And from what I've understood, images and cue sheets are just useful when you later want to burn a CDDA?

But the only reason NOT to choose images was that I wanted to be able to load single tracks to my playlist, and not just whole albums.

Can I with EAC, at rip-time, create cue sheets pointing to a .flac-file instead of a .wav-file for my album? (If ripping to single file instead of individual tracks?)

Why would I want to tag to cue sheet?

Tags I know add at rip are title, artist, trackname, year and genre. Should I add some more?

My directory structure is artist\album\tracks. Good enough? (What I'm thinking about is how multi-cd-albums fit into it...)

And I'm about to by another 200 MB for storage.

//Anders

if one file is identical to the source, how could they sound diferent?

PS: identicall: exactly the same.