I want to create a digital library of my CD collection. My ultimate aim is to have all of my music in digital format. I have over 300 CDs so even if it only takes ten minutes per CD it will still take several weeks to rip and encode my entire collection. Since this is such a large job I only want to do this once and get it right the first time. I don't want to have to deal with clunky command-line programs or spend months updating metatags.

Requirements:

* Lossless compression (FLAC?)
* Single compressed file per CD
* Automatic addition of metatags for title, artist, album etc from online database
* Ability to easily add custom metatags if required (ie for lyrics, historical info etc).
* Embed scanned/downloaded album cover art (front & rear) into file
* Easy transcoding to lossy formats (ie OGG or MP3) while retaining significant metatags ie song title, artist etc.

Is there any software available which will allow me do easily do all this?

If your purpose is solely to archive I wouldn't use FLAC. FLAC has superb decompression time, which means it is ideal for everyday playback. If you are purely archiving go for the best compression, with something like La, OptimFrog, or my choice, Monkey's Audio. More info here: http://doc.hydrogenaudio.org/wikis/hydrogenaudio/LossLess

1-3 can be done quite easily in an automated process - possibly using EAC, [FLAC/LA/OFR/MAC], MAREO, and maybe TAG.

4-5, I would expect, are going to require some effort from you - i.e.: they will be a manual process using a good tagging program (search forum for various threads on which ones are good)

6: Any lossless format can be easily transcoded, retaining tag info, using FOOBAR. I can't vouch whether that includes lyrics/cover art/etc. - but I can't imagine that any other program would have a better time of it.

FLAC is also the fastest I've seen for encoding. So fast that on my machine ripping to flac is faster than ripping to wav.

Someone will surely correct me if I'm wrong, but if you keep the whole album in one file I think you need a separate cue file to keep the track information. I generally keep the tracks in separate files with a directory hierarchy of artist/album/trackfile.

DBPoweramp's ripper works pretty well. It gets tags from freedb, but as far as I know has no capability for cover art.

It's something I can't understand... Ripping speed can only be lowered by an encoding process.


For encoding speed (compared to flac -5):
http://foobar2000.net/lossless/encoding.htm

But flac is the fastest at -1:
http://web.inter.nl.net/users/hvdh/lossless/lossless.htm

Is -1 your flac setting?

Not if the process is I/O bound. With a relatively slow or fragmented hard drive, writing 300MB to disk should certainly be faster than writing 600MB to disk, assuming that the compressor is fast enough to keep up.

Right
But DonP's hard drive must be severly fragmented :!

I chose FLAC simply because of it's quick decoding and encoding time. It makes transcoding or replaygaining much faster.

You can do all of the above (except for the album art) using EAC and Flacattack. (Shameless plug ) http://www.uninformative.com/flacattack This will also require that you download each encoder and Synthetic Soul's version of Tag.

I use EAC & FLAC for these three...


...Foobar2000...


...Oggifier (a front-end for the Ogg Vorbis codec) easily converts FLAC to Ogg Vobis while maintaining tags.