I'd like to re-rip my CD collection to flac with id3 tags. Then I'd like to schedule a script (written in VBS on Windows XP) to go through the flac directory tree and transcode any flac files where there isn't a corresponding mp3 file in another tree. The reason I want to batch the transcoding is that ripping is much faster if I can avoid compressing to both flac and mp3 during the ripping process (using MAREO or some other script).

The VBS is easy enough, and I can call flac.exe and lame.exe to do the transcoding. My question is, how can I extract the id3 information from the flac file so that that I can have LAME place it in the mp3? Or is there already an application available that I can use to transcode from flac to mp3 that will also transfer the id3 information?

I think you'd be better off using FLAC's native tagging instead of ID3.

Anyway, there are tools that can "copy" tags while encoding MP3s from FLACs. dbpoweramp and foobar2000 come to mind.

Placing ID3 tags in flac's makes them non-standard. Flac uses Vorbis Comments which are to most people superior. Anything that can convert flac to mp3 in the first place will have no trouble with VC's. See the main flac site or do a search here. I do flac>ogg using OggDropXPd but flac>any format is very easy using DBPowerAmp Music Converter (dMC)....and tags are preserved.

xen-uno

Shows how much I know. I just assumed that the tagging I've been doing to flac files were called "id3". I'm guess I'm just doing the standard tagging using flac.exe. I'd like to transfer these to id3 tags in the mp3 files I create.

Can foobar be called from the command line to do the transcoding?

Are there any command line utilities that can extract these tags from flac files? Can flac.exe itself do this?

Not quite command line, but using speek's multi frontend you can transcode from most format and keep the tags. I've used this for trancoding between flac and wavpack and vorbis and mp3. There is an option to use the tags from the source files.

EDIT: BTW, if your not familiar with it, it calls on command line encoder to do the transcoding, so you just stick flac.exe and lame.exe or whatever in the same dir with the frontend and tell it what command line options the encoder should use...

Not exactly true. ID3v1 is legal when attached to FLAC (as opposed to Ogg FLAC). I don't know about ID3v2.

ID3v1 is no longer officially supported by the newest FLAC tools, though.

1. You can, but I'm not sure how you could deal with multiple files. You can call the command line from foobar2000, to transcode each item from the playlist selection.

2. Either (edit: not sure which) flac.exe or metaflac.exe would work. Case's Tag would work, too.

EAC's "Make compression tasks sleep" button lets you rip all your CDs, one after the other, without the compression windows being launched during the ripping. After ripping everything, you can uncheck the button and all the queued compression jobs will start. If you use MAREO, you can then encode to FLAC and mp3 all in one go. Tags are then written using EAC's parameter passing scheme.