I want to archive my CD in a lossless format. I have tried Flac with limited success. I browsed the forms here but didn't quite find the information I want so I hope some of you can help me out. I have about 50+ CDs.

1. I am having a lot of trouble with Chinese characters and Flac. My English XP system's "Language for non-Unicode program" is set to Chinese. I can view and run any Chinese program I download. I can also type Chinese characters into most well behaved programs. I am using the GB code.

2. A lot of my Chinese CDs do not have CDDB entry, so I manually enter the song names and album information into CDEX. The resulting mp3 ripped using lame from cdex works fine and shows tag information in windows media player correctly.

3. I tried to switch the encoder in CDEX to external and point to my flac.exe program, it doesn't work. I think the problem is with the command line passing mechanism of either cdex or flac. It doesn't parse the Chinese filenames correctly. I end up with a 0 byte .flac file and a temporarily flac (full size) file in my temp directory. In other words, the mechanism is broken.

4. I tried the Flac frontend, unfortunately it have trouble with my Chinese directory name and won't even open the file for encoding! This is not giving me a lot of faith in flac.

5. I tried "Flac -8 *" on the command line, it encoded the files fine. I can handle commandline fine, but it would be nice if I can get it to work with cdex and do it all in one step.

6. Whatever format I use, I would like to use windows media player to play it. I downloaded some plugins that was suppose to help, but windows media player just refuses to play the flac file. What do I need to do? will WMP display the tag information inside flac?

Thanks in advance!

Finally figured it out, to use CDex with Flac, I need the following cmd line options:

-T artist="%a" -T album="%b" -T title="%t" -T tracknumber="%tn" -T
date="%y" -T genre="%g" -8 -o %2 -

Also enable "Send wave header to stdin" and "on the fly encoding".

Mux your FLAC file into matroska ( .MKA ) container with mkvmerge ( http://mkvmerge.matroska.org ) , tag it as per your wish and in unicode, then install the matroska full pack from http://packs.matroska.org to play your files in Windows Mediaplayer or any other DirectShow based player.

You can make each album a track of its own, and mux all albums, or one album, into a single MKA file.

Christian
matroska project admin
http://www.matroska.org