In the next few months I need to rip over a thousand CD's, compressed to both FLAC and MP3. I'm not looking forward to it. For those who have gone through this, which of these two choices would you recommend:

1. Rip all CD's to WAV, and then do a mass shift of those WAV files to FLAC and MP3.

-or-

2. Rip CD's and compress to FLAC/MP3 simultaneously, one CD at a time.


I feel like Choice#1 would save me time, but the majority of documentation around here is for Choice#2. All comments welcome, thank you all.


I can't thank the people working at this site enough. Unbelieveable!!!

Your wave files will not have id tags (normally) so to FLAC is preferable. Rip to FLAC (not much slow than ripping to wave) then later convert all those FLACs to mp3, over night.

I can't see any benefits by using method one. Ripping and encoding at the same time will only save you time, and you will avoid tagging mess.

I'd read some of the past messages on this here board - some guy posted a link a month or so ago that does rips and flacs for (IIRC) significantly less than $1.00 per CD.

If I were starting out today to do mine, I'd send that guy all of my CD's in a heartbeat. It was a pain.

Mark

using flackattack, you could rip to mp3 and flac at the same time. that could save you some work...

Though it is well out of my price range, I think I found what you meant:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=19130

I've been reading around here till my eyes bleed; seventy pages of topics in this forum-area alone!! Thank god for that Wiki.

After reading the reply's, I will attempt to rip to FLAC (with ID tags) and then mass shift to MP3 overnight (or however long it takes). Thank you to all who commented, very appreciated. I'll be back when it's all over to ask what program to use for the FLAC-->MP3 conversion...

ty

Hello,

If it is well under a $1/CD then it was probably my post: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....ndpost&p=300030

My company Awaken (www.awaken.com) performs the same service as Rip Digital at significantly lower prices, especially when you take into account shipping which is not included in their prices. This forum has been good to me, so I'd be willing to give you an additional discount if you shoot me a note (cmorace@awaken.com). CD repair and NAS/Hard Drive loading are included as well at no additional charge. FLAC and MP3 are two of our most commonly requested formats and our rips include the cover art. (For FLAC where it cannot be embeded it is included as a JPG in each album folder named folder.jpg as that convention is used by some players to display the art.)

We'd love to do a great job for you.

Cheers,

Chris

For FLAC ripping does your service rip to individual tracks or a single file with a cue sheet (or have the option)? I'd be very interested in the single flac + cue for each CD. Your service seems to be by far the best as far as pricing and features from the research i've done and this would really top it off for me, but one can only hope

Maybe I'm burning out from searching these forums for so many hours, but this step is stumping me. I'm not understanding how to automatically transfer the tags from an online database (like freedb) during the EAC-rip/FLAC-compress process. I'm continuing to dig, but if someone could step in with the answer, it would be greatly appreciated.

EAC >> Database menu >> Get CD Information From >> ....
+
http://www.saunalahti.fi/cse/EAC/ ... (scroll down for the differing steps for FLAC)

other FLAC command line options - http://flac.sourceforge.net/documentation.html

This is why another poster had said to you:

If you rip and encode simultaneously, the ripping software snarfs up the information from the database for all of the tracks on the cd when it first sees the cd and then puts it into the flac file when it makes it.

Mark

You do have a spare 500gb HDD space for the rips, right?

He may be planning to burn them back to optical media (DVD+/-R or CD-R).

Well if he's going to rip his CD's to wav first and then encode them to FLAC, he's going to need a hell of a lot of disk space. Assuming the average duration of his CD's is 60 minutes, and that he has one thousand of them (discs, not albums), he'll need (44100Hz * 16bits * 2 channels * 3600 seconds * 1000 CD's) bits: that's about 591GiB.
I doubt he's going to burn the wav files to DVD-RW first (of which he would need about 136), then encode them to FLAC, and burn them to DVD-R. That would be an utter waste of time.

If he encoded to FLAC on the fly, while ripping, he could directly store the FLAC files on whatever media he chose, once a sufficient amount is reached (~4.7GB for DVD-R, for instance). Even if he chose an HDD based solution, storing only FLAC files would require about 384GiB if his files have an average compression ratio of 65%. That's a much more viable solution already.

The thing is, with a decent CPU (mine is an Athlon XP 2500+), the bottleneck isn't the CPU, but rather the ripping process. When encoding on the fly, no time is wasted on encoding, so why not do it?

Thank you, Cosmo, that did it.

You are right, Defsac, I am burning to DVD, doubled for backup. I bought 25 Sony DVD+R's for $22 from Target to get started, and I've got 100 Taiyo Yuden DVD-R's coming in the mail (because of what I read here: http://club.cdfreaks.com/) for only $30. I figured that with 4.7GB per disc - and each disc costing less than a dollar - that I wouldn't find a good harddrive with that competitive of a space-to-money ratio.

Skamp has another good reason there for not ripping to WAV's first: it doubles the space needed. I happen to be doing this whole process on a 14GB hard-drive, so that matters a lot.

In regards to speed, though, my computer is not "encoding on the fly", it is stopping the ripping process in-between tracks to compress to FLAC - so no time is saved. But again: I'm getting the Tagging work done automatically, and I don't have to worry about storing a mountain of WAV's, so this seems to be the best method.

I am about 50 albums into this, and I can't thank you all enough. To think that, 30 days ago when I realized I had to do this, I was planning on using MusicMatchbox to rip to 128Kbps CBR MP3's. In less than month, you contributors to this forum have me brought me to EAC/AccurateRip/FLAC/etc and a lot more confidence about what I'm trying to do - and that I won't have to do it all over again. ty all!

That's way too much. That's a very good deal, though the media is probably only 4X, right?

It is actually about 4400 GB per disc, thanks to the marketing tricks with using two systems (1MB=1024 kB and 1MB=1000000 bytes) for caculating storage space. Still, it beats a hard drive in the MB-to-dollar department.

You're right. But I may do it again if those Taiyo Yuden's don't get here soon enough. Maybe I'll try Walmart or Kmart this time...


True. But I'm only burning at 4x, because my computer can't seem to dump data much faster. [Before I figured out how to turn on DMA mode, things were even worse, much much worse.]


Once I got down in the trenches, I finally realized that it was pure fantasy to consider maximum DVD size, since it's unrealistic to think that the album sizes will line up to an even amount. So to a certain extent that DVD is even "smaller", but the totaled up unused space on every DVD in the whole project will still be negligible - when price is considered.

Ok I have done this but used wavpack instead of flac. I used wack and synthetic soul and co helped me confiure it.

see
http://www.uninformative.com/wack/
and
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....ic=34384&st=150

you just need to change your encoder from wavpack to flac.

rip and encode one CD at a time or you'll have a mess. I tried this with a bathch of only 40 CDs and there was tagging nightmare. also download the CD database from freedb.org (you will need to unzip it) as it makes it a lot faster (given our poor internet connectivity in India).

In EAC check to see all fields (incl Genre and year) are populated and the CD is recognised correctly. if the cd is not recognised correctly get information from the web (option in the database menu).

I would surely have given my CDs at a $1 per CD to a service if one of reupte was available in India (Bombay) where i live.

I tried to hire a school going kid but he wanted $700 for the 600 CDs for MP3 only and he did not know about LAME or EAC so I was not even sure about teh quality of his rips.

At a $1 a CD for a wav/flac file and a quality MP3 file i think it is a steal and our earning power here is a lot less than most parts of Europe or the US.

I'm not sure if you've checked out the services of MusicRip, but we've been in the business for nearly two years and have done quite a bit of work with FLAC. We can rip your CDs to FLAC both as individual tracks with metadata, or as a single FLAC and cue sheet. Check us out on the web at http://www.musicrip.com, or send us an email at orders@musicrip.com if you have any questions.

Thanks!
Joe