HI there all. I'm new here and this is my first post of what will probably be many. Great forums you have here

Right, this is driving me mad! I plan to get a Squeezebox2 very soon and am starting to rip my CD's ready.

I personally think that backing up CD's should always be done with an image (compressed) and a cue file as it's easy then to re-encode for various other uses is the best method, at least for me anyway., just as long as the players you use work with cue sheets. Especially as i have many CD's which require gapless playback.

However, when i use EAC and FLAC i run into a couple of problems;

1. It's either that the cue file is always incorrect and needs manual editing (OR it could be that EAC is actually naming the FLAC file incorrectly). What happens is that my audio file ends up being called MYFILE.FLAC.FLAC but the CUE file references a file called MYFILE.FLAC. This only happens with FLAC, not Ogg Vorbis. What am i doing wrong?

2) EAC never creates folders when i rip to an image (single file). It creates the folders fine if i rip to many individual track files. I am using the naming scheme "%A\%C\%N - %A - %T". This seems to happen regardless of which encoder i use. Is this a bug? Am i doing something wrong? Can it be fixed?

Also, can CDex do this kind of ripping? I have tried it but the CDDB access never works.

The "<file>.flac.flac" thing is an EAC quirk. It doesn't like extensions that aren't three characters long. Either manually rename your file to "<file>.flac", or use an intermediary application like WACK, REACT, or FLACKAttack with EAC to help with the issue.

EAC only uses that filename mask with single files. With images you specify where to put the file, and what it is called, using the dialogue box that opens. Edit: I use a batch file system to rip to a specific folder but then create <artist>\<album> folders and move the files there. WACK, REACT, or FLACKAttack would help you here also.

The CDex version at Rarewares can do image+cuesheet ripping. Ive never tried it. EAC is considered to be a superior ripper.

Thanks, i there no known way around the naming issue within EACs' settings? Do you think they will remove this quirk in the next version? I might just have to name then [filename].FLC, but what problems would that cause? as long as my associations are ok, that would be all right, no?
What are those programs you mention, got any links?

Having to type a new folder and sub folder everytime i rip is a bit annoying really. I would like it to be as automatic as possible as i have so many CD's to get through!

Thanks

This quirk has been around since the beginning I assume, so it's difficult to see a. why it is still there and b. when it will be removed.

I believe ".fla" is a valid/recognised FLAC extension, but I'm not sure. One way to find out...

Do a search for REACT. WACK and FLACAttack are here: http://www.uninformative.com/ - or do a search.

Edit: REACT

Thanks again, seems that .fla is indeed a valid extension. I really think hydrogen audio should update the wiki for EAC and FLAC to reflect this (it says use .flac with images), as it seems a much better way of doning it.

That flac attack seems to sort the folder issue, will give it ago.

Thanks mate, i knew this would be an easy thing to solve. Sometimes you just can't see the wood for the trees and i was too busy playing with formating strings and going insane! I just hope they sort these thing out for the next release of EAC.

Cheers

Damn, seems flac attack needs the .NET framework installed. Really don't want to do that as it made a mess of my system last time. Any alternatives?

REACT? WACK will need the .NET framework as well.

You could also try a VBS/Windows Script or batch file approach.

Get with the now man, .NET is here to stay.

I've no idea why ".fla" is not more widely used - I suppose it's simply as it is only EAC that causes an issue with ".flac".

Edit: I am now using WavPack, which also has an issue ("<file>.wv.wv"). My batch file simply has the following line to rename to "<file>.wv":


...and then uses the following to create folders and move all files:


Try REACT, as it does have some other nice features that you may find useful, but if your really can't get on with it post back and I can knock up a batch file that simply provides the functionality of renaming "<file>.flac.flac" to "<file>.flac" and moving files to a folder structure based on artist, album, genre, and/or date information.

Edit: In fact, Dirk Westerfer has already adapted the batch files I use to run with FLAC. My guide is here, and you will see a link to Dirk's batch files near the top. The guide is a little confusing, especially as I have made numerous updates/addendums, but it may be of use.

Ok, REACT is too complicated for me. I can't firgure out how to use it with Flac or create the directories i want. I need a newbie guide for it, but it all seems to be aimed at very experienced users.

Also, entering .fla does not work with EAC. It creates the WAV file ok, but then does not delete it after the Flac finishes and i end up with a file something like Gtmp1!542.fla.

It's all very strange. I'm finding it all very frustrating. All i want is a to make a .flac image with a WORKING cue file and not have to manually create lots of directories. I am starting to get very frustrated with EAC in all honestly.

Is there an alternative that can do what i want?

This suggests that you are terminating EAC before the external compression process has finished.

I'd suggest you give Synthetic Soul's batch scripts a try, that's probably as close as you'll get to a one-click solution for your needs.

In REACT.ini did you change:

ImageExt=flac to ImageExt=fla ?

I must admit I haven't had any luck with REACT. It just doesn't seem to work as it should for me. It doesn't open EAC as I believe it is supposed to, and I can't get a simple INI file to process. It's a shame, as I think it could be very useful to me. When I have more time I may try again - but I have spent a little time trying to get it to work, and I can't do anything about it not opening EAC.

Can I just confirm: you want to create a FLAC image with cuesheet and put it in a folder structure. Do you want to embed the cuesheet and/or EAC log? What structure are you after? "<root>\"<artist>\<album>" ? Edit: what about tags? Do you want the FLAC file tagged with any of the following: artist; album; date; genre?

NB: I replied in your other thread about WAPET also - although that may be irrelevant now.

Not really up on embeded, i'm not sure how useful they are to me as the Squeezebox2 player i am buying supports CUE sheets but i don't know if it supports embeded. But can you have both? Also, writing CD's with Feurio/Nero/etc, do they support them? And what about Foobar, how does that handle them?

What i want is an inage+cue in D:\Music\Ripped CD's & Albums\<artist>\<albums>\<artist> - <album>.fla/flac

Sorry for all the questions, but you have been a great help to me so far!

Oh and yeah, i get WAPET now. It makes APE2 tags but im not really sure how they would benifit me.

Thanks you a lot mate!

dangerous_dom,

I have written a new batch file* for your needs - to keep things as simple as possible.

It encodes to FLAC using "<file>.flac" (not "<file>.flac.flac") adding artist, album, date and genre tags, and creates an "<artist\<album>" folder structure within a given root folder. Once the FLAC file has been written the cuesheet and FLAC file are moved to the newly created folder.

E.g.: You ask EAC to call your FLAC file "Pixies - Dolittle.flac". You have specified in the batch file that your <artist>\<album> folders are to be created in "D:\Music\Ripped CD's & Albums".

The script will encode to "Pixies - Dolittle.flac". It will then create the folder "D:\Music\Ripped CD's & Albums\Pixies\Dolittle" and move "Pixies - Dolittle.flac" and "Pixies - Dolittle.flac.cue" to that folder.

With a minor addition it could also wait for the log file and move that. Your choice.

Let me know if you are interested and I'll upload it and tell you the necessary EAC settings.

--
* Note - one batch file. I've employed a new technique where the batch file immediately calls itself to fool EAC - instead of calling a second file. Thanks to [proxima] for the inspiration.

foobar handles them, but I'm not sure about anything else - apart from I know Nero won't.

Let's just stick with an external cuesheet.

NB: the benefit is basically that you then only worry about one file - your FLAC file - as that has all the info you need to recreate the CD. However, if you are using burners and players that don't support embedded cuesheets then there's little point.

I use my images purely for archiving so I embed, but I keep the external file also as it's only 2KB.

I can't find this batch file in your website. It is possible to see the code for this trick ?
Maybe you used some others ideas of mine.. but i never adopted this smart method of one batch file...

No, but your batch files did all processing in the second file, which made things easier to maintain.

The code used is:



EAC passes 7 parameters - %1 - %7, so the first time round %8 will be empty and this condition will be true. However the START command passes an 8th parameter "GO", so the rest of the batch file runs on the second pass.

NB: I'm just preparing to upload this new file. Link will be in this thread.

Excellent, your guide is very useful to me. I have bookmarked it so i will check it out for the batch file when i get back from work. Hopefully it will inspire me to write my own too. I have not really bothered with them since the good ld days of DOS

Synthetic Soul, your a diamond!

dangerous_dom,

I have just seen your last post while writing this one. The guide below explains how to implement a simple batch file to do what you want. If you want to use my guide to get a bit more in depth then go for it. I'll leave this here though for your reference, and perhaps others.

Setting up EAC with eac-flac.bat

Download the batch file.

Extract the file "eac-flac.bat" and put it in your system32 directory. If you are on Win2K this will be "C:\WINNT\system32". if you are on XP it will be "C:\Windows\system32". The reason we put it there is so that it can be called from anywhere without needing to specify a path. This seems to make things a lot less complicated.

Open the file and look for the lines near the top that say:

REM ######################################################
REM PLEASE SET THE VARIABLES BELOW
REM ######################################################
REM The path to FLAC.EXE must be surrounded by quotes if it contains spaces
SET pathToFLAC="C:\DOS\FLAC.EXE"
REM The root folder path should never be surrounded by quotes
SET rootFolder=D:\Music\Ripped CD's ^& Albums
REM ######################################################

Amend "C:\DOS\FLAC.EXE" to the path to your FLAC executable. I have already put in your root folder value. Note the "^&". This is because "&" is a DOS keyword so I need the caret to escape it. You awkward bugger.

Go into your EAC compression dialogue and ensure it looks like this:



Copy the command line here:

/c eac-flac.bat %o %s %d "%a" "%g" "%m" "%y"

Again, if you are on Win2K you will find CMD.EXE in "C:\WINNT\system32" - in XP it is in "C:\WINDOWS\system32" (as screenshot).

Edit: Oh two things I've just thought of.

1. You may want to amend the FLAC command line - it's just default compression at the moment (-5?). Line is:

%pathToFLAC% -V -T "ARTIST=%~4" -T "ALBUM=%~5" -T "GENRE=%~6" -T "DATE=%~7" -o "%~dp3%~n1" "%~dp3%~nx1"

As you can see, it is verifying the encode, and tagging with artist, album, genre and date. Change as you see fit. Just ask if you need help with the variables to hand.

2. I have actually implemented the code that waits for the log file to move that also. If you don't care about the log you may want to remove:

REM ===========================================================================
REM Wait for user to close EAC's completion dialogue, as we want the log file
REM ===========================================================================
REM Beep, to signify that the process has completed
REM ECHO 
ECHO Please close EAC's completion dialogue, then press any key to complete
REM Wait
PAUSE >NUL

... and possibly implement:

IF EXIST "%~dp3%logFilename%" DEL "%~dp3%logFilename%"

... to delete the log if it's there already.


Oh yeah - happy 1000th post to me! How I have managed to not be barred for talking incessant nonsense yet is beyond me. Thanks to everyone for putting up with me thus far.

It doesn't work for me if you don't include the complete path for eac-flac.bat:
/c c:\eac\eac-flac.bat %o %s %d "%a" "%g" "%m" "%y"
Even with "c:\eac" included in the PATH environment variable EAC does not launch the batchfile.

Thanks for the feedback [proxima].

I tested with the file in my "C:\DOS" folder which is in my PATH. I assumed that it would logically work from another folder in PATH - i.e.: system32.

I've just tested by moving the file to system32 and it has worked!

That's confused the issue...

Dunno why yours won't work - but it is at least a warning to dangerous_dom that he may need to specify the path...

Edit: FYI I always run mine from "C:\DOS", so it's difficult for me to comment. VCSkier, who runs an alternative version of my files uses system32 - but I'm not sure whether he specifies the path or not - ie.:

/c C:\Windows\system32\eac-flac.bat %o %s %d "%a" "%g" "%m" "%y"

Edit 2: I've just tried the file in "C:\Program Files\GnuWin32\bin", another folder in my PATH, and it works there also.

I don't know the reason but for a moment i was sure it didn't worked
Now it works perfectly but you need to place the batch in a dir included in the PATH variable.
Sorry for the confusion i generated with my previous post, please ignore it.

No problems. I'm glad it's working now.

Again, thanks for the inspiration for the one-file method. It's a lot easier to maintain than the two. I may change my eac-enc.bat/eac-post.bat system to become one. I actually do this is a VBS version that has two "jobs" in one WSF file. I prefer the BAT version to my VBS though - even though VB(Script) is my language of choice.

To confirm: The file eac-flac.bat will definately need to go in a folder in PATH - system32 is easiest for novice users as it's already there. If not, put it in any folder you want that is either in PATH or that you plan to add to PATH. When adding to PATH I believe that you may need to reboot to make the change official. Not sure on that - seemt o remember a problem before that went away after rebooting.

No need to thank me I used your batch files as inspiration for mine
As you already know.. i'm using a third self executing installing batch that uses reg.exe registry tool to modify directly some EAC settings. With this method you can autoconfigure EAC compression options and even others. I'm still working to this but it seems to work flawlessly with WinXP/2000. Maybe the batch files could run even with Win9x using Win95cmd.exe wich enables extended NT batch syntax.

Great stuff! And i'm 80% of how it all works to!

Could you clarify exacxtly what -o "%~dp3%~n1" "%~dp3%~nx1" is and does

Also the /c switch?

Thanks you very much!

If a parameter looks like a path DOS lets you split it into parts.

D: Drive (e.g.: D:)
P: Path (e.g.: \folder1\folder2\)
N: Filename, excluding extension (e.g.: myfile)
X: Extension (e.g.: .wav)
Z: Filesize (in bytes)

Therefore:

"%~dp3%~n1" : %~dp3 is the drive and path of parameter 3 (%3). %3 represents the destination file - EAC's %d). %~n1 is the filename of %1. %1 is the required filename, e.g.: "<artist> - <album>.<ext>" (EAC's %o)

"%~dp3%~nx1" : %~nx1 is the name and extension of %1

As EAC gets confused with FLAC N will equal "<file>.flac" and X will equal ".flac". This is why you get "<file>.flac.flac". In a three letter extension file N will correctly yield "<file>" and X will yield ".xxx"

Therefore, if the destination (%3) is "E:\CDBackup\Ctmp58-!).flac" and the filename (%1) is "CDImage.flac.wav" then %~dp3 will yield "E:\CDBackup\", %~n1 will yield "CDImage.flac", and %~nx1 will yield "CDImage.flac.wav".

Things get more confusing with non-three letter extensions. The same example using APE would result in "E:\CDBackup\", "CDImage" and "CDImage.wav". A lot easier to deal with.

Looking at it now I could have used %~1 instead of %~nx1. using %~1 will return the value of %1, but ensure surrounding quotes are removed. %1 == "CDImage.flac.wav", %~1 == CDImage.flac.wav.

FLAC.EXE -o <output.flac> <input.wav>

-o specifies an output name - I use it to ensure we get "<file>.flac" and not "<file>.flac.flac".


This site has been very useful to me.

Too many edits to list! I've basically just tried to clarifythings and format better.

I don't like badmouthing applications, so I'm pleased to report that REACT v0.990 is working well for me on initial tests.

One glorious addition is that REACT can close EAC's dialogue box to allow the log to be created - so there's no pauses - set it going, come back and it's all done and dusted.

Hello!
It is possible to rewrite this batch file, to work with FLAC Attack ?
This is what I want:
1. rip CD with EAC
2. compress it to FLAC
3. put FLAC+EAC file into D:\images\ and use this directory scheme:
(Artist) [year] Album\ and here FLAC&CUE
3a. if it is possible, before making above directory, rename Artist with this rules:
- if it starts with "The", move it to end of name, after a comma, like:
"The Thievery Corporation" -> "Thievery Corporation, The"
- if Artist is a name and surname, change order with comma, like:
"Roger Waters" -> "Waters, Roger"
as recognizing if something is name and surname is impossible,
probably will be better to write to versions of batch - one for changing
order between two words, with comma, and another for checking only
for something like "The", and changing order with comma
4. after that all FLAC stuff, I want to make mp3/mpc (and or or), correctly tag
it, and put it on my F: disc, in directory structure like this:
F:\music\a\
F:\music\b\
F:\muisc\c\ and so on
name of directory used I want to be like in 3a point.

I'm doing all that 'hard work' by hands, using proper programs, but it takes
more and more time... And there is no one-click software to do it all

As find you are helpful, so if you don't feel fear with this simple 4 points,
can you do it for me, and probably not only for me, for others mp3's maniacs,
who are mad about police and order in music collection