I have been using EAC for awhile but only recently became interested in archiving all my music CD's to DVD-R's. I decided to use a single image file, cue sheet, and FLAC as the compression program. My interest is in archiving mostly, although playing the .FLAC file may be secondary. These will all get burned to DVD's.

What I want is something that will:

Rip, compress, embed CUE sheet into FLAC file(if possible), create regular EAC cue sheet, create regular EAC log, and put it into a directory structure of my choice, such as C:\music\Led Zeppelin\<CD title>

Which of the above programs does this the simplest?

-Robert

REACT is perfect for that job Keep in mind that if you use the latest EAC version(v0.95b4) then you will need Synthetic Soul's fixed version of REACT : http://www.synthetic-soul.co.uk/temp/REACT-0.996.1.zip

I tried using WACK and REACT but neither worked correctly. Perhaps it is because i have the latest EAC. I'll try this one. Thanks!

Robert

What problems did you run into?

I'm not at home to try the latest REACT listed above, but I my image rips always had the name of one of the tracks (instead of the album name) and I couldn't get REACT to name the image extension properly. It was always name.ape.flac. I'm not sure why it thought I needed APE anywhere.

Robert

Yes, you need the fixed REACT version which Synthetic Soul kindly has provided us all with in the meantime before Tycho fixes the problem officially. One of the great things with REACT, is that it automatically closes the ripping dialog so that the EAC log file is made which then can be embedded in the image automatically. This means that just pressing a single button(F10), will make REACT command EAC to rip a CD to an image + cuesheet and encode it with whatever format wanted, while also getting the cuesheet + log file embedded + album gain RG tags in the image. Of course you also have the option to additionally get separate lossy trackfiles made also besides the lossy image file. I simply love REACT, and the only thing i now need, is Test & Copy for images, which Andre will implement for the next EAC version.

OK, I have the latest fix of REACT from Synthetic Soul's web page, 0.996.1 and I have a single problem left.

All I want to do is make .FLAC images with the embedded cue sheet and keep a copy of the real EAC cue sheet handy for my archive, so when I uncompress the .flac image, the resulting .WAV file is ready to go with the EAC cue sheet to re-create the original CD. The problem is the cue sheet it makes has the filename with the .FLAC extension! Why is that? Under what circumstances could EAC decompress and write a FLAC file directly? Anyway, I want it to say .WAV, as it should.

For example:


This is what REACT makes. It should have
FILE "The Beatles - Rubber Soul.wav" WAVE

What can I change to make the .FLAC image stay the same, as it works well and I don't want to touch it, but leave the original cue sheet showing a .WAV file?

Here is the pertinent part of my REACT.INI file:


Also, as another plea for your collective experience, before I start ripping all my CD's, is there anything else you can recommend as a good idea for preserving all for posterity? I have quite a few CD's that are out of print. Is there a way to grab the CD cover image from online as well?

Thanks!
Robert

You could make a copy of the FLAC cuesheet and amend the FILE reference using SED.

I believe that the following should do it:

SED s/".flac"/".wav"/g < "@cuesheet@" > "@destbase@.cue"

Stick that in at line 4 and see what happens.

With regard to covers, there are a few tools around now on the forum, using iTunes, Amazon and/or Wallmart. You could possibly use one of these in your script to download the album art. Do a search using "+itunes +covers"; "+wallmart +covers" and/or "+amazon +covers".

I just did the first one for you and found iTunes Covers Downloader.

Edit: sorry, I have SED in a folder in my PATH. As I see you are using apps in @encdir@ you should probably just stick SED in your "/REACT/Encoders/" folder, and use the line:

@encdir@\SED.EXE s/".flac"/".wav"/g < "@cuesheet@" > "@destbase@.cue"

NB: I am using super sed v3.59 for Windows by Paolo Bonzini. Just rename it to "sed.exe" for clarity.

Sed! Why didn't I think of of that. I guess I don't use Linux enough to remember those commands. Anyway, it results in a 0 byte CUE file. I tried it from the command line substituting the variables for actual file names and the syntax works, but something is wrong in the REACT script.

Here is the react.ini



Here is the TMP batch file being created as REACT works it's magic.



And on an unrelated note, I notice all images have a tag with a CRC of always 00000000 as you can see from the batch file. I don't know why, but I also don't need it, so I removed it from my REACT.INI file. If it can be made to work again, I'll put it back in.


So with the above code and SED.EXE, I get a blank album-name.cue file. Any ideas?

Robert

Hmmm... I tested with a WavPack profile and it worked as expected.

I see you have:


Shouldn't that be:



... ? That would certainly be an issue, as my script would be looking to copy "<name>.flac.cue" to "<name>.cue", but with your setup it would be trying to copy "<name>.cue" to "<name>.cue"! If you want the FLAC cuesheet to be "<name>.cue" then what do you want the WAVE cuesheet to be called?

I think the latest version(s) of EAC have broken a few things with REACT, this being one of them, and possibly @islast@ being another. As you say, not really required.

That did it! Thanks. I wanted to remove the .flac.cue extension so I changed that. All is well now.

Robert