Using EAC v0.95 beta 4 I ripped to WAVs and compressed to MP3 with LAME 3.97b2 for home entertainment use. (-V 2 --vbr-new --add-id3v2 --pad-id3v2 --ta "%a" --tt "%t" --tl "%g" --ty "%y" --tn "%n" %s %d)

Using Monkey I compressed the WAVs to APEs. Now I'd like to make mp3s for my portable device. What is the easiest method to do this?

The APEs and MP3s exist in the same folders. Folders are organized by Artist\CD Title.

RazorLame seemed like a good bet since it can compress directly from the APEs but it would require that I manually point it to each and every individual folder and manually input the subdirectory path where the new MP3s should be saved. Moreover, it doesn't appear that the tagging is maintained. (I used the 'Use only custom options' with -V 5 --vbr-new.)

I can't seem to figure out a way to get Monkey to transcode its own APEs to MP3s.

What I want:
-point the software to the main folder where all the files are stored in varying subfolders, have it find every APE in every subfolder, transcode to MP3 (perhaps using -V 5 --vbr-new), *maintain the existing tagging intact*, and automatically save the new and smaller MP3s in subfolders of the folder where the source files were found.

My one thought is to have Monkey uncompress every WAV, leaving the source files intact. This part is easy since I only need to point Monkey to the top level folder where all the music is stored. The next step would be to have EAC compress to MP3s since I can specify the subdirectory using %I and delete the WAV source files. The problem here is that would need to point EAC to each and every subfolder and the WAVs contained within. Thoughts?

If all this can be scripted for an XP box using LAME I'd be really grateful for the help!
TIA!

/lllusion

Monkey's audio can covert ape files to mp3 with no fuss... you only need to put lame.exe into it's "External" folder...

Also, you could do it with Poikosoft's Audio File Format Converter, which is a part of Easy CD-DA Extractor package... But, the program is not for free... it uses LAME 3.97b and it actually can transcode anything you want... You can always try the trial version to see if you wish to pay for it, maybe...

EDIT: added links...

Suggesting a commercial GUI to a newbie while there are dozens of free alternatives available is really rude!

Use foobar2000:
1/ add the root directory into the playlist [if your subdirectories already contain MP3 encodings, then use the search feature of explorer for filtering / drag and drop into fb2k's playlist]

2/ use the convert function. Tags are automatically maintained. For creating an extra subfolder for each album, change the output naming scheme: %ALBUM% (portable)/%_filename%. You must use the "convert to same directory" function.

N.B. If tags are not properly read (I noticed it while transcoding old APE files), use foobar2000 0.83 instead of 0.92

Pardon me for that... but I don't know of any free program that can convert all kinds of audio formats, can use directory structure, like you want, add tags, as you want them, etc. So for now, I use that one... I think maybe it should be possible to do it with foobar2000, but I'm just to lazy to try to set it up...

So, Illusion, you should probably listen to the others or use Monkey's Audio to do the job...

Psycho, you are really PSYCHO!

Either that, or I am just having a bad day...
Anyway... I didn't want to cause so many off-topic comments, so back to the problem...

dBpowerAMP should also be able to do what you need.

Just use windows search and single out all your *.ape files, then select all, right click, 'convert to'.
Make sure the output is 'same folder as original'.

If you are trying to convert from musicSourceFolder/artist/album to musicDestinationFolder/artist/album, I think foobar would be the better choice.

Thanks for all the suggestions. I'll start with the freebee's first and move on from there if I don't get the desired results.

... ... I've discovered that what I'd like is to output to a specified directory (i.e. p:\portable) AND have the software create subdirectories and filenames based on '%ALBUM%\%_filename%'.

Monkey's external convert seemed the easiet but, unless I'm missing something, it is only possible to name a specific output directory (i.e. m:\portable) but there's no way to further place the files in subdirectories based on a tag element. If the output is the same directory as the source then the renaming option gives 'filename (1).mp3'. Suggestions?

foobar also seemed like a good option. Single track naming is set to PORTABLE\%_filename% which gives me the desired subdirectory. However, I don't see the "convert to same directory" function. Neither do I see a way to output to a precreated folder called 'portable' and then create subdirectorys based on %ALBUM%/%_filename%.

However, I don't see the "convert to same directory" function.
right click / convert / convert to same directory

Neither do I see a way to output to a precreated folder called 'portable' and then create subdirectorys based on %ALBUM%/%_filename%.
right click / convert / convert to
then choose your directory (e.g. c:/portable)

N.B. This is for foobar2000 0.9.x

Thank you! Just what I was looking to do.


... Now there's one more hurdle. The .ape files I'm using never actually had all the tag information. Perhaps that information got lost when Monkey compressed the .wavs to .apes? The .mp3s created by EAC & LAME from the original .wavs managed to get all of the tags except for sometimes missing the genre. I've used mp3tag v2.36a to easily populate the the missing genre tags on those .mp3s. At the same time I populated the genre, album, and artist tags on the .ape files. But I haven't found a quick way to populate the title and track tags on the .ape files without selecting each .ape and it's accompaning .mp3 and copyinig over the information.

Is there any way to quickly populate the track and title information of the .ape files using the larger .mp3s, with their complete tag information, as templates? NOTE: I don't think this is a problem with foobar 0.92 losing tag information from the .ape to the .mp3 but rather that the information was never actually contained in the .ape. Again, TIA!

You can easily copy tags from one or more files to one or more files:
right click / tagging / copy info between files

1.mp3
2.mp3
3.mp3
1.ape
2.ape
3.ape

=> tags from 1,2,3.mp3 will be duplicated to 1,2,3.ape

Very nice. Thanks again.

I found that I had to sort by %codec% %ALBUM ARTIST% - %DATE% - %ALBUM% - %DISCNUMBER% - %TRACKNUMBER% - %TITLE% and then REVERSE the order so that the .mp3s with the complete tags were in the top half of the playlist, then run 'copy info between files'. Otherwise the non-populated tags in the .ape files depopulated the track and title tags of the already populated .mp3s. It sure would be nice to have the copy to/from window larger in order to see the whole file names.


Addition 06.06.25: I just discovered that Mp3tag has a 'convert file name to tag' option that works really well too!

Ok, now I understand what you meant. 0.9.2 only writes id3v2.4, which may not be supported by my portable hardware. Correct? So where do I get 0.8.3 so I can write id3v2.3 tags?

You can use Mp3Tag for converting ID3v2.4 to v2.3 Tags:

http://www.mp3tag.de

First you'll need to set your preferred default tags (although I think with the latest development build, it's already ID3v1+ID3v2.3)...

So anyway, to be sure you get ID3v2.3 Tags goto "Tools->Options->Tags->Mpeg..." there you can set them under "Write". You'll have to test whether your DAP accepts UTF-16 or ISO-8859-1 encoded tags.

I'd recommend to "Read" all tags, "Write" ID3v1+ID3v2.3 (if your DAP will ignore the v2.3 tags when v1 tags are present then only tick the ID3v2.3 box), and "Remove" APEv2 (and ID3v1 in case those tags are preferred over v2.3 by your DAP). With this setting you can easily use a simple key combo to rewrite all tags:

Load up all your mp3 files: Press CTRL-A, CTRL-S and then CTRL-R. This will select all files in the list, save the new tags and remove all the unwanted tags if there are any (apev2, id3v1...).

Thank you for the detailed information!

All the WAVs were compressed to APEs so I'll need to keep the ape tags. I'm looking into which id3 tags are supported by the DAP.

Three Qs:
1. Why remove id3v1 tags and only have id3v2.3 tags on the MP3s?
2. What's the disadvantage to including APEv2 tags in the MP3s? Is it is just a matter of reducing file size a shade more?
3. What's the disadvantage to including id3 tags in the the APE files?

1: I guess it's highly unlikely, but there might be bogus DAPs out there that can read and interprest ID3v2.3 perfectly, but for some stupid reason will prefer the ID3v1 if both tags are present. It's only a wild guess, which I can't backup, since I've never heard of something like that. But it's stupid to underestimate the stupidity of others (in this case the people who wrote the firmware of the DAP). I only mentioned it, to encourage you to test your DAP's tag reading capabilities with 1-10 mp3s before retagging hundreds of mp3 over and over again. Test all possible combinations of the three tags. Do it once and you'll know for sure if it causes trouble or not.


2: This is more likely to cause trouble, because there have been reports of mp3 decoders that get confused by APEv2 tags. But if the decoder is obeying the mp3 standard there won't be problems.

Besides it's not advised to use two "advanced" tag types (ID3v2 and APEv2) at the same time together, because it's simply unecessary and might cause trouble with applications that only recognise or update one of those tags... the meta data in both tags gets out of sync and this will only lead to confusion on the user's part.


3: There's none, but actually there's no advantage either. Programs that are able to read APE audio files are also able to read the APE tags. Some very old programs might only support APEv1 tags, and I'm not sure if APEv2 is backwards compatible, but I'm sure that it's highly unlikely that you use such software...

Your input is most appreciated.
Most everything is already tagged but it's easy enough to remove the unwanted tags and leave only the appropriate tags using mp3tag. Since there are separate settings for MP3s and APEs only one 'remove' action is required.

Thanks again!

When trying to 'convert to' using either %ALBUM%/%ARTIST%/%_filename% OR PORTABLE/%_filename% there are no subfolder(s) created. Both options work fine when running 'convert to same directory'.

Why doesn't it work with 'converting to' and choosing a different destination than source?

TIA.

Subfolders are only created when more than one file is selected for the conversion...

Hmm, the behavior here is:
'Convert to'- subfolders created only when converting multiple files
'Convert to same directory'- subfolders created regardless of number of files converted (single or multiple).

Thanks.