I promise I have done a million searches and tried many things before posting this. It seems like it has been covered a lot, but I still cannot figure out what I need to do. Any and all help would be appreciated.
I have almost 1000 cd's I want to rip to a hard drive. I want to do this only once! I want the following things to happen.
I want to insert a cd, have EAC recognize it, and rip it to FLAC. I want the resulting flac files to got to a predefined folder. I then want it to automatically create an artist folder if there isn't one already. The I want it to create an album subfolder. I would like the files to be named in this fasion:
01 "Where the Streets Have No Name" U2 - The Joshua Tree 1987 Rock
I want the tags to be the same. I want the album art to be saved along with the song so that If I am listening to the file on my player, it will pull up the cover. I want the tracks to play back gapless (which I believe is standard with FLAC, and I want to make sure that if there is any information in the pre tracks on the cd, that it is appended to the following track.
Finally I want the appropriate info to be added to the files for album replay gain. (This doesnt actuallychange the files right?)
I have tried FLACATTACK and couldnt get it to work. I have also tried mareo and had the same problems. I cannot figure out how to get the standard flac.exe to name and tag files in the way I laid out, and I cannot figure out hoe to have the album art included. Thank you all for your patience and help. I really have tried to figure this stuff out on my own. Also, I am assuming that there is an easy way to transcode the resulting FLACS to a lossy format after the fact if I decide to. If there isn't an easy way to batch convert everything, than I guess I need to rip to a lossy format at the same time.

Here's what I'd do if I were you:

- Rip CD to CUE + WAV image using EAC
- Mount image on virtual drive
- Rip image to FLAC using Mediamonkey to accomplish the tagging, naming, album art, organizing, ect part of the job


Alternatively, you can:

- Rip CD to FLAC files using EAC
- Use Mediamonkey to deal with each file as above

Just my suggestion

My suggestion would be EAC and REACT.

You need REACT as an interim application to create your folders, get the album art, etc.

well for the auto-directory and filename thing:
F9 -> filename tab -> set naming scheme to

%A - %C\%N %T %A - %C
that will create a new directory for every album (and artist if necessary)

you can't have "" in filename
and let the "normalize" option disabled bad for quality
if you rip to flac, disable all ID3 tag options you see, messes up non-mp3 files

Better idea:
%A - %C\%N - %T - %A - %C

though I prefer:
%A - %C - %N - %T
or
%A\%C\%N - %T

Let delmiters be your friend!!!

Okay, I guess I am just a total idiot. I now downloaded REACT and I cannot figure out what to do in the .ini

Do I want to use image rip or individual tracks? My end goal is to be able to transfer individual songs or entire albums from device to device. I want the album art to transfer with the individual tracks. I also want the whole albums to play back as the original albums do. What reason is there for image burning?

How do I tell it to tag the files with album replay gain?

Thanks!

You may run into a Windows filename length limitation with some ripped tracks using that naming convention and then have a hell of a time renaming the files unless using a command prompt.

I'd also suggest a more shortened naming convention. The one I use is:
%A\%Y - %C\%N-%A-%T

Since you'll be dealing with 1000 or so CDs you may need a mass tagger to correct some track titles and such. You can mass tag tracks with Foobar2000 audio player (highly recommended for playing your FLAC's and all audio), or Mp3tag, or Tag Frontend w/Tag.