I have now almost control over my compression of my CD's to FLAC with EAC/DMC/FLAC.
I 'll get an error msg. from FLAC which I have to press "OK" butten to accept and to start the compression.
I don't get the windows explorer column YEAR filled out.
This I'll investigating at the moment

Since me and my familiy also have several mp3-players I want to compress the same music to .mp3 at the same time. (In one operation from EAC) I have made profiles in EAC to convert either to .mp3 or to .flac, but this will be in two operations. Is this possible to do this in the same operation?

And at the same time, since my .flac also are backups of my CD's I want to have added the CD picture and the CD-Cover picture as well. In a way that I can recreate the complete CD if wanted.
Is this possible thru this compression?

Thanks again for a godd and living forum where there ara lots of good information to get and to read

Do a search on the forum for REACT, MAREO and FLACAttack.

All these are interim applications that allow you to perform multiple actions from EAC.

I have read it, but I am a newbie - as you surely understand - and I have problems to pick out what exactly to do - in the most simple way - with best possible result
Do I understand you right if I say you ment I could not use my installed configuration to do what I want?
(Get .flac, get .mp3, get image and .jpg of CD and cover) Hopefully in one operation?
And I believe I don't have to keep a wav-image of each CD in addition to the .flac files to be able to recreate a lost or broken CD? Including printed pictures on the CD and cover.


Do I need more than?
.flac
.mp3
cue sheet. (By EAC to recreate a complete CD? Can I get the pictures on the CD and Cover when I recreate the CD)
.jpg of the CD and cover - do I need it or not? If I need it, can I get it thru the SW I already have installed?

Hopefully you understand my questions and rare way of asking

I'd just like to add that if you are wanting to be able to re-create a cd, then you would want to scan the cd covers at a high resolution - say between 600 and 1200 dpi - and the resulting file will be somewhat large. You would not want a file that large to be merged with a flac file, I don't think. I would store the scans as either bmp (lossless) or highest quality JPG (or the lossless version of JPG, if you have that option).

If you want images in your FLACs, I think that is meant for small iPOD-style images with small filesizes.

I want the pictures together with for instance the cue sheet in its own catalogue. Not together with the .flac or .mp3 files

How do you intend to get the pictures? Are you willing to scan them? I think it's more cost-effective to buy another CD copy than to do all that scanning. Time VS money. If you've got the time..

I am sorry, must have lost something here.

Thougt it was possible to dowload pictures as well from freedb (or somewhere else from Internet) and hoped to make that automatically from EAC or similar tool...

I am sorry if I misspelled myself.

Anyway - is there anyway to solve this? (Without manual scanning. Which I will do if there is no other option)

There are certainly tools to download album covers, such as the iTunes Cover Downloader or the Walmart Cover Downloader (search the forums for the links). You can also manually go to amazon.com and download the album cover from there.

In terms of making it automatic, I'm not sure how you would go about doing that.

Good luck!

What can I say, there is no resolve for this. You need to make an informed decision and that involves doing some reading and making some decisions.

Yes. I will speak of REACT as that is my tool of choice. You set EAC up to use REACT as an external compressor - in fact REACT will set EAC up for you automatically. You then use a REACT config file to tell REACT what steps you wish to take. This config file is essentially a list of command lines using standard commands mixed with variables that REACT makes available, like @artist@, @source@, @cuesheet@, etc. So, you would need to take your commands used in EAC and move them all to one config, substituting EAC tokens (e.g.: %a) with REACT tokens (e.g.: @artist@).

Correct. You use the WAV image to create your FLAC image and you can then delete it.

REACT has examples using albumart.exe which can automatically download cover art (not CD, inlay or back cover art).

No. if you have a FLAC image with cuesheet you can recreate the CD. The MP3 tracks are for listening. Your requirements for the level of album art may need some consideration. Personally I don't bother with it.

great advices, synthetic soul. So far I use EAC to convert to Flac and then another run with Foobar to MP3. But you got me interested in REACT now...so I will check ot

[quote name='The Two Channel Amplifier' post='446361' date='Nov 2 2006, 17:40']Do I need more than?
.flac
.mp3
cue sheet.[/quote]No. if you have a FLAC image with cuesheet you can recreate the CD. The MP3 tracks are for listening. Your requirements for the level of album art may need some consideration. Personally I don't bother with it.
[/quote]

Thanks a lot for very good answers and guidelines! Especially to Synthetic Soul. I'll try to go for REACT and convert to .flac for my HIFI and .mp3 for my portables..

Still one more question:
.flac - I want the different tracks playable on my Squeezebox. I hope I can use the the .flac files to recreate the CD. (I'd rather have the tracks indivudally than having the CD as one image)
Is this possible?

Yes. You could still use REACT, or MAREO if your preferred.

scanning process itself degrades the quality anyway, so why go for BMP or lossless?

Using JPEG would add additional artifacts, and is not really good for further editing/conversion of an image.

If you don't need super-fast access to your portables (presuming they're small), you might archive to flac and then automatically transcode on sync with your players. MediaMonkey allows you to sync to multiple players using a different transcode to each player, and in the next (maybe current) version you can also auto-transcode to CD to make MP3 compilations from FLAC archives.

This is my current set up. Archive to FLAC, three MP3 players which get (1) Lame extreme MP3 (my Muvo), 128kb MP3 (wife's nano, coming soon), and a Lame medium "take along" portable usb HD. Whenever I add to my library, MM will sync to each. It could just as easily sync to a seaparate drive/directory mounted locally, I think. The recode does take time, so it's not as fast as a direct copy, but it minimizes overall storage, and lets me tailor the file sizes to the device/listener on the fly.

I haven't played much with images, so I don't know about that part.

Degradation depends on dpi used. 300dpi should be enough for most applications. more than enough to scan and recreate album covers.
saving as png is the best route to keep quality and decrease file size IMO.