My old H340 went missing, I got a Karma that can handle ogg/flac, a new computer that can actually encode and rip like crazy, so now I'm planning to completely re-encode my music collection. I already have a couple hundred CDs on one of my computers encoded in both WAV and MP3 format using EAC. I'd really rather not have to rip everything all over again. Is there any good procedure for re-encoding those source wav files?

My current configuration I'm using for all of my new CDs is to run them through MAREO and encode them into ogg/flac/mp3/mp3 for my various needs (I definitely have the HD space to support this many formats) and I leave the WAV files just in case I need to re-encode in the future. Is there any way to "simulate" a rip using the WAV files? That would ensure that nothing weird would happen.

The main problem I'm seeing with this is that WAV files don't have tags. I do have a relatively consistent directory naming scheme, but I would prefer if there was some way to rediscover the tags. I don't know how freedb or the other cd databases work, but is there any way to discover the tags for WAV files based on content or maybe some bits of the filename so that I don't have to manually discover all the tags? In the future, is there something I could do to prevent me having to do some weird stuff for a future re-encoding?

Also, on a side note, is it possible for mareo to automatically add its source wav file to a RAR archive? Clearly I won't be needing those very frequently. If not, it's a relatively trivial matter to do it myself using my current directory structure, so that's fine.

Get friendly with FooBar2000. Jack-of-all-trades media player, converter, and tagger.

I suggest you create a CUE sheet that ties each of your albums of WAVs. That way you'll have [an external] means of tagging them with album artist, track title, track artist [if CD was various artist], album year, and genre.

Easiest way to go about that is FB2K and add the foo_cuesheet_creator.dll [Look here http://tmp.reharmonize.net/foobar/ and read below]. When you drop all the tracks of a CD into FB2K, make a CUE sheet [like a playlist], have it get the tags from FreeDB. That will lower the amount of time you manually apply tags.

You drop those WAVs into FB2K, create a custom conversion profile, design it to locate them in your custom folder structure, and run a giant batch conversion of those WAVs. If you know how to use the command line encoders FLAC and LAME, then setting up custom profiles in FB2K is easier and will save you time.

No clue how or why you'd do that. You do not need the WAVs anymore once you have the FLACs encoded. FLAC is lossless. My suggestion is NO REPLAYGAIN processing of the WAVs in Flac.

RAR is not the way to go about archiving WAVs. For storage: just keep the FLACs. You could use Monkey's Audio Codec to compress the WAVs even more than Flac. However, those MP3s can stand to be RAR archived. All my CDs where it won't break my heart to encode as MP3, I RAR archive the albums. Doing that, I can save up to 30% on 320 CBR [Q0], and 5% on 320 VBR [Q0 V0]. Like you, I have an abundance of space, but I prefer albums as single files, so either an APE image with an embedded CUE sheet [my lossless standard] or a RAR archive of MP3s [so long as the album was not contiguous music].


EDIT: These cue sheet creators each work differently. The 0.4.3a works to my needs where it will create a CUE as if the files were part of a single file which is helpful for burning purposes. I believe the latest one fixed that "problem" and it will create a CUE that is based on individual WAVs [which is why I went back to the old one].