I am asking for recommendations regarding ripping and encoding CDs.

I pretty much used Eli's suggested EAC settings for FLAC, Lossless Archiving to set up EAC:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=30959


I am starting out with my Goals and assumptions based upon what I have gleaned from postings in this forum.

Goals

1. Rip 1000+ CDs in an archival format
2. Recreate CDs
3. Encode music files for playback on various players (including iPods, CD/Mp3 player, & eventually home and car mp3 players
4. Store volume information in FLAC file & mp3 file via ReplayGain
5. Store as much info in tags as possible
6. Each track should have one corresponding FLAC & one mp3 file.


Though I will probably need more apps, so far, I have settled upon the following applications

EAC V0.95b4
FLAC 1.1.3b
LAME 3.97
AccurateRip


Hardware
1 GHz P3
512 MB RAM
Generic DVD-ROM
Creative CD-RW

I have installed EAC and FLAC and have done some configuring. However, I'm not finished.
Assumptions:
Detect Gaps
Extract a CD into several WAV files
Create Cue Sheet--> Multiple WAV Files with Gaps (Noncompliant)

FLAC Settings
Compression Options ->External Compression --> Additional command line options --> 8 -V -T "artist=%a" -T "title=%t" -T "album=%g" -T "date=%y" -T "tracknumber=%n" -T "genre=%m" -T comment="%e" -T %s --replay-gain

LAME Settings
-V 3 --vbr-new (~175 kbps), -V 2 --vbr-new (~190 kbps)


Questions
What are your recommended tools for:
1. Ripping to FLAC & encoding to mp3 at same time
2. Cataloging CDs in Database (Access file & CVS file)
3. Create playlists for computer player and portable player (if possible create just one and use anywhere), both for FLAC and mp3 files
4. Edit tags quickly & efficiently edit FLAC tags
5. Edit tags quickly & efficiently edit mp3 tags
6. Edit file names en masse
7. Anything that may need to be a goal that I have missed

Other questions:
1. EAC
Gap Detection - which one to use and how?
2. Cue sheets
How do I create a cue sheet when each track will have its own FLAC & mp3 file (i.e., I will not put an album in one file)
3. What is recommened bit rate for FLAC, Mp3 and should it be VBR or not?
4. Given that I have 1000+ CDs with a wide range of genres, how do you recommend splitting the music up accross Hard Drives
My music breakdowns by CD Binder from most # of CDs to the least:
R&B - Old School
R&B - Contemporary
Rap
Jazz
Rock - Old School
Rock - Contemporary
Soundtracks
Various Artists
Pop
Dance
Gospel
Country
Classical
5. What are the cons, if any of calculating replaygain values in the tags FLAC/mp3 command line. I would like to play mp3s on both my computer and an ipod & possibly other seperate players. What is the diff in using mp3Gain?

6. Which is the largest RELIABLE hard drive recommended
7. Which mp3 tag?
8. Any other recommendations?

Why not use FLAC 1.1.4?

If calculated from the command line, you'll only get trackgain. You need to pass all files simultaneously to the encoder to get the albumgain as well. The easiest way might be to Replaygain scan the albums with Foobar2000 after encoding them.
Replaygain tags aren't normally read by portable players. The shining example of one that does is the Rockbox firmware.
MP3Gain changes the loudness in the file directly, and is therefore always applied.

FLAC 1.1.4

Mareo.exe for 1 step encoding while eac rips to flac and mp3,

follow http://www.high-quality.ch.vu for rest of your questions.

lame -V5 -vbr-new should be sufficient for portable usage. id3V1 tags. mac mpeg audio collection to find your albums on different HD drives or DVDs.

Are you sure ID3v1 is still needed for portable usage? I wouldn't know of even a single MP3 player that was unable to display ID3v2.3 ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) tags.

Actually yes, ID3v1 is still needed. I just purchased a 2007 Jeep Wrangler and the Radio/CD-MP3 Player only reads ID3v1 tags. When I read that in the Owners Manual, I was kind of amazed, but at least it plays VBR with samplerates from 16-48kHz.

When I went to the FlAC download site at http://flac.sourceforge.net/download.html,
I selected the FLAC for Windows installer link. FLAC 1.1.4 was somewhere else, but it seemed to be source code that needed to be compiled. If you can tell me how to install 1.1.4, I will do so.

Regards

I downloaded and unzipped 1.1.4. I copied flac.exe and metaflac.exe to /Program Files/Flac, replacing the ones from 1.1.3b.

Is this all I need to do?

You may want to hold off for a bit before doing a major library rip session. The new accuraterip dll supports writing the accuraterip results to tags and logs. This functionality is already available in dbpoweramp and hopefully andre will add support soon. It will be much nicer to be able to confirm the validity of your rips that are in lossless format.

Thanks for the heads up!

It seems as if EAC is the recommended app, but would you recommend dbpoweramp instead, just in case I wanted to "get on with it"?

I know that this is out of your hands, but do you have any guess as to soon new accuraterip feature will be available in EAC?

Goals 1 and 6 conflict with each other. You will not have an authentic archival format that can accurately recreate a CD if you have single FLAC files per track. The issue is with the gaps, even if you don't throw the gaps away, you will lose the indexing information. This might be possible to avoid by embedding separate cuesheets within each individual FLAC that contains the indexing information, however, most gaps are pre-gaps, i.e. INDEX 0, and if you append gaps to the previous track, this will be awkward. Even if maintaining the information is possible, it would be much more difficult than simply having a single FLAC file for an entire album. You can still make individual track mp3s for portability. And most players, like fb2k or winamp, will recognize CUE sheets so you can still listen to individual tracks within a FLAC file that consists of an entire album.

I'm in the midst of a similar project. Currently ripping about 2000 CDs to FLAC. I should hit 1000 in next couple days!

I ended up using REACT (http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=REACT). It's a tool that automates a lot of tasks using EAC and other tools. It's very customizable, but can require a little effort to figure out (like EAC itself). There's lots of info in the forums about it.

It allows me to do the following in one pass with just a couple clicks:
Rip CD to FLAC files using my file naming convention
Download album art and included it in tag and folder
Add replay gain (track and album)

That way as soon as the CD is ripped, I've got fully tagged FLAC files including album art and replay gain. Then it's on to the next CD without having to remember to go through X number of different steps/tools on each CD. And trust me, ripping this many CDs is truly mind numbing, so you want to keep your process as simple as possible.

REACT also lets you do other things like rip to many formats at the same time. It's highly customizable via an INI file, but if you're comfortable with DOS Batch language, you can make it do pretty much anything you want.

I also pretty much stick with the suggested setting you mentioned. I use Burst mode with test & copy and have accuraterip enabled. That gives you the best performance while still giving pretty secure results. When I occasionally hit a disk that returns errors or gets bad accuraterip results, I will switch to secure mode and see if I get a better result. Unless you have a drive that does not cache audio, secure mode will likely be intolerably slow for a large ripping project.

So to you questions:
Questions
What are your recommended tools for:
1. Ripping to FLAC & encoding to mp3 at same time
>>> REACT will do this

2. Cataloging CDs in Database (Access file & CVS file)
>>> I'm interested in this as well. Please post if you find a good solution.

3. Create playlists for computer player and portable player (if possible create just one and use anywhere), both for FLAC and mp3 files
>>> I customized REACT to do this, however I've since stopped doing it. I ended up frequently correcting tags/filenames which breaks any generated playlist. Plus with most media players it isn't really necessary, although it might be good for some portable devices.

4. Edit tags quickly & efficiently edit FLAC tags
>>> Tag&Rename rocks. You can edit tags (manually or download from amazon, freedb, etc.) and then automatically rename the files based on the tags. Or vice versa. It's not free, but it's really, really good and well worth it. Many people use Foobar for mass tagging as well.

5. Edit tags quickly & efficiently edit mp3 tags
>>> Tag&Rename

6. Edit file names en masse
>>> Tag&Rename

7. Anything that may need to be a goal that I have missed

Other questions:
1. EAC
Gap Detection - which one to use and how?
>>> I believe the recommended method is just to try each one and pick the one that works the fastest on your drive.

2. Cue sheets
How do I create a cue sheet when each track will have its own FLAC & mp3 file (i.e., I will not put an album in one file)
>>> REACT will do this

3. What is recommended bit rate for FLAC, Mp3 and should it be VBR or not?
>>> N/A for FLAC. As for MP3, there's no right answer to this one. See http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....=16&t=32288 for recommended settings.

4. Given that I have 1000+ CDs with a wide range of genres, how do you recommend splitting the music up accross Hard Drives
>>> I built a 1.5TB RAID 5, so I didn't really have to worry about splitting between drives. With most media players/librarians, there's not really any logical need to do it. I've ripped about 1000 CDs to FLAC and used a little over 300GB. So a 500GB drive will definitely accommodate your FLACs and maybe even your MP3s.

5. What are the cons, if any of calculating replaygain values in the tags FLAC/mp3 command line. I would like to play mp3s on both my computer and an ipod & possibly other seperate players. What is the diff in using mp3Gain?
>>> as someone else said, if you do it on an individual file, you only get track gain. You need to do it on all files in the album at once to also get album gain. REACT takes care of this.

6. Which is the largest RELIABLE hard drive recommended
>>> I believe most (including me) are favoring the WD 500GB right now. I always used to favor Seagate, but the new 750GB (and in fact all of Seagate's latest gen) has been getting some pretty bad reviews (loud, hot, unreliable). Early reviews of the new 1TB Hitachi (currently only available from Dell) are very good, but it's a brand new drive so reliability is a question. In any case, no single drive can be considered reliable when you're talking about archiving a sizable collection. At minimum you'll want to at least mirror 2 drives. RAID 5 would obviously be better if your budget can swing it. WD 500GB drives (WD5000AAKS) are only $130 at newegg right now, so it's not really that much to get two of them. When you consider the monetary value of the collection and the months of effort that goes into archiving it, you want to make sure it's protected.

7. Which mp3 tag?
>>> Not sure what you mean

8. Any other recommendations?
>>> Clean your CDs before ripping! You'll notice much better accuraterip results. I wasn't doing this at first and was surprised how many "rip not accurate" results I was getting. Started cleaning the CD before ripping and now get "rip accurate" the vast majority of the time.

I just wanted to say that since you have a 1 Ghz P3, you may save a lot of time by encoding to -V6 instead of -V8 (without sacrificing a lot of space).