I've been searching for a couple hours for an answer to this; but I give up....it's really painful to do that many page-loads on 28kb dialup...


I'm getting set up to rip our CD library, and want to do it 'right' the first time...so I only have to do it once!

Here's the question:

As a trial-run, I just used EAC to rip Houses of the Holy to WAV's. Using version .99pb3, and LAME 98; ripping for 160K vbr using the --preset.

This is all working perfectly...EAC is putting the WAV's on disc, and making perfect MP3's...but it's only processing individual tracks.

What I want to end up with is ONE mp3 file containing the whole album; AND preserving the track-titles for each track within that single final mp3.

In other words, when I play the 'album' in Foobar, I'd like the currently-playing track-title to display in the window title-bar (and title-bar changes as each track comes on).

Is this possible? Does the MP3 format even support this?

Previously, I've made an 'album' from downloaded tracks, using Musicutter; but that did NOT preserve the track titles. I.e., while playing this 'album', foobar only ever displayed the album filename.

thanks much!

In EAC: Action-> Copy Image & Create Cue Sheet->Compressed

Use the Cuesheet in your player (foobar2000, Winamp, etc) to see the tracks.

thanks for replying dbb.

So, are you saying that the MP3 format itself doesn't support built-in track titles?

One -must- have an accompanying seperate cue-sheet file for every album file ??

thanks

Bingo, MP3 does not support internal CUE sheets. If you want that, go for a different format-FLAC, Monkey's Audio, WavPack, Vorbis, to name a few.

You are not saving the WAVs are you??

In my oppinion you should encode all your CD's to FLAC (or another lossless format) if you only intend to do this once. Sooner or later you would probably have wanted to do that.

I would advise a better encoder when making images, then you can convert if needed. Flac would be a good choice.

Would AlbumWrap help in this case?

This isn't exactly true. The mp3cue plugin for Winamp has the ability to store a cue sheet inside an mp3 and use it to index the audio as well as display track information.

In MP3 the basic paradigm is that a track is a file and all the tags apply to that track/file.

Out of curiosity, why do you want all the tracks in one file?

Also, do you ever plan to play this album-file on a portable music player, e.g., an iPod or Zune or Sansa?




But what happens when you try to play that MP3 on another player?

If you use an external sheet instead of or in addition to (mp3cue can work with either), then it will work with foobar as well. I don't know of any other players that support this function.

thanks folks...I appreciate all the replies.

Samhain: correct, I'm not saving the wav's.

odyssey: I don't have the disk space for lossless; and it's neither easy nor cheap to add space, since we only run laptops here. (we live off-grid, so power consumptiion is a big concern....can't run regular tower-PC's, unfortunately)

hybridfan: I'm using LAME 3.98...that's as good as it gets, as far as I know. In regards to FLAC, see above.

fyi; we live in a 500 sq-ft cabin, and I no longer own any fancy audio gear...just a simple stereo system. Intended use for the MP3's is casual listening at the cabin; plus in the truck, and my wife has an ipod.


Rio: thanks...I'll check into AlbumWrap. I did just come across a proggy today on sourceforge; called mp3join or something like that. Supposed to do similar function as Albumwrap. Not sure if either of them support internal track-titles or not tho...


greynol: thanks for that tip on Winamp! I use 1by1 as a daily/regular player; but also have Foobar installed (used to be my regular player, but I LOVE the directory-type layout/function of 1by1). In any case, if Winamp will modify the mp3's correctly to embed track titles, I'll get it and install it just for that! LOL


plnelson: why? because I like it that way! LOL... Basic answer: The music comes as albums....I generally think in terms of listening to an album...e.g., "hmm...I feel like listening to 'Wish You Were Here' today.."

etc. etc.. So...I want the CD's to appear in my directory as albums.

BUT...I don't always know or remember the track-names of every single track in the collection....and sometimes when we're listening to music, one of us will look up and say "hey, what tune is this? I really like it".

So I want the track-titles stored in the album....I want the player to be displaying the name of the currently playing track.

ps; and yes, I'd expect these mp3's to be played on my wife's nano ipod occasionally. On the other hand, track-name display isn't nearly as important to us in that application.


greynol; if I understood your last post correctly, you're saying that the Winamp function which stores the titles inside the 'album' mp3 will ONLY produce a track-name display on Winamp? The names won't show up on any other player?



Isn't it possible to insert an extra 'frame' at each junction of tracks within the 'album'; with that frame containing a tag with a new title? So that all players will change the displayed title?


thanks again everyone for contributing thoughts and observations...appreciate it.

I also use 1by1 as a regular player and I use a cue sheet to see the tracknames and times. In that way I can pick any track I want, although there's only one 'disc-image.mp3'. The only thing is you can't shuffle tracks.
I also use this method for classical albums. Ripping the several movements to one 'album', you won't shuffle this type classical music, but separate movements can be picked and played. Works for me.

But I still don't understand why you want to store all the tracks in the same file!

"Album" is a standard MP3 tag, so any player that recognizes MP3 tags can still play "'Wish You Were Here' today" as an album, even though the tracks are separate files. I listen to albums all the time on my iPod. If I want to hear Miles Davis' "Sketches of Spain" or Beethoven's Ninth Symphony I just select the album and play it - I don't select individual tracks.

Most of us know that it's stupid, but if he insists on it, why bother?

It's not the question to be asked or answered here, anyway. Tell him what he wants to know, he will have his reasons, and it doesn't matter if they are valid or not.

PS: He already answered that question. He wants one file for one album. I can actually agree with that, but for a completely different reason and I wouldn't use MP3 as the codec either.

It isn't Winamp that does this, it's mp3cue which is a plug-in for Winamp. If you still plan on using 1by1 as your player and it can't read a cue sheet that has been embedded by mp3cue, then it won't be of any help to you.

Sure it's possible but I don't think the resulting file would conform to specification. Mp3 was not intended to behave this way.


I don't do this myself, but why is it stupid? Why be so condescending?

greynol, thanks.....my sentiments exactly...

in re Winamp, it's the plugin that does the job, understood.

I guess I won't know if this setup/trick/resulting-file works with other players until I download, install, and try it all.

So it embeds the cuesheet-file inside the mp3 file, eh? Do you happen to know if it will use the standard cue-sheet files produced by EAC/Lame; or do I have to do the ripping with Winamp, or some other prog?

2nd question: regarding adding frames between tracks (in a single 'albumized' mp3), you mentioned such not being to 'standard'. Were you suggesting that most players wouldn't play it?

Or that they're likely to play the file OK, but not likely to 'see' the title changes and change the display as the album proceeds from track to track?

Related question: could you suggest a few possible good tools for experimenting with this? Preference is freeware win32 gui tools where possible.

Also, would I need to actually add frames; or could I just modify, i.e. add a tag to an existing frame at the beginning of each 'track' ?

I guess another question is....when Musicutter put the tracks together to make my 'album', what happened to the tags that were already present in the individual track files? If those tags weren't deleted/modded by Musicutter, then perhaps we already have an answer as to whether adding frames with title-info would work (it apparently would not).


fandango; mp3, despite its flaws, is a very widespread standard; playable on anything, now or in the future. Even if albumizing/embedded-titles causes a difficulty on some device in the future, that's fixable without losing the tunes (i.e. via Musicutter et al to split back to individual tracks if needed).

As far as quality....as I mentioned above, I do not need 'supreme' quality for our intended apps. Believe me, you will NOT be able to ABX to anything better while listening on phones while operating a 50,000 lb excavator at the mine...LOL...


plnelson: I simply prefer a directory of albums, rather than an enormous list of tracks. Albumizing cuts the list size by an order of magnitude...ten times smaller directory of music. Just plain easier to deal with on a daily basis; for me anyway.

And the thought of having to make, store, and keep track of during transfers, all those extra cue-sheet files....I dunno...that idea just bugs me. It seems inelegant....and is yet another small PITA to add to the big pile of such already in life...lol...

(for the life of me, I can't understand why this SIMPLE functionality wasn't built into the mp3 std to begin with....but I guess it's neither the only nor the biggest flaw in that std, eh? lol)

My problem in this task is that I'm not up to speed yet on the format/standard (tag ignorance, as well as mp3 format). I'm very computer-literate (cut my teeth keying octal into the front-panel of PDP-11/45's in the 70's), but this is the first time I've ever done anything with mp3's.

You said that 'album' is a tag, and that a player can play an album from separate tracks; but you didn't say how that was done; or what you meant by 'album' in this scenario.

Did you mean that a player will do this only WITH an additional cue-sheet file (plus tagging the file 'album)?

If 'album' is a 'tag', doesn't that imply that it's embedded within the mp3? What does that tag do? Tell the player to look for a cue-sheet file of the same name?


thanks again to all for your help and info.

OK, but all I can say is that I have about 1300 CD's worth of music (maybe 8000 tracks) plus a few thousand other downloaded, or bought-online tracks and I almost NEVER have to deal with files and directories. It's managed for me by the software I use to play it - Sonos and iTunes. They both use the MP3 tagging paradigm to organize my music by album, composer, artist, genre, or whatever.

As you say, it's up to you, but I think the approach you're taking is both more work on your part AND less adaptable to standard MP3 players.

I did some brushing up on how mp3cue stores embedded cue sheets and seriously doubt any other player will be able to read them. I know people around here that embed cue sheets using foobar2000 (for lossless images) and am assuming it works for playback, but like mp3cue/winamp, it might not be supported with other players.

Standard cue by EAC is fine, but it only keeps the 01 indices and strips the rest. mp3cue works with other formats besides mp3, I've successfully used it with ape and flac, but I don't embed cue sheets; I use external ones and have never tried embedding them except with mp3 files.

I said possible in a theoretical sense. I seriously doubt it would work with anything except a specialized imaginary theoretical player. I am not an mp3 expert, not by a long shot, but I wouldn't waste my time on this because I guarantee such an effort with existing players would be fruitless. Anyhow, someone already mentioned albumwrap, which basically concatenates mp3 files with tags intact. Another option is to store (not compress) the tracks in a zip file and rename the extension to mp3. You'll see that the files are playable as albums and in between tracks the decoder will probably just skip over the tags.

I haven't used musicutter in a very long time, but my guess is that it simply deletes the tags.

Album metadata is stored in a tag, most likely in an ID3 tag. Players such as iTunes and WMP are able to sort/search/organize based on the data stored in tags.

I am not he, but the answer is no.

And what's wrong with 1by1 and a separate cue sheet, apart from it's not embedded in the image.mp3 ?
I have a tag in the image. mp3 : artist, album, year, genre and comment (by mareo)

MP3 (and many other music formats) has an extensive set of supported tags, one of which is "Album". So all tracks with same Album tag value, e.g., "Dark Side of the Moon" are regarded as being part of that album.

All players let you search and sort by Album, so you just select "Dark Side of the Moon" and tell it to play. It finds and plays all the tracks and you never have to worry about selecting individual tracks or telling it where in your file system they are. But if you want to you can still select individual tracks or skip over them or add individual tracks to playlists or change the order they're played in, or whatever - you just don't have to.

You said your wife has an iPod - just borrow it for a second, go to "Albums" in the menu, and see for yourself.

Most software that's used to rip music knows how to look out on the web to download all the tag information so you don't have to manually edit the "Album" tag, but you can if you want. Classical music collectors often re-purpose the "Album" tag to refer to the work or opus, since the people who designed MP3 tags knew a lot more about technology than music, and had no idea that many kind of music have a level between "album" and "track".

Musicutter will break the bit reservoir in this situation.

fandango....LOL...

still, mp3 is what I'm going to use....flac et al are just too big, and at this time anyway, too limited in players.


collector....that may be where I end up someday....but for now I'm going to try the albumwrap/mp3join route.


greynol and pnelson....thanks VERY much for those informative replies/posts. I really appreciate the clarity and level of detail you gave.

It sounds like, at this time, Albumwrap (or the open-source equiv...mp3join or something) is the way for me to go. I believe that either result/format can be re-split without loss....so this method also gives me the option to recover the individual tracks and do something with cuesheets in the future...if I ever become less hardheaded...LOL.

Didn't SebastianG develop an mp3 album splitter that preserves gapless playback using Lame headers?

I never got much past using musicutter and zipping them back up without tags so they'd still be gapless. Once I became acquainted with gapless playback using Lame and compatible players, I never looked back.

Storing an album in one MP3 file is a terrible idea. It has many compatibility issues. It won't play properly on an iPod for example (plays as one song), and cutting up a VBR file isn't straight forward, plus there's still the bit reservoir issues.

I tried to split up a big MP3 file, which was a long DJ mix with a cue sheet with MP3 Direct Cut, and it failed to cut it at the proper positions, due to the inherent inaccuracy of the VBR seek table.

Whatever problem or abstraction issue you're trying to solve, MP3 albums is the wrong solution.