This is so screaming out for an FAQ or a HOWTO, I'm sure it already exists, but I can't find it!

I found lots of bits and bobs, but nothing that walks through the process or suggests the best end-to-end method.

Basically, I want to have a 'master' library of lossless compressed audio files, and I also want a couple of duplicate libraries. Probably a 128kbps AAC, and a 256kbps MP3. Oh, and I want to apply replaygain to normalize the albums.

I'm using EAC to rip the CD's, and have been ripping as FLAC. This is quite slow, so I started to look at batch processing of wavs overnight, and found all sorts of options and progams. I haven't even started thinking about transcoding.

I'm no longer sure that FLAC is the best option. I want something I can play in WMA without bother. I'm also not sure the best way to batch convert, and even the best format for ripping from EAC, so can someone walk me through, make a howto, or give me a link on a step-by-step way to do all this?

I should probably also mention I want the least interaction possible. I'd rather do a bit of scripting up front than mess around with GUI's.

Apologies if this is covered, and I'm just too dim to find it, and mch gatitude to anyone who helps me :-)

What part do you want a walkthrough for? You have various requirements. There are actually a few ripping guides on the board; however IMHO I feel that one man's guide is... well, a guide for one man's requirements. Not mine, not yours.

Take a look at REACT. It works in conjunction with EAC and will allow you to perform multiple steps on the ripped WAVE as part of the ripping process. Ripping to FLAC, AAC and MP3, with Replaygain, comes as standard.

WMP(layer)? I have no idea what formats that will play. Most definately WMA Lossless I suppose.

If you have existing WAVE files the process may depend on the format (image or separate tracks).

Fair point. It's chaining everything together. Looking at the best way to rip a CD for postprocessing by script. I sort of though so many people would do this that someone would just have a really good recipe. If not, I'll work out something that works for me, and I'll publish it somewhere.



Will do - thanks. I hadn't come across that yet.



Pretty much anything if you can find a codec for it, so I merrily started encoding FLACs, then I read a few forum posts about how the flac codecs for WMP are a bit flaky. Darn. Oh well, I'll just have a look into it. There's plenty of info out there on choosing codecs.




which I guess is what I was looking for in a guide - what's the best starting point? I have just ripped a CD to a single wav + cue sheet from EAC. I guess my idea was to make a big pile of those, and then run some script overnight to blast it all apart and re-encode in the different formats I want.

Thanks for the response.

Most people have the scripts ready before doing the post processing. However, like you, I started with a lot of WAVs and CUEs. To start from there, I would recommend using FooBar2000. Before I knew how to write BATs to process any considerable amount of files, I learned to use FB2K to handle the processing.

REACT is, in my honest opinion, the most powerful CD ripping utility, if not the most powerful audio tool I have ever used (FB2K and REACT are neck and neck ;-) ). Using nothing more than REACT, I just setup an automated process that:

1. Rips to a WavPack lossless image (-hh, more compression than FLAC --best and faster), verified against AccurateRip
2. Put this into a directory based on: "Genre\Album Artist\Album [Year]\WavPack Lossless Image" (Soundtracks automatically get a different directory structure!)
3. Perform a hash calculation on the image and save that as a TXT document
4. Put the image, cue, log and hash TXT into a RAR archive with 10% recovery record with the EAC log as the archive comment, all later to be burned to a DVD for long term storage
5. Output OGG Vorbis (-Q2) tracks [I have yet to setup replaygain on the Vorbis tracks]
6. Put the Tracks into a similar directory, only "OGG Vorbis Tracks"

Given the amount of time and research I have spent into this, I gave up on players like WMP or WinAmp and stick exclusively with FooBar2000. Any DAP I buy will either have RockBox or natively play Vorbis. MP3 will be the most popular codec to use for lossy playback.

While a script I cannot help, however with WavPack and FooBar2000, you can run processing on the WAVs that will import the CUE into your outputted WV image! The setup would require you to setup a custom WavPack Conversion profile, then use the custom settings:

That @ is important for wavpack encoder since it tells the encoder to grab the CUE.

It so happens that I am currently writing a draft of the setup and the steps required for my neighbor. If you like I can post one here or email you a copy of the guide. It will be a long guide and take a while since my boss is one of those that needs lots of pictures in his setup instructions.

You extract all your discs to .wav files *then* convert them to .flac? All those .wav files would chew up a lot of space. What sort of volume are you talking about? 100 CDs, 1000?

FWIW...

I extract and convert to .flac as I go along. I use Plextools, but you can configure EAC to extract directly to .flac. There's a how-to guide in the FLAC forum. (Of course, you don't have to use flac, you can also use Monkey's Audio or just about any other lossless format. I don't know anything about Windows Media Player so I can't help you there.)

I also extract all songs on a disc as a single .wav file and use a cue sheet. If you later want to make an mp3 collection, use Foobar 2000 to do your converting. It's extremely easy. It's a GUI (which you said you didn't want to mess with), but you can load up a bunch of cue sheets and let it run for hours (or days). If you want, Foobar can split out the individual songs when converting to mp3.

So your sequence would be like this:

EAC > .flac + .cue > Foobar2K > .mp3

I did something similar to this for 2500 titles.

The best starting point IMHO is ripping the CD. This is where EAC/REACT comes in.

However, if you already have a load of WAV+CUE files of CDs that you don't want to rip again then my preference would be to either load all the cuesheets into foobar and then run Converter for every format you want, or to write a batch file that uses ACDIR (or CueProc, but I'm more familiar with its predecessor ACDIR).

A lot to digest ehre, and I'll have a play later, but I think my initial post was a bit misleading, or just lacking in info, so I'd like to clear a few bits up.

- I don't mind starting again from scratch. I already ripped my entire CD collection to 192Kbps AAC in iTunes when I first got my iPod. I feel a fool, but that's where I am so I'm mostly starting again from scratch (so I have a few FLAC and wav+cue albums as I've been mucking about. Quite happy to ditch them though)

- I don't think I'll rip my entire collection to Wav and encode in one go - I'll just rip as many as I can every day, and then batch process them overnight (deleting the wavs). The iTunes library I talk about above is only about 25Gb, which I reckon will beef up to 2-300Gb in lossless. I have a brand new 500Gb disk just for this :-)

- I'm not dead against GUI's, as long as I don't have to interact much once I've set it off. I come from a UNIX background, so my initial thoughts were to write a shell script to do the processing, but I thought there'd be something better out there (sounds like there is)

- I'm not that bothered about WMP - I just happen to use it now. I like the browsing interface. I'll look into the options on this.

- one day (maybe not today...) I'll get some sort of networked gizmo like a squeezbox to rig into my HiFi, so I want a lossless format that plays nice. That's why I chose FLAC in the first place, but I'll look at the options.


Thanks all for your comments, I really appreciate them. Sometimes you just need to talk about this stuff to get your head around it all!