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Topic: Ripping strategy for "average" user (Read 56057 times) previous topic - next topic
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Ripping strategy for "average" user

The time has come for me to rip my CD collection and put it on my home server.
Actually, I tried to do it an year ago and was hit by the complexity of the subject and postponed it for some later time. I simply wasn't ready to dig deeply enough to master offsets, cue sheets, gaps and other issues. I thought it's just a matter of putting CD in the drive, choose file format and click button, and being overwhelmed with technical issues/choices I just gave up, being scared that if I make a wrong choice I'll have to re-rip all my collection later again.
I don't consider myself an audiophile. My CD collection is about 150-200 CDs and I don't spend too much time listening music from CDs. My hi-fi (home theater) equipment is decent, but doesn't cost a fortune and have a dedicated room. However, it's good enough to make it easily noticable when CD has errors, or music is ripped at low bitrate. Therefore, I prefer that equipment is limiting factor when enjoying music, rather then the music source quality.
My main reason for moving music from CDs to files might sound strange. I had DVD jukebox (Sony, 200 places) which I was filling with CDs and only a few DVDs and really enjoyed not having to deal with CDs and cases all over the place. They were protected from kids and I had photo album with sleeves where I was storing CD covers, so it was easy to find disc number in jukebox. But now I run out of the space in jukebox and I couldn't find another to buy in shops anymore.
On the other hand disk space become cheap, so I calculated if I rip my whole collection uncompressed in wav format, it would still fit on 200x600MB=120GB hard disk. Even an year ago it wasn't terribly expensive.
What I realised over the past year is that choosing the right strategy (hardware, software, file formats, folder structure...) is probably as equally important as understanding technical background of CD ripping (gaps, cue sheets, offsets...). My main goal is still, that once ripped and stored away, I don't want to use original CDs and pass them through my CD drive at any point in the future. So, my strategy must be as future proof as possible. If I preserve CD information correctly, there will always be some software way to transform files from one format to another, or re-organize files. But there will never be possible to automate taking CDs from the shelf and putting them in and out of CD-R drive  .
I've spent past two weeks reading countless posts, manuals, discussions, and I believe I understood technical side of ripping disks and I can do it any way I want it. I am ready to go.
The problem now is to decide how I want it done 

Therefore, I would like to share my thoughts and make someone stop me if I oversighted something, before I spend hours and days feeding my CD drive with disks.

FILE FORMAT
An year ago, when initially I wanted to start this adventure, I thought I will use .wav. Yes, it's bulky, but my collection is not huge and will still fit onto hard drive. And I will preserve the full audio quality of the original.
After a while, I realized that it won't work. It's difficult to find media streamers that support .wav and certainly portable devices are mostly oriented to lossy formats.
Therefore, it became obvious that I will need two formats:
Lossless for preserving the quality of the original, which I will hopefully be able to use in the future, when it becomes widely supported by the hardware, but also as a source for re-encoding in some other loseless format if that format becomes market winner. In the meantime, I can use it as a source for encoding into lossy format as well. It's always easier to use these files as a source, then to search for a CD for ripping again.
For this format I chose FLAC. Although, there are no huge differences between FLAC and the others (Monkey Audio, Wavpack...), FLAC seems to have less demand on hardware for decoding, probably the reason why it's more widely supported by hardware, then the others. It's free, so no legal issues in the future, and has wide range of software tools already available. Therefore, I placed my bets on FLAC. I'll use it with maximum compression -8 to preserve disk space at this time.
Lossy for portable devices and currently using it with my media streamers (Kiss DP-558 and Pinnacle Showcenter 200) until firmware upgrade enables them to use FLAC, eventually (or I buy other device). For those reasons, I chose MP3 because it's compatible with almost anything. Encoder I will use will be LAME, because there seems to be a consensus that it's the best. Settings I will use will be "-V 0 --vbr-new". That's almost the best setting, and I didn't go for the best "-b 320" because the files are bigger and I have feeling that not all the hardware devices will be able to support it. I might be wrong here. More info here: List of recommended LAME settings


RIPPING SOFTWARE
Again there seems to be consensus that EAC is the best ripper, actually, the only one that provides secure mode and can guarantee that no errors will pass unnoticed.
So, the choice was simple. (An year ago, I started using CDEx, but only on a few CDs, which I'll re-rip now when I know that they might contain errors)
Still, there are a number of options to set up in EAC and make decisions.

OFFSETS
In order to make a perfect rip, CD-R drive offset has to be set up correctly in EAC. The way it was designed to calibrate it, didn't work for me. I bought my CDs mostly in UK, and found about 10 titles from the EAC CD reference list, but none of them matched CD code on the inner ring. As EAC's author is from Germany, I think, probably they were pressed in a different factory, so they are not exactly the same.
Fortunatelly, the new plug-in AccurateRip solved the problem

GAPS AND CUE SHEETS
One decision to make is how do I want to create CD Archive in lossless format (FLAC). It seems, until some additional options are made in EAC, that the only way to make an exact rip of a CD, including all the gaps, is  to rip the whole CD as a single file and generate cue sheet that will be needed to re-create audio tracks if I want to restore CD.
But the only loss, compared to ripping tracks as individual files is the first gap (pre-gap), which is usually silence anyway.
Therefore I decided to rip tracks as an individual files, so I can easily play them with e.g. WinAmp, and at some later point in the future I hope that I'll manage to get rid of MP3s and use FLAC files only. In that case, no re-ripping will be needed, because everything will be ready.
I will use Burrrn for restoring original CDs from individual FLAC files and cue sheet.
One other thing I noticed, in favour of burning individual files, is that it seems that the whole music industry will move towards selling individual songs, instead of the albums. And also, logically, I don't want always to buy CD, just because of only 2 good songs. I would rather buy just the songs I like. Therefore, having songs organized in albums, might be obsolete in 10-15 years time, so taking care that all the gaps are exactly ripped and preserved is probably pointless.
Also, preserving gaps has sense if you want to re-create the exact copy of original CD for backup purposes, but some topics I read, e.g. here suggest that it's very unreliable to keep copies on CD-R media because their shelf life is very short.

TAGS
For FLAC I will use Vorbis Comments as tag format because it's the only tagging system required and guaranteed to be supported by FLAC implementations.
For mp3 files I will include tags in ID3v2.4 or the highest ID3v2 version supported by Lame. There is no rule here. Some people like to have both ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags, just in case that some older mp3 players cannot recognize ID3v2 tags. But in that case they spend extra 128 bytes, which is not much. On the other hand, I found that some people don’t want to have tags at all, because they put all the information they want in a file name and want to keep file size to the minimum.
I chose something in the middle.
It’s worth mentioning, once you have info in either format, it’s possible to use tools to copy info from one format to another. ID3v1 format tags are at the end of the file (so it arrives last when streaming) and ID3v2 ones are at the beginning.

Explanation of ID3 tags can be found on wiki.

REPLAY GAIN
Different CDs are recorded with different levels of loudness. You probably didn’t notice, because you rarely leave several CDs to play in a row (you need jukebox for that), or change audio CDs every few songs. That means that if you rip and mix tracks from different CDs and then play them, it’s very likely that you’ll have to adjust sound level between tracks. Therefore, people decided that it would be nice to have “average loudness” calculated and stored in a track tag, so players which know how to read that tag can adjust volume automatically, so all the songs have similar level of loudness.
That “average loudness” parameter is named Replay Gain and can be calculated per track and per album and they are called trackgain and albumgain respectively.
It’s calculated using complex algorithms, taking into account human hearing imperfections.
Albumgain is important because there might be a song that is intentionally recorded with lower volume and shouldn’t be adjusted. More info on Replay Gain can be found on http://www.replaygain.org/.

REPLAY GAIN WITH FLAC
I have decided to calculate and write Replay Gain values in tags in flac files. If players support Replay Gain, as many newer ones do, it will make listening more pleasant. If they don’t, there will be no effect and no harm. The only drawback of including them, I can think of, is that they will increase file size for a few more Bytes and make ripping process slightly longer.

REPLAY GAIN WITH MP3
For adjusting volumes of mp3 files, I will use slightly different approach. I will use program mp3gain, which uses Replay Gain algorithm to calculate loudness of the track. But, instead of leaving the file as is (like for flac files explained above), and just writing calculated albumgain and trackgain in tags, I will directly adjust mp3 files for the albumgain value. It’s important to know that such adjustment is made losslesly.
The only danger is possibility for tracks to go into clipping.
The clipping happens when music peaks, after decoded to 16bit, 44.1kHz, get level higher than 32767, because such volumes cannot be reproduced when played. Therefore, decoder will cut them at 32767.
However, mp3 file can have stored such values and it will not be damaged, only the decoded wave would be.
Lowering/increasing the volume losslessly by mp3gain, you can create mp3s, which don't clip, or clip after decoding.

To help you understand, you could do this simple test.
Take a proper mp3 with max gain peak value below 32767.
Then increase the volume losslessly by mp3gain to values far above from 32767, to 50000 for example.
If you play such mp3, you will clearly hear clipping.
Then take this mp3 with values above 50000 and decrease the volume so they fall below 32767.
It will sound well again!
And if you lower it to the starting value, the resulting file will be exactly the same as at the beginning.
This approach takes an advantage of mp3 file possibilities and is better then method with storing Replay Gain values in tags, because it works with any player.
However, mp3gain leaves Albumgain and Trackgain tags empty (they should be 0 after adjustment anyway) , so in order to know that the file has been processed with mp3gain, I’ll write a note in a Comment tag.
Also, I’ll have to make sure that after adjusting gain, decoded file will not go into clipping.


FILE STRUCTURE
I had to decide how and where I will store the files. I've changed my mind several times already, and I hope that I've decided finally 
I will have two folders: FLAC and MP3.
FLAC will have folder structure Genre\Artist\Album\
Files will have names as TrackName-Artist. That's because, I think some MP3 players display filenames instead of Tags, and if they have a limited number of characters on a display it's better if they start with song name, rather then all start with e.g. Joe Cocker.
I don't see why I would need track number in a file name.
MP3 will have similar folder structure, but not having Album folder.
All the songs from the same Artist will be stored in a single folder.
FLAC ones are grouped by Album only because it's simpler if I want to re-create audio CDs.
I will never re-create audio CDs from MP3s.

RIPPING PROCEDURE
As I need to rip and encode tracks in two different formats, I plan to do it in a single go, so I don't rip CDs twice. For that purpose, I plan to use Flacattack

For protection from disk failure, I have my hard disks mirrored, which are now 2x250GB, so enough room for expansion and some other stuff as well.

I know that for most of the decisions I made there are no right or wrong answers, they are individual preferences.
Still, I would like to hear your comments why would you do something different way, while I still haven't started ripping. It's unlikely that I'll change my mind again, but I'm always happy to listen and learn  .
And, of course, if there are other "average" users that think similarly, I'm happy to post more detailed instructions how I set up software to work (if i manage to set it up  ).

Nik

*****************************************************************************************
From this point down, I'll try to document how to achieve what I want (the reasons explained above) going through the process step by step.
As I go through each step, I'll describe it, so I expect it to last several days, or even weeks if I get stuck somewhere and need some help.
Here we go!
*****************************************************************************************

Because of technical limitations (number of screenshots in the post), I have decided to write a guide in Word format and will try to post it later, when completed.

Introduction has changed and I uploaded finished guide here

Ripping strategy for "average" user

Reply #1 –
Quote
Lossless for preserving the quality of the original, which I will hopefully be able to use in the future, when it becomes widely supported by the hardware, but also as a source for re-encoding in some other loseless format if that format becomes market winner. In the meantime, I can use it as a source for encoding into lossy format as well. It's always easier to use these files as a source, then to search for a CD for ripping again.
For this format I chose FLAC. Although, there are no huge differences between FLAC and the others (Monkey Audio, Wavpack...), FLAC seems to have less demand on hardware for decoding, probably the reason why it's more widely supported by hardware, then the others. It's free, so no legal issues in the future, and has wide range of software tools already


It's a popularity contest that's reason why it's so widely supported. It takes like all of but three seconds to add a Wavpack decoder Bryant has optimized the compiles for just about every platform. Everything else is an excuse the surplus population is just looking for an easy way to create a lossless backup and FLAC is usually the preferred method.

Quote
For protection from disk failure, I have my hard disks mirrored, which are now 2x250GB, so enough room for expansion and some other stuff as well.


250 GB? I have a 20 GB and I have barely used up half of the space on it with my lossless album's and backup's 
budding I.T professional

Ripping strategy for "average" user

Reply #2 –
Quote
250 GB? I have a 20 GB and I have barely used up half of the space on it with my lossless album's and backup's


I've checked and I have 83GB free, with less then 20-ish CDs ripped so far (which I will re-rip anyway). I just wonder where's all that space gone. I know there are 80-ish GB in movies and 10-ish in photos, and some in software install files. Anyway, it should be enough, and once I sort audio, I'll start with video, but it seems that in that field the mess is even greater then with audio 

Ripping strategy for "average" user

Reply #3 –
Nik,

Awesome post.    I am in the same exact position, right down to being intimidated by how involved the process can be (it's frightening really).  I found the more I read the bigger this project became.  Ultimately I made the same decisions you did, save your folder naming convention. 

It was only last night that I decided to use REACT copy my discs to .flac and .mp3 and even that boggled my mind.  I almost decided on Flacattack because of the GUI but I saw so little discussion about it that I decided to go with REACT.  I have a thread opened now though because even though it's been made simpler to configure, it's still not simple enough for my little brain.  Did you look at REACT and MAREO?  Why did you choose Flacattack?

Only thing I haven't totally decided on was whether or not to use ReplayGain.  I noticed you didn't comment on this.  Did you forget it?

Also, are you ripping to individual tracks or an image that will be divided into tracks?

I really appreciate your post.  It's nice to know there was another average joe out there trying to get it done right without going off the deepend.

Po

Ripping strategy for "average" user

Reply #4 –
Sounds like you guys, Nik and powlaz, have your strategy figured out and just need to get after it.  Congrats!  It is a daunting process, no doubt, but rewarding once you're finished.

Here's some tips I can offer from my many years spent refining the process:
1. Naming convention
  a. Directory Structure: Artist ~ Year ~ Album
  b. Image and .cue: Artist ~ Year ~ Album
  c. Separate files: Artist ~ Album ~ Track # ~ Track Name

You might ask why I'm using tilde's (~)?  Well, take a look at any song and you'll never see, at least I haven't, a tilde in the title.  What's this good for?  Tagging, especially batch operations.  Say you want to tag based on filename.  If you use a dash as a field separator and the song title has a dash, then any batch operations get confused on the variables.

2. Album art
  a. Get it at the same time you're ripping.
  b. Sources
    1. Wal-Mart (500x500)
    2. Buy.com (500x500)
    3. Amazon (size varies)

I generally have my lossy and lossless files seperated into different directory structures.  For example:
\Music\Lossless\
\Music\Lossy\

Any questions...just ask.

Ripping strategy for "average" user

Reply #5 –
Here's my insight, if it is of any use.

I currently rip with my Plextor PX-760A using EAC, secure mode with C2 disabled and no offset, to cue/wav images. I may begin compressing them losslessly if disk space ever gives indications of getting short.

File naming: My Music\Artist\Album\nn. Title
Titling: Title: Subtitle [extra info e.g. demo, acoustic, live]
Multi-CD albums: Title CDn

I don't worry about any fancy capitalisation. I take the CD's catalogue number right off the disc or sleeve and put it into the cuesheet's COMMENT field. And that's about it! I may start using album art eventually, but that will probably be the limit for my needs.

If I needed (speaking in the past tense because I have lost my MP3 player ) to convert to MP3, I ran foobar2000 and LAME on my image files.

Ripping strategy for "average" user

Reply #6 –
Quote
I don't see why I would need track number in a file name.


when you cant utilise tags, this would save your ass.

a lot of older mp3 players sometimes read the files in alphabetical order by filename, so if you didnt have track numbers (BEFORE the track names) in your filename, it would play an album out of order.

might i suggest, for an artist, simply add the tracknumber before the title. if they are in seperate folders by album, this will do it. if you keep them in one artist folder, then in order to get them sorted right, maybe do Album - Tracknumber - Title. of course that doesnt help you with anything not reading tags....but thats the breaks ;].

Ripping strategy for "average" user

Reply #7 –
A couple of quick things:

- Consider ripping to FLAC and converting to MP3 as separate steps, rather than one process.  It gives you time to clean up your tags in FLAC , grab album art etc. THEN convert to mp3 in a batch process - plenty of software to do this. It will save time if you ever have to re-encode or decide to listen to FLAC directly.

- consider putting your FLAC archive on an external drive and not touching them again 'till you need them. If your archive is on your active PC, its just too easy to blow it away.

- if you ARE going to listen to FLAC directly at home, consider using a lower LAME setting for your portables (V1,2 or 3). In all likelihood You won't notice the change in quality on your portable and your save real space.

- for 200 CD's, choice of library software is not a big deal. Anything the the software doesn't do automatically can be done manually. Just know that iTunes does not support FLAC

- Tagging classical music is an artform and a royal PIA.
EAC secure | FLAC  --best -V -b 4096 | LAME 3.97 -V0 -q0 -b32

Ripping strategy for "average" user

Reply #8 –
Quote from: UrbanVoyeur on
A couple of quick things:

- Consider ripping to FLAC and converting to MP3 as separate steps, rather than one process.  It gives you time to clean up your tags in FLAC , grab album art etc. THEN convert to mp3 in a batch process - plenty of software to do this. It will save time if you ever have to re-encode or decide to listen to FLAC directly.


What happens to FLAC tags that they need to be cleaned up.  What software converts FLAC to mp3 in a batch process?

Po

Ripping strategy for "average" user

Reply #9 –
Quote from: powlaz on
Quote from: UrbanVoyeur on

- Consider ripping to FLAC and converting to MP3 as separate steps, rather than one process.  It gives you time to clean up your tags in FLAC , grab album art etc. THEN convert to mp3 in a batch process - plenty of software to do this. It will save time if you ever have to re-encode or decide to listen to FLAC directly.


What happens to FLAC tags that they need to be cleaned up.  What software converts FLAC to mp3 in a batch process?


There's nothing wrong with FLAC tags that they need cleaning per se. It's just that the music databases the rippers use don't always tag the music perfectly - or at least not the way you might like. And EAC is limited in its tagging options at the time of ripping. There are many tags like composer, album artist, different year for each track, disc 1 of 3, etc that you may want to  add later. This is especially true for classical music.  You may also want to correct misspellings and change genres.

Most of the library managers - Foobar, MediaMonkey, dbPowerAmp, etc, can re-encode FLAC to a different format and preserve the tags. As can several stand alone programs.
EAC secure | FLAC  --best -V -b 4096 | LAME 3.97 -V0 -q0 -b32

Ripping strategy for "average" user

Reply #10 –
Hi Po,

Quote
It was only last night that I decided to use REACT copy my discs to .flac and .mp3 and even that boggled my mind.  I almost decided on Flacattack because of the GUI but I saw so little discussion about it that I decided to go with REACT.  I have a thread opened now though because even though it's been made simpler to configure, it's still not simple enough for my little brain.  Did you look at REACT and MAREO?  Why did you choose Flacattack?


I choose Flacattack for no clear reason. I figured that there are a few tools for that purpose, and picked Flacattack first. I gave it a try (probably GUI appealed) and, of course, it didn't work at first. It was creating FLAC, but no MP3s, with no error feedback. After a day or two I found one post and put parameter "--ignore tag errors" and it solved problem. I think it's because I used some Genres that are not defined in MP3. E.g. I wanted to separate music in Croatian from English, so I defined Genre "HR Rock" for such CDs. Although there's a drop down list, EAC allows you to put anything under Genre, and I used that for automatically creating folders. Lame obviously didn't like it when creating MP3 tags.
If I haven't made it work for a day or two more, I would have switched to some other tool.

Quote
Only thing I haven't totally decided on was whether or not to use ReplayGain.  I noticed you didn't comment on this.  Did you forget it?


I didn't forget it, but I'm still not clear what should I do about it, without spending another week going into technical details. Because I'll use FLAC and MP3 formats, I will include it. In this ripping guide, it says that it's a losless operation for those formats, so no harm can be done.
Although, to be honest, I'm not sure how useful it will be. It will probabbly be fine for my collection of CDs to make them consistent, but I don't know what with songs purchased from various sources from the internet?
What if they don't have ReplayGain set?
I'll read a bit more about it, make my decision, explain it and edit my original post.

Quote
Also, are you ripping to individual tracks or an image that will be divided into tracks?

Individual tracks, explained in the original post.

Quote
I really appreciate your post.  It's nice to know there was another average joe out there trying to get it done right without going off the deepend.

Thanks
BTW, it seems that tags are subject on it's own, so I'll read a bit about them as well and try to make some "average user" decision about them.
It seems, I'm still not ready to go. 

Nik

Ripping strategy for "average" user

Reply #11 –
Quote
1. Naming convention
  a. Directory Structure: Artist ~ Year ~ Album
  b. Image and .cue: Artist ~ Year ~ Album
  c. Separate files: Artist ~ Album ~ Track # ~ Track Name


I will not use Year, because I don't see any artist having two different albums with the same name, released.
But, as I said, I'm not audiophile and my collection is small. So, if eventually I stumble across such case, I'll deal with it then. Most probably I'll put year in brackets in the name of album, manually. There's no point making my folder structure more complicated. It's complicated enough.
It seems that I'll stick to my original convention.

Quote
You might ask why I'm using tilde's (~)?  Well, take a look at any song and you'll never see, at least I haven't, a tilde in the title.  What's this good for?  Tagging, especially batch operations.  Say you want to tag based on filename.  If you use a dash as a field separator and the song title has a dash, then any batch operations get confused on the variables.


This is a bloody good advice, just the kind I'm looking for, from experienced users.
However, after a bit of thinking, I'll implement the idea in the slightly different way, if you don't see any problem with it.
I'll keep my filenames as decided before, but if I find any song, or artist, with hyphen, I'll use ~ there.
Why?
Because if I buy any player that has problem displaying ~ (which might happen, but almost impossible to check before you buy, because it's never declared which characters can be displayed), then my whole collection will have problems with it.
This way, I'll have problems only with particular song/artist and if I remember not to use hyphen (whether to use just ~ or just omit it I don't know), that should solve it. Coming from non-english speaking country, I've seen so many problems with displaying non-standard characters.

Quote
2. Album art
  a. Get it at the same time you're ripping.
  b. Sources
    1. Wal-Mart (500x500)
    2. Buy.com (500x500)
    3. Amazon (size varies)


Good hint, but I'll probably have to leave that for later. One reason is that I'll have to figure out how to put album arts into FLAC and MP3 files (if possible at all. But I don't know where else to put it. Just in a folder? In which format?). That's probably another few days to spend on, and I want to start ripping ASAP.
My Kiss player cannot display them anyway. Car stereo either.
The other problem is that about 25% of my CDs are Croatian, for which those sources are of not much use, and much more time will be needed to find them, if possible at all. I don't want to spend ages on sorting CD collection. I don't have time. When I buy new CD, I want to store it on disk and put in a safe place as quickly as possible. Process might be painful to set up (as we are just going through it), but later it must be simple to run.

Quote
I generally have my lossy and lossless files seperated into different directory structures.  For example:
\Music\Lossless\
\Music\Lossy\


Me to.

Although I will not follow all your advices, I still appreciate them very much.

Thanks,
Nik

Ripping strategy for "average" user

Reply #12 –
Quote from: NogginJ on
Quote
I don't see why I would need track number in a file name.


when you cant utilise tags, this would save your ass.

a lot of older mp3 players sometimes read the files in alphabetical order by filename, so if you didnt have track numbers (BEFORE the track names) in your filename, it would play an album out of order.

might i suggest, for an artist, simply add the tracknumber before the title. if they are in seperate folders by album, this will do it. if you keep them in one artist folder, then in order to get them sorted right, maybe do Album - Tracknumber - Title. of course that doesnt help you with anything not reading tags....but thats the breaks ;].


This is a valid remark, thanks.
But, I'll still omit it. 
That's probably the difference between me as an "average user" and you devoting much more time to your music 
You probably listen music mostly by albums, and I will try to listen by combining tracks from multiple albums (using playlists, or copying just a songs I like to MP3 player). In that scenario track numbers don't have sense and will be just confusing.



Quote
- Consider ripping to FLAC and converting to MP3 as separate steps, rather than one process.  It gives you time to clean up your tags in FLAC , grab album art etc. THEN convert to mp3 in a batch process - plenty of software to do this. It will save time if you ever have to re-encode or decide to listen to FLAC directly.


This is not clear to me. I want to make process as simple as possible to run. I hoped that I'll be able to rip to both formats correctly in a single go. It seems that I'll have to read more about tags.
What problems with tags in FLAC you think will appear, that needs cleaning?

Quote
- for 200 CD's, choice of library software is not a big deal. Anything the the software doesn't do automatically can be done manually. Just know that iTunes does not support FLAC


But I'm an "average user". I don't want to do things manually and spend too much time arranging my music.

Ripping strategy for "average" user

Reply #13 –
People use year in front of their album directory names, because it enables chronological sorting instead of alphabetical. I personally don't want to clutter the directory album name, so i don't use year there, but instead i use a sort string in fb2k which sorts by year for single artist albums(not for VA albums), as fb2k is my main interface for the albums and not Windows Explorer.

Ripping strategy for "average" user

Reply #14 –
Quote from: Nik on
I will not use Year, because I don't see any artist having two different albums with the same name, released.
But, as I said, I'm not audiophile and my collection is small. So, if eventually I stumble across such case, I'll deal with it then. Most probably I'll put year in brackets in the name of album, manually. There's no point making my folder structure more complicated. It's complicated enough.
It seems that I'll stick to my original convention.


Year is mostly for us folk who sometimes go through the directory structure (b/c that's how our mp3 players work or whatever) and like to see an artist's albums organized by release date.  Way to be hyper organized with your ripping.  It's inspired me to get back on the horse.

Ripping strategy for "average" user

Reply #15 –
Quote
There's nothing wrong with FLAC tags that they need cleaning per se. It's just that the music databases the rippers use don't always tag the music perfectly - or at least not the way you might like. And EAC is limited in its tagging options at the time of ripping. There are many tags like composer, album artist, different year for each track, disc 1 of 3, etc that you may want to  add later. This is especially true for classical music.  You may also want to correct misspellings and change genres.


Thanks,
Sorry, I asked for the explanation you already posted.
But, being an "average user" I don't have huge demands regarding tagging. I'll try to figure out what EAC's limitations are, but I'll probabbly be able to live with them.
Again, it has most with me trying to design process which is as simple as possible, hoping that one day it will not be only me in the house being able to put music from newly bought CD to server, so it can be played on hi-fi through the media streamer.

As I understand, I'll always be able to use some software and re-tag album, making it "perfect". 
Can you recomment some software for viewing/editing tags in FLAC files.

Ripping strategy for "average" user

Reply #16 –
Quote from: Nik on
Thanks,
Sorry, I asked for the explanation you already posted.
But, being an "average user" I don't have huge demands regarding tagging. I'll try to figure out what EAC's limitations are, but I'll probabbly be able to live with them.
Again, it has most with me trying to design process which is as simple as possible, hoping that one day it will not be only me in the house being able to put music from newly bought CD to server, so it can be played on hi-fi through the media streamer.

As I understand, I'll always be able to use some software and re-tag album, making it "perfect". 
Can you recomment some software for viewing/editing tags in FLAC files.

Nik,

I can now say from experience that REACT is a great tool for an 'Average' user.  It's not terribly difficult to configure but it also isn't the type of program that one can just open up and start using.  It's a GUI world because of the intuitiveness of the interfaces.  For anyone who is comfortable with command line stuff I've got to think REACT is about as easy as it gets.

Anyway, Tycho replied to one of my posts and got me through the entire process.  I successfully ripped my first album tonight the way I wanted.  I opened Media Monkey, played the songs and checked the tags while I was in there.  The tagging was great and my custom Comment even made it into the tags the way I wanted.  I've seen some odd things come off freedb before so what I've decided to do is go with the best information it feeds EAC and then clean and update any tags that don't seem right through Media Monkey. 

Another 'Average' user step in Tycho's program is it has a cover art downloader.  It finds the cover art for you, you choose the correct one, and it embeds the art into the .flac and .mp3 tags.  Worked like a charm. 

In a nutshell, it took me a couple of hours to configure REACT.  I didn't really get it the first time but with Tycho's help I spent about an hour on it tonight.  When I was done I loaded the CD into my drive,double clicked the shortcut for REACT (which opens EAC with REACT improvements),  pressed F10 and in a few short minutes I had a .flac and .mp3 copy of my album, properly tagged, including album art, in the folders I wanted them in.  NOW THAT'S THE AVERAGE JOE'S WAY OF DOING IT. 

I'm nowhere near experienced but I'm relatively sure I can help you configure the INI file in REACT if you get stuck.

PO

Ripping strategy for "average" user

Reply #17 –
Quote from: powlaz on
Anyway, Tycho replied to one of my posts and got me through the entire process.  I successfully ripped my first album tonight the way I wanted.  I opened Media Monkey, played the songs and checked the tags while I was in there.  The tagging was great and my custom Comment even made it into the tags the way I wanted.  I've seen some odd things come off freedb before so what I've decided to do is go with the best information it feeds EAC and then clean and update any tags that don't seem right through Media Monkey.
 

What do you use Media Monkey for? Just for playing files?

Quote
Another 'Average' user step in Tycho's program is it has a cover art downloader.  It finds the cover art for you, you choose the correct one, and it embeds the art into the .flac and .mp3 tags.  Worked like a charm.


What's Tycho's program name? REACT?

Quote
In a nutshell, it took me a couple of hours to configure REACT.  I didn't really get it the first time but with Tycho's help I spent about an hour on it tonight.  When I was done I loaded the CD into my drive,double clicked the shortcut for REACT (which opens EAC with REACT improvements),  pressed F10 and in a few short minutes I had a .flac and .mp3 copy of my album, properly tagged, including album art, in the folders I wanted them in.  NOW THAT'S THE AVERAGE JOE'S WAY OF DOING IT.


I'll follow your steps, shortly 

Nik

Ripping strategy for "average" user

Reply #18 –
Mediamonkey can pretty much do most all of the tasks internally except for secure ripping/cuesheets. I use it for everything except ripping now.

For ripping I would recommend dbpoweramp R12 *REFERENCE* version. Yes its not free, but it works great, is simple to use and with mediamonkey monitored folders (or manually rescan them if you use the free version), you can rip with whatever ripper you want and mange the files within MM.

Of course neither MM nor dpoweramp R12 currently support cue sheets, so that might be an issue.

Personally I would not consider any process involving cue sheets to be 'average', but your overall strategy sound good to me.

I use year and track numbers in my folders/filenames because of the already mentioned issues of explorer sorting and various devices which don't read tags to sort properly.

Ripping strategy for "average" user

Reply #19 –
Quote from: Teknojnky on
Mediamonkey can pretty much do most all of the tasks internally except for secure ripping/cuesheets. I use it for everything except ripping now.


So can foobar2000, and it supports cuesheets. I use cuesheets embedded in Wavpack files. You can do the same with FLAC files. I like it, it's nice and compact, each album is a single file, and it means I'll never loose the cuesheet (rendering the cd image almost useless). I transcode to Nero AAC for use on my portable, with a modern dualcore processor this takes no time at all (it can convert two tracks at once in the same time as it would take to do just one, foobar2000 exploits this).

Ripping is extremely easy, as foobar2000 has a built in secure ripper, which rips straight to wavpack with embedded cue, and even files it in my library directory structure automatically. It also allows you to edit the tags before ripping, which is worthwhile because freedb entries are quite often crap. And I don't like Genre tags.

The only problem is that I don't think many other players out there support embedded cuesheets. I've never tried playing my files in another player, so I wouldn't know.

Ripping strategy for "average" user

Reply #20 –
I agree about the usefulness of WavPack files (or others) with embedded cuesheets, but don't you miss the extra information which EAC would generate to a cuesheet, which foobar2000 will not? Examples are UPC/ISRC, (occasionally) FLAGS, etc.

Of course, I understand if you don't care about those, but I prefer to keep as much data from the original CD as possible (within EAC).  Actually, if a CD which I rip ships with CD-Text, I usually keep two cuesheets: one with the original CD-Text and another, if necessary, with the titles, etc. changed to match my "library" naming scheme!

Ripping strategy for "average" user

Reply #21 –
Yeah, i really hate that all the CDs with CD-TEXT that i have seen, uses this format :

Artist : ArtistName

Album : ArtistName  Album

I just change it, though, as i will rather have a "lossy" CD-TEXT re-production on burned CD-Rs, than having a stupid looking image file-name, lossy album directory name, ALBUM tag and playlist formating.

Ripping strategy for "average" user

Reply #22 –
Yeah, and a lot of them have "(Album Version)" at the end of every track title! Well, duh!  There are quite a few random spaces at the end of some artists / track titles as well.

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I just change it, though, as i will rather have a "lossy" cuesheet/CD-TEXT re-production on burned CD-Rs, than having a stupid looking album directory name, ALBUM tag and playlist formating.

You may be right . . . I might adopt this method eventually as well!

Ripping strategy for "average" user

Reply #23 –
Quote from: dv1989 on
Yeah, and a lot of them have "(Album Version)" at the end of every track title! Well, duh!

*LOL*  Yeah, you are absolutely right, i totally forgot about those annoying things too.
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There are quite a few random spaces at the end of some artists / track titles as well.

Yes, that too 
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You may be right . . . I might adopt this method eventually as well!

Well, your method is the most accurate one  I'm just personally not the most anal type, so i will rather change it to look correct, even though it's technically a "lossy" operation i.e. the CD-TEXT when burned back to disc

CU, Martin.

Ripping strategy for "average" user

Reply #24 –
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What do you use Media Monkey for? Just for playing files?

Yes.  But it also has the ability to fetch tag information and coverart from Amazon.com.  I figure if any place has the proper information about an album Amazon would be it.  It's an excellent media library tool also.  For the rest of the world it rates very well.  I've used several versions of Foobar.  It has an excellent feature set that you just can't find anywhere else.  Problem for me is that I like "flashy" players.  Good looking, busy, etc.  A couple of years ago I played a track in WMP, then played the same track in Foobar.  I just played it flat.  The song played in Foobar as if it had been equalized or processed.  It sounded outstanding.  Foobar is one of the other challenges I walked away from.  I've seen some good looking configurations of this software but have not spent the time to make one of my own. 

Strangely, I've had an attraction to Media Monkey for the last four years but every version I've run with the exception of this most recent one has caused my computer to lock up.  I don't know why I keep going back to it but I'm drawn to it.  I DON'T KNOW WHY!!!   

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What's Tycho's program name? REACT?

Yup.  I found it here in the forums.  In fact I believe that in the Validated News section theres a thread that leads you to the release.

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I'll follow your steps, shortly

Let us know how it goes.

Matt