DbpowerAmp is what use.
“The best audio quality” and “mp3” are incompatible requirements.
I use AIFF, in iTunes.
I found a spare .5 Terabyte external drive so I’m currently ripping all my CDs there in WAV with the software that came on my laptop. It should hold the majority of our music collection, if not all of it.
From there I’d like to do a global or scripted operation to convert everything at once and send the MP3s to a single destination. Do any of the programs referenced above allow a single operation to convert everything in one swell foop?
DbPower Amp lets you select a folder of files to convert to mp3.
I haven’t tried subfolders. I had several hundred songs in a folder and it converted them easily.
Be sure to set it for the best encode.
I have struggled with this, and come to the conclusion that a nested data structure (not sure if that’s actually a thing, but that’s what I’m calling it) is not a practical way to store and retrieve classical recordings.
Say I have an album/program that I particularly love, and let’s say it’s a symphonic group, but with a notable soloist for some of the material. Let’s also say that all the pieces aren’t by the same composer. Let’s also say that the conductor is also notable.
There is no consistent/accurate structure that I can conceive of that leads to each track belonging in one and only one folder. Do I store tracks under album? Composer? Soloist? Conductor? Orchestra/group? Size of ensemble?
I used to worry about file structure much more than I do now, but the impossibility of coming up with a foolproof system finally brought me around to the idea that relying on meta tags and searching is just a better way to deal with this kind of data.
So, for classical, I just keep all CD rips in a folder called “classical” and then just let them sit there, one folder per album. Then I use iTunes (which I hate) to search and find the music I’m looking for.
This. So much this.
Also, re organizing music, tags work really well. You should, ideally, tag each piece with name of piece, composer, artist, album, genre, and whatever else you care about that your preferred music player recognizes. Then you can quickly search for whatever you like.
I used FLAC on an audiobook, and it wound up compressing 5 CDs of about 50 minutes each to where it would fit on on single CD.
And computers are now fast enough that there is no reason to use anything but the highest compression. It maybe took a couple minutes per disk.
Also, any good CD ripper will tag the files for you. And, contrary to what they are saying, WAV can have tags. It’s just less standard. But it works in Windows Media Player.
dbpoweramp is also great with tags: when the cd is ripped, it looks up four sources of meta-data and shows differences and commonality. With a few clicks you fix the tags to your liking.
I’m reviving this thread to inquire about the various FLAC converters. I’ve narrowed my choice down to these programs :
The first one is interesting in that it seems to be the most reliable and secure but it also looks like the setup is complex (I sure don’t want to mess that up) and really slow. The others look ok, too.
Which one would you recommend, bearing in mind that I want one that’s free, reliable and can tag the tracks accurately. Another one that I’m missing ?
I’d say Exact Audio Copy all the way. To me, the entire point of using the FLAC format in the first place is for quality, and EAC is the clear best choice for making bit-perfect rips. I found EAC from this article, and followed the linked instructions to set it up and it worked great. (EDIT: Re-reading that article, it appears that dbPowerAmp does the same thing, and has a nicer interface, but costs money. If you’re okay paying money for a ripper, that seems like a no-brainer choice.)
Story time:
Last December my car stereo died, so I ordered a low end ($100) new one to replace it. Unfortunately the hard winter made a huge backlog of people installing remote-start devices, so I had to wait until late January before it got installed. During those weeks I decided to dig into my music collection and get it all squared away, which I hadn’t done since the 90s. (It was mostly an unorganized mess of old 128kbps files from the napster era and various youtube mp3 downloads of varying quality since then.)
The new stereo has a usb slot in the front for playing mp3s from a flash drive, so I ordered a low profile flash drive from amazon and it ended up working great. The biggest issues I faced were the cheapo stereo limitations: [ul][li]It reads nested folders as part of the parent folder, meaning you only get a single list of folders[/li][li]It plays folders (and tracks? Not sure…) in the order they are on disk (FAT32), not alphabetically[/li][li]It doesn’t normalize the volume levels[/li][li]It reads the legacy 8.3 file names, which is only a display issue but I’m anal retentive[/ul][/li]My main focus during December and January was to write a “mix tape” program that would let me easily assemble and refresh the flash drive, including re-ordering the physical files on disk to play in the proper order. The GUI is essentially a spreadsheet with sortable columns, the ability to easily reorder rows, and a Transitions button to play the first and last 7 seconds of each track, one after another, to check the “flow” of the set list. (I could just use shuffle, but prefer a set order in the car.) Here’s a screen shot of how it looks.
When it copies the tracks to the flash drive for use in the car, it renames the tracks 01-57.mp3, 02-57.mp3, etc… and moves them around so they’re physically in that order on the disk. The stereo reads the ID3v1 tag info for displaying title/artist/album, but I can also toggle it to the folder and file name and just seeing something like “THEBE~01.mp3” bugged the crap out of me. Now that track (The Beautiful People by Marilyn Manson) shows as “16-57.mp3”, which is useful information.
After bulk normalizing all my old mp3 files with Audacity and copying them to the flash drive, I started thinking about quality. A few of them had always had a few hiccups here and there, but just thinking about how many times my 128kbps mp3 files had been edited over the years – losing quality every time – motivated me to try and replace them with higher quality versions. That led to FLAC, which led to Exact Audio Copy.
As it turns out, used CDs are cheap as hell, and even if they’re scratched up, EAC will usually get you a perfect rip of them anyway. So since early February I’ve been active on [noparse]swapacd.com and discogs.com[/noparse], ordering tons of old 90s CDs for ripping to FLAC. It’s been a super fun hobby, though my other free time activities have died on the vine since I started this project. (eg: My DVR is currently at 96%. Ouch!) On average, each CD is a little under $2. For example, I have two discogs orders arriving next week, 10 CDs each, one for $14 and the other for $15. (Both including shipping.)
My FLAC library is currently at 78 artists, 195 albums, 2830 songs, 69.27 GB. Of note is that the actual music I listen to is only 823 songs; most of those FLAC albums only provide 1-3 songs to my active collection.
Story #2:
Once I got the car stereo set up initially, and then started gradually upgrading the quality of the mp3 files to 320kbps as I rip new (used) CDs, I started thinking about how I play music on the computer. I’m an old-school desktop user, and spend a lot of time on it. (I’m a programmer.) So I wrote my own music player that would work exactly as I like:[ul][li]No matter what I was doing, if I start playing music, it resumes exactly where I left off[/li][li]It plays all my (823) songs once, in random order, before starting the list again[/li][li]If I add new songs to my active music list, they are automatically added to the unplayed portion of the current (random) set list, added in random order of course[/li][li]I can easily switch to listening to an entire album, then switch back to “all my music” and it resumes where it left off[/li][li]If I have a FLAC version of that song, the player plays the FLAC file instead of the mp3 file (And it lets me switch back and forth between them)[list][*]When playing a FLAC file, I can define fade in and fade out times to mirror the mp3 files, where I edit out long talky intros to live performances[/li][li]I can set Gain levels for the FLAC files (and mp3 files if needed) to normalize the volume level without messing with tag data[/ul][/list][/li]Earlier tonight I added Retrograde by James Blake to my active collection, though it was tough. I had to use Audacity to record it as I played the youtube video. (Gah!) I then added Overgrown to my discogs want list so I can rip a proper (and legal) FLAC version of it.
Anyway, I’m super happy with the player I set up. I’ve been downloading 600x600 album art from [noparse]albumartexchange.com[/noparse] to embed in the FLAC files as I rip them, and also embedding them in the 320kbps mp3 files I make from the FLAC files. The player then displays the album art if it’s available, which means I’ve ripped the CD.
Normal usage is a small, functional (albeit not pretty) bar in the top right-ish part of the screen (Image). That shows playing a FLAC file; playing an mp3 looks like this. As soon as I set up those format icons, I immediately felt irrationally prejudiced against mp3 files. I think maybe I find the logo abrasive, compared to the pleasing FLAC rainbow.
Clicking the down arrow button on the right opens the detail screen. (Image.) If the source album has been ripped to FLAC, right-clicking the cover art lets me jump right over to playing the album. Or I can choose any album from the Play an Album screen. (Image.) When playing an album, the details screen gets a set list window attached to the left of the cover art when showing details, letting me jump around tracks if desired. (Image.)
Anyway, sorry for the super long post. I’ve just been so enmeshed in music library maintenance / updating for the past three months that I had to share.
Just a word of caution: ripping so many CD’s is quite an effort. Putting the files all on a separate hard drive is the way to go, but I also recommend making a back-up hard drive for that hard drive (they do fail sometimes, as I found out the hard way).
Anyone ripping to AAC*?
I did a side-by-side listening session of Lossless, AAC and mp3… oh, and the original CD.
I could definitely tell when music had been compressed using the mp3 codex, especially at less than 256 kbps. Below 128, it was really annoying (besides clipping certain frequencies, I could hear artifacts – I liken it to a bad JPEG visually).
But AAC gave me files about mp3 size (and sometimes smaller), and I couldn’t hear the difference between the original, Lossless, and AAC.
So I’ve been using iTunes, ripping my shelves of CDs to AAC at 256 kbps. Looks like it’ll all fit on a 2TB drive, which is great!
Anyone have an opinion on this? Should I rip to something like FLAC for archiving? The only downside is that I have one friend who claims he’ll never listen to any of my music because it isn’t in .aiff format. Poor guy. He admits he can’t hear a difference, but he’ll be listening and the whole time he can’t stop thinking “This music’s been corrupted.” I just pat him on the shoulder and tell him he’s going to talk himself into hearing glitches in it.
*MPEG-2 Advanced Audio Coding files. What iTunes uses, but it’s not Apple’s codex, not proprietary.
You are not supposed to compress mp3 beyond 256 kb/s or what the “extreme” preset gives you, but you found that out yourself. Conversely, there is no strong reason not to use mp3 at those high bitrates (unless you can indeed “definitely tell” the difference).
To test whether some codec introduces audible artifacts or not, you are supposed to run a so-called ABX test. I never tried AAC, but this page of ratings seems to indicate it sounds OK at 128 kb/s (some recommend 160).
The only reason not to use FLAC is if disk space is precious. Otherwise, it is a good lossless format. Personally, I would stick with FLAC and ~256 kbps mp3/aac (when you need smaller files); no point in spending a lot of time trying to crush it down even further, just relax and enjoy your music!
I guess it won’t surprise you then that AAC was designed pretty much to do just that- offer better audio than mp3 in a smaller file size, particularly at lower bitrates.
Archiving in a lossless format like FLAC can give you peace of mind for converting to whatever format comes next, but really nothing is coming, at least not for a long time. By the time an AAC-beater comes along that makes you want to dust off those old drives containing your FLAC archives, ten bucks says everyone you know will already be happily subscribing to a streaming service, effectively mooting the need to archive.
Well, it is proprietary, it’s just not Apple’s proprietary.
That’s me trying to relate to my kids, who went from buying music on CD’s to pirating mp3s to buying AACs on iTunes to just streaming.
Now if you’re riding with them and you ask “What’s this song?” They’ll say “I dunno… something from Spotify’s ‘Indie Pothead’ Playlist…”
As a matter of fact, I ripped my first two CDs with EAC this weekend.
I messed up the installing process the first time, so that I had to uninstall/reinstall it. I’m still not 100% sure that I did it properly. It does seem to be working, though. I listened to the results (not the all thing just the beginnings & ends of a few tracks) and the FLAC files sound really good to me. They are also about 40% lighter that the WAV ones as expected, so I guess it’s fine. The only thing that worries me slightly is that I got reports that mentioned the rips were “accurate” but also said someting like “Blah, blah, blah… confidence level 91%…”. I guess I’ll leave it like this for now, though.
However, it must be said that it’s quite slow : about 40 minutes per CD, the process usually hovers around 1.5X-2.5X.
There are a bunch of numbers in the log reports; as far as I can tell, here’s what they mean:
Peak level
Loudest volume (for normalizing)
Track quality
How many reads it took. If everything checked out correctly on the first read for every sector, this will say 100%. If it had to re-read sectors to get an accurate rip, that % will be less than 100. I assume the equation is MinimumPossibleReads / ActualReadsNeeded. This number can be anything and still get you a bit-perfect rip. The higher the % the better condition your CD is in. Think of the % as telling you how likely it is to play correctly if you pop it into a CD player and hit play, where you only get the one read.
Accurately ripped (confidence #)
The # is telling you how many matches your rip (for this track) have in the AccurateRip database. Even a value of 1 is a good indication you got an accurate rip, since both you and some other anonymous person ripped that same track and ended up with the same checksum value. That’s highly unlikely if your rip isn’t accurate. The higher the number the more people got the same checksum. (Read as: This disc is more popular.) Essentially, if the line starts with “Accurately ripped”, you’re good to go. If it starts with “Could not be verified as accurate,” you may or may not have gotten an accurate rip.
Of note is that even inaccurate rips tend to be perfectly serviceable. Most data errors you get will be small, as in tiny fractions of a second, and those get replaced with silence that’s undetectable to the human ear. So I tend to just ignore inaccurate rip warnings.
For me personally, I keep the EAC log files in the album folder alonside the flac files. I rename them all to EAC.log. I also put a Cover.jpg file in every album folder, taken from albumartexchange. Pro tip: If you open an aax jpg in MS-Paint and “Save As” a jpg file, they crunch down to around 60% of the original size. (The aax jpgs are in 100% quality, while MS-Paint defaults to 95% quality.) I totally do that for all of them.
For sure. A plurality of my rips take around 15-20 minutes, but a substantial minority take 30-40 minutes.
Some followup points:
EAC reads each sector x times (8, I think?) and checks to see if at least half of the reads returned the exact same values. If so, it accepts that sector data and moves on. If not, it keeps re-reading that sector until at least half the reads return the same value. I’m unclear if it’s cumulative (ie: Does the second read need 4 of 8 to be the same or 8 of the total 16 to be the same?) but either way, once it’s satisfied that the sector is accurate, it’s very likely it actually is accurate.
Different pressings of the same CD can generate different checksum values in the AccurateRip database, and EAC usually (but not always) asks me to choose a pressing when I rip a disc. So if I choose the wrong pressing, the AccurateRip checksum comparisons can be misleading. (But anonymous other users might also have picked the same wrong pressing as I did.)
I hate the low-quality cover art images EAC embeds in the flac files (usually around 250x250) so I physically remove them using MP3Tag and replace them with 600x600 AAX images. Replacing the cover art for each individual track is a tedious process, so I wrote an AutoHotkey macro to greatly speed it up. That’s partly why I name them all Cover.jpg, to simplify the macro. If you’d like to do something similar, I’d be happy to post the macro code and explain how to use it.
EDIT: Almost forgot: I read somewhere that you’re supposed to let your CD drive rest for 15 minutes for every hour of EAC ripping. I don’t know if that means 60 on 15 off or 45 on 15 off, so I play it safe and wait 10 minutes between each rip.
Wow, thanks for the very thorough feedback. It sure clears things up 
!
I plan to rip 4-6 CDs per weekend (more than that and Mrs LEDS and the mini-LEDSes will be unhappy), so I should be able to stick to the rest period. But I didn’t know about it, so it’s good that you mentioned it.
The only thing that bothers me is that I didn’t get tagged FLAC files and I don’t think you can tag them manually. But it’s just a minor inconvience at this point, all the info I need is in the name of the file (which can get quite long, however).
Having at least two disc drives helps a lot.