Ripping 'em for the last time

This is kinda a spin-off from this thread. My CD collection is a mess. There is absolutely no organization and CDs are out of their jewel cases, getting lost, etc. The plan is to buy 3 200GB drives and put them in an array. I want to rip my CDs for the absolute last time. I just sucessfully paired EAC with Flac and got a file with tags and all that. Here's what my command line options are:

--tag=ARTIST="%a" --tag=ALBUM="%g" --tag=TITLE="%t" --tag=TRACKNUMBER="%n" --tag=DATE="%y" --tag=DESCRIPTION="flac 1.1.0" %s %d

Does this look good? Here is a pic of EAC compression options:


I would assume that the part about 192kbps means nothing to Flac. So, should I start ripping? Does an applet exist for Windows to Grab Flac files, convert to WAV, then convert to MP3 with LAME? It would be good if it could recurse directories and save the MP3 files in another desination with the same directory structure as the Flac archive and retain ID3 tags. It seems there are plenty bash scripts to do this, but none for windows. Using bash is not a deal breaker, but I usually don't have a linux machine in the house.

PS- I would probably put the 200GB drives in a RAID-5 array since losing all the files would be devistating.

plenty bash scripts to do this, but none for windows

Well, you could get bash for Windows, or a better shell, like zsh or ksh.

Well, you could get bash for Windows

Hmmmm.........

Go ahead, man... try opensource... the first hit's free...

If you're ripping for the last time shouldn't you be saving FLACs of the result?

Of course he should, but he also needs to work through this mass of .flac files converting them to mp3s for his empeg, doesn't he.

...or even better, cygwin, a complete POSIX/GNU environment for Windows. Extremely useful; reasonably well integrated with 'native' stuff, and you can choose to use as little or as much as you need (from shell only to gcc, Apache and X-Windows).

FWIW, I always found cygwin to be kinda hacky and not work all that well. It works, but it feels very kludgy.

You might want to check out uwin, too. It's not totally free like cygwin is, but it's free to download for your personal use, I'm sure.

Hm, interesting, the only 'kludginess' I noticed is directory mapping, and I use it as my primary interface to WinXP. Anyway, thanks for uwin pointer; I will take a look.

I installed cygwin and it's cool. I think it will prove invaluable to me in the future, but for this Flac to MP3 mass conversion project, it's a kludge.

My options as I see it:

• Write a windows program to do it. I could probably whip something up in VB relatively quick.
• Linux box. This is pretty easily done since I use Linux at work daily on our webservers.
• OS X. I quite sure bash (or some similar shell) exists under all the bling bling.

I think the VB route is the most likely. I have pieces done already that I programed in the past from other projects. I will make my stuff freely available when I'm done. I almost never finish a coding project, so we'll see how it goes.

I believe that you can write a windows shell script. ISTR that there are more features these days than in .BAT file days.

Yeah, true. I misunderstood the result of EAC. I'm just a silly non-Windows user.

I believe that under a proper *nix shell, this is just a single command line -- no script required, just a bit of xargs ..

Cheers

After spending precious at-work time on this, I think I have all the bits and pieces to put a VB program together. I just have to load VB on my home computer since I haven't touched VB in over a year. Let's hope it comes out OK.

Stupidly, I didn't bring any of my flac files to work and the sample file I'm using has the ID3v1 tags all screwed up. Writing ID3v2 tags seems to be working in VB, but the Winamp plugin doesn't support ID3v2, so who knows....

The issue is how to pass the tags around between the files, and I think that that makes a one-liner very hard, if not impossible. Certainly harder than writing two or three lines.

On the assumption that you've got ID3v2 tags on your .flac files (which is allowed -- the flac decoder explicitly skips them)...

peculiar:~> cat `which flac2mp3`

#!/bin/sh



echo Converting $1

echo to $2...



flac -c -d "$1" | lame --nohist --vbr-new -h -k - "$2"

id3cp "$1" "$2"

Admittedly, the lame command line could use a little work -- I've not used this script in quite a while.

Don't know how far along ripping you are, but there is a topic on HydrogenAudio about a multi-encoder, which encodes to multiple formats at once, here:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?act=ST&f=1&t=9198

Josh

p.s. see also http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?act=ST&f=2&t=9390