So I purchased the software over the weekend. Unfortuately I don't yet have an application to view the stuff in so I'm not able to tell how fussy I'm going to be about things like different sized album art like you mentioned because I could see as I was ripping some the album art file sizes differed ranging from like 300x300 up to 1000x1000. I do like that you could add multiple images like back covers etc. and take an image directly from the scanner by the looks of it. I didn't experiment with this yet though. Do you know if you can add additional images or change your default choice once the album has been ripped? I don't even know what application would be used for that.
I ripped a number of albums with minimal Flac compression i.e. the 0 setting and some with the highest i.e. 8. I'll probably do some in the uncompressed option as well. Does any of this have an impact on the end result i.e. audio qualty or is it literally just how small or large you want your files to be since in the end all of the options are lossless.
WAV vs FLAC or other lossless compression sound quality has been debated in the past. I remember some series of articles in one publication where the author tested WAV vs FLAC vs FLAC converted back to WAV. For me, I can't tell any difference. I use FLAC and the default compression size that dbPoweramp sets.
I can't speak for Mac. If you're using windows, you can examine the folder/file structure just as you would any other computer data files, using the Windows Explorer. For all my album artwork, I download from
www.AlbumArtExchange.com. My preferred size right now is 1000x1000, but I have no technical basis for that choice. In addition to the image size, you'll notice the file size of the image can change dramatically. One 750x750 file may be 80KB, while another may be 1.2MB. That is due to compression. Much like mp3 files, image files can be compressed and made much smaller, but you will lose some detail. The more it's compressed, the more detail is lost. I'm more concerned with the image quality than the image size. After all, most software interfaces will resize the image anyway, just as Chris said the BDP interface does.
You can then go into Windows Explorer into a folder that contains all the FLAC files from one CD. Select all the files. Right click your mouse and select "Edit ID-Tag". From there, you can remove and add album art to all of the selected files. If you wanted to add or change the album art for just one file, just select only that file.
Once you decide how you want to store your collection, it becomes a pretty smooth process. I had to write down exactly what I did though. After I ripped my existing library, it was several months before I had more discs to rip. By that time, I didn't remember exactly what I had settled on. Fortunately for me, I kept notes and was able to get back to it with little stress and relearning.
- Garrett
The author of dbPoweramp ("Spoon") was pretty responsive to posts in the forum he runs for dbPoweramp too. If you run into a problem or have a question about the software, you can try there too.
https://forum.dbpoweramp.com/forumdisplay.php?9-dBpoweramp
