[John151]

The wife suddenly and unexpectedly wants to put all of our CDs on a hard drive so she can download them to her recently acquired iPod.  Also, I have been planning on going the squeezebox route for my HiFi rig for some time now.

We have lots of computer harware, including close to a Terrabyte of hard drive capacity.  For software, I have been using Nero 6 for for burning CDs. but am not well versed in creating music files.  The wife ofcourse has iTunes.  

Any advice you can give regarding file formats, software, hardware, etc, will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, John

[kfr01]

That's a tough one, actually.

You'll definitely want to rip from cd to wav using Exact Audio Copy.

The next part is a more difficult decision.  For squeezebox I'd recommend FLAC, but Ipods don't support FLAC.  She probably wants to store as many tunes as possible.  

I would do this:

Rip to wav using EAC.

Encode one set of music in a folder called /wife/ in mp3 format.
Encode another set of music in a folder called /lossless/ in flac format.  

This method will take up more hard drive space, but disk space is dirt cheap and you'll both get what you want.

[ted_b]

Here's what I do.  I rip cd's to wav using EAC (no brainer, perfect rips, and grabs the tags, title info, etc from the internet via freedb).  I use the method called "copy image and create cue sheet" for an entire album per file.  Don't worry the wav file has a little sister pointer "cue" file that simply holds the title/track/song length info that was gleaned off of freedb).Then I take that perfect rip and do two things with it:
1)  using a simple piece of software called Daemon Manager I mount the rip (yes, daemon manager makes a virtual drive and all you do is right click on it, mount the cue file you just ripped, and then Itunes sees it as a cd and brings in the track info etc.).  It imports to Itunes at about a 20x rate (cuz it really isn't a cd but a perfect file) and I use 224 aac set up in iTunes (instead of mp3, for example, cuz it sounds sooo much better and compresses well).  After it's done, unmount via right-click, and mount a new file you ripped.
2)  After I have ripped 20 or so cd's I load them into the FLAC front end and encode them in FLAC in almost like a batch process, (meaning hit "encode" and then they compress into FLAC at about 1-2 min per cd).  

Then I delete the wav file (no longer needed) but keep the associated cue file (1-2kb), which I'll mention later.  The itunes library is on my main hard drive and doesn't use much cuz AAC is lossy compressed.  The FLAC library is on a second drive (or external, whatever) and although compressed, is only compressed about 45-55%...but completely lossless.  FLAC will be read natively by Squeezebox, and I keep a copy of the cue file (the small 1-2kb file that EAC makes along with the wav file that stores the title/track info) in a folder just in case I need to reburn a cd for the kids or the car, etc.  (Doing that simply requires loading flac files into the flac frontend and then decoding back into wav....again only needed if yo uwant the original wav file to burn a disc or whatever).  I keep another copy of the cue file in the flac library, but this cue file needs to have "wav" replaced with "flac" in line 3 or so of the file, where it refers to the sister file containing the actual music data.  Easy, just open it with notepad and make the change; takes about 5 seconds per file.  So now you have AbbeyRoad.flac, AbbeyRoad.cue (edited to point to AbbeyRoad.flac) and a separate folder with AbbeyRoad.cue (unedited, pointing to AbbeyRoad.wav, which will automatically be the name of you wav file if you ever need it).

All the software you need is freeware.  Flac front end can be found at
http://flac.sourceforge.net/

EAC can be found at
http://www.exactaudiocopy.org/

There are tutorials for setting it up all over the net.  My fave is
http://users.pandora.be/satcp/tutorials.htm

Daemon manager is here
http://www.daemon-tools.cc/dtcc/download.php


Hope this helps

[kfr01]

Ted_b has it right.  Do that.  

[John151]

Great info, guys.  Thanks.

I will give Ted's strategies a try, and see if I can master them.  I have since loaded a FLAC plug in for Nero, which is working well, and I am seeing approx 50% compression.   Bonnie Rait's "Nick Of Time" consumes 239 Meg.  Assuming this is a typical CD, I can then extrapolate that I can store approx 4 CDs per Gig.  Although I currently have plenty of drive space, I envision getting a 500 Gig external drive just for my flag files (if this all works out).  Thus, I can expect that the 500Gig drive will store around 2,000 CDs.  Cool!   The wife already has a 320Gig external drive for her iPod files, so my main PC's internal available capacity (!200G) should work well for an intermediate staging area.  


Again, thanks for the excellent advice.

[John151]

I am cooking with gas now!  I discovered the Mareo command line encoder, which allows for more than one codec to be invoked.  I now have EAC set up to invoke Mareo, which then invokes both LAME for MP3, and FLAC, with the target directories being different for each.  I also am able to create directories within the target agrea for the genre.  As soon as I encounter a new genre, bam, I get new directories for both MP3 and FLAC.  Way cool!

[ted_b]

I am cooking with gas now!  I discovered the Mareo command line encoder, which allows for more than one codec to be invoked.  I now have EAC set up to invoke Mareo, which then invokes both LAME for MP3, and FLAC, with the target directories being different for each.  I also am able to create directories within the target agrea for the genre.  As soon as I encounter a new genre, bam, I get new directories for both MP3 and FLAC.  Way cool!

Oh yeah, Mareo.  I forgot about that great little piece of software.  Never did try it, but read about it after I had put my process together.  Hell yes, if you are doing MP3's and FLAC you are made in the shade!  Beats my 9 steps to great health!