Flac to MD NOT using SS but SB instead

[1kyle]

Here's a neat way of getting FLAC into your MD and preserving track / album info at the same time.

Before you start

1) ensure you have your FLAC files properly encoded / tagged. Winamp or CDEX will do this. I prefer WINAMP as it uses the Gracenote for lookup -- freedb doesn't seem as good as it used to be for CD lookup.

2) ensure you have the FLAC front end installed ( it's free).

3) you need a copy of Nero or other CD burning software

4) you need a CD Virtual mounter --i.e you can mount an ISO / NRG image file as a virtual CD. Nero has this already built in.

Here's what you do

1) Run the flac front end against the tracks you want to load on to your MD. Use the DECODE function and keep each album in a separate folder. It takes just a few seconds to create an album from the flac to WAV even on a fairly modest machine.

2) Create an Audio CD from the WAV folder. Use an Image so you don't burn an actual CD.

3) Mount the image

4) Simple Burner will start as soon as you've mounted your CD and will get the CD info. This will show your album properly titled per track.

5) Transfer to MD at your preferred rate -- Hi-SP at 256 is more than good enough for most purposes. For Net Md use the available transfer rates.

6) dismount the virtual CD and so on.

Delete the temporay WAV files you've created afterwards.

No SS needed and creating a Virtual audio CD image takes literally between 10 - 30 secs for a typical CD.

If you are unfortunate enough to be using VISTA you'll need to make a Virtual machine running Windows 2000, Windows 2003 or Windows XP and run simple burner from that.

I have a special Virtual Windows XP machine just for this purpse --it also runs on Linux.

Although I have plenty of disk space I still think the compression (lossless) offered by FLAC makes it worthwhile -- you can get nearly 1500 entire CD's on to one of those tiny 250 GB WD passport USB disk drives with FLAC compression (roughly 2 1/2 times more than by using WAV).

Now if only MD would play and record native FLAC.

(Note to use Simple Burner you DO need to have SS installed -- or at the very least the Open MG module(s). Since it's a bit of a pain finding out exactly what you need just install SS complete - saves a lot of messing around).

Cheers

-K

Edited August 13, 2008 by 1kyle

[srizvi1]

sorry for the stupid question, but what exactly is flac? I've heard about it before.

[sinus]

sorry for the stupid question, but what exactly is flac? I've heard about it before.

Free Lossless Audio Codec

The best there is - I always use it ... (before recording to Hi-MD ^^)

...

I think it's still faster to type in track info by hand ... for me at least.

[Strungup]

sorry for the stupid question, but what exactly is flac? I've heard about it before.

Not a stupid question , FLAC is a way of LOSSLESLY archiving audio . Just like ATRAC ( Adaptive Acoustic Transcoding ) is a Codec , Flac is also a Codec

Flac Compresses the file , only without removing data , it works kinda like DBX noise reduction

Big signal comes in , gets the ^$% squeezed out of it into a DBX encoding , then comes back thru a DBX decoder expanded to original size without the noise

Flac Has to be played in a Flac capable player .

Edited August 13, 2008 by Guitarfxr

[srizvi1]

Thanks for getting back to me guys. I hope my question doesn't take this thread off topic, but while we're on the subject of lossless, I thought I could ask:

I have been wanting to get rid of all my CDs for a while now. In the era of mp3 players, its just so much easier going that route. I don't really use my MD for pleasure listening so it's really going to be my iPod and whatever future capabilities that cars will allow for my music needs (My minidisc is for recording purposes).

So that being said.. as an Apple user.. what is the best way for me to rip my music to ensure I've captured the most quality that I will not miss my CD when I get rid of it? Any advice or suggestions? Any better threads to check out?

[1kyle]

Thanks for getting back to me guys. I hope my question doesn't take this thread off topic, but while we're on the subject of lossless, I thought I could ask:

I have been wanting to get rid of all my CDs for a while now. In the era of mp3 players, its just so much easier going that route. I don't really use my MD for pleasure listening so it's really going to be my iPod and whatever future capabilities that cars will allow for my music needs (My minidisc is for recording purposes).

So that being said.. as an Apple user.. what is the best way for me to rip my music to ensure I've captured the most quality that I will not miss my CD when I get rid of it? Any advice or suggestions? Any better threads to check out?

The best way is to rip your CD's to a LOSSLESS codec like WAV or FLAC. DON'T USE A PROPRIETARY CODEC for archiving -- if support stops (aka ATRAC3) then you could be stuck with a lot of unplayable music.

WAV is fine but uses a lot of space. FLAC is LOSSLESS as well and compresses to about 2.5 - 3 times smaller files than WAV. Both these are OPEN (non proprietary) formats.

You can then convert these to any format if new codecs / music devices appear.

MP3, ATRAC, OGG etc are all COMPRESSED formats which means you lose some quality depending on the level of compression. This won't probably be too bad in a lot of cases but remember that if you need to do more changes then each time you edit / convert a compressed format you degrade it further.

That's why I'll keep the Original tracks in something like FLAC (LOSSLESS). Think of a LOSSLESS track as a Negative and a compressed track as a scanned copy. If you re-scan the scanned copy you will very quickly degrade the copies, however a decent negative should faithfully reproduce your photo as many times as you want without any degradation.

FLAC can be played by WINAMP etc or even on the SQUEEZEBOX BTW. (Squeezebox duet is brilliant even if expensive.).

Cheers

-K

Edited August 13, 2008 by 1kyle

[greenmachine]

FLAC is LOSSLESS as well and compresses to about 2.5 - 3 times smaller files than WAV.

Such high compression ratios are rare for me and happen only with some low level live recordings or similarly easy to encode material. More common ratios of commercial CDs are between approx. 50-60% of the original size (seechart). Very loud, high frequency rich content like modern rock/metal compresses even worse.

[raintheory]

...

So that being said.. as an Apple user.. what is the best way for me to rip my music to ensure I've captured the most quality that I will not miss my CD when I get rid of it? Any advice or suggestions? Any better threads to check out?

Apple has it's own lossless codec; "ALAC" aka "Apple Lossless Audio Codec"... You should be able to set it as default ripping codec in iTunes and rip yr CDs losslessly.

I prefer FLAC myself, but ALAC may be easier for your setup.

Edited August 14, 2008 by raintheory

[1kyle]

Apple has it's own lossless codec; "ALAC" aka "Apple Lossless Audio Codec"... You should be able to set it as default ripping codec in iTunes and rip yr CDs losslessly.

I prefer FLAC myself, but ALAC may be easier for your setup.

Hi there -- the trouble if you use a PROPRIETARY format is that you are "Locked in" to that vendor -- if it changes the format, adds rubbish like DRM or goes out of business (ok Apple so unlikely but it COULD get taken over by say M$ or another company) then you are stuck again with an incompatable music collection.

If you stick with an Open format (such as WAV or FLAC) you can ALWAYS convert these to whatever new devices come out in the future without having to re-rip your entire CD collection.

I NEVER buy music from Itunes or elsewhere -- first there's often too much DRM which makes it difficult in transferring music to different devices and secondly the compression is too high -- why should I pay for a relatively "Low Fi" 128 kbs mp3 compressed file when I can get the original UNCOMPRESSED and DRM FREE from a CD.

In addition if you DO buy "downloadable" music the tracks you've downloaded are stored on some anonymous corporations data base - and if you share these the transactions can be logged ("Ipod Police" I believe a previous topic refers to).

Stick with your own recorded music or CD's / Vinyl until people like Itunes supply music UNCOMPRESSED and DRM Free.

BTW of course using an open format such as WAV or FLAC means you can access and manage your music library on Windows, Linux, Macbooks etc. You are not dependent on any particular OS.

Cheers

-K

Edited August 14, 2008 by 1kyle

[theblueraja]

The few times I downloaded a FLAC album, I just used a simple freeware program that converted FLAC to WAV, then imported the .wav into Sonic Stage, simple as that. I'm not sure why it has to be so complicated, unless you're going to tell me I'm losing all kinds of quality going from FLAC to WAV...

As far as gracenote info, etc, I'd just re-enter the data into Sonic Stage manually if needed... like I said, I don't get FLAC files that often that it would really be an issue.

[srizvi1]

Thanks for the feedback 1kyle and RainTheory. Let me look into this some more and figure out what the best solution is for me.

btw - I just came across this on The unofficial apple weblog but haven't gone through it thoroughly:

http://www.tuaw.com/2008/08/13/play-flac-i...with-less-mess/

Edited August 14, 2008 by srizvi1