Basic ripping/music library questions

[jerrym303]

Hi,

I have my SB3 up and running fine with about 150 songs I ripped to Wav or Flac just to get started. I have several questions that will seem simple, but I have been trying to figure out for several hours now.

To get a flac file, I ripped to Wav in EAC, then converted to Flac using Flac Frontend/Flac.exe adding indicating it should add tags and replaygain info. Can EAC rip directly to Flac and add this info?

I cannot for the life of me figure out how to get Slimserver to recognize an album. Somehow, one of my albums (wav files) is recognized as an album even though the songs are just mixed in with about 100 other songs in the general music folder. Alternatively, I have put files in the hiearchy: Music Folder/Artist/Album Name/songs and they just show up as individual songs in Slimserver.

Did I do something in ripping that one album that made it get identified as an album? In Slimserver, it looks like I have two albums - the one that worked and "music folder" that has everything else.

My song titles have Artist Album Songname.flac

Thanks in advance

[JJZolx]

To get a flac file, I ripped to Wav in EAC, then converted to Flac using Flac Frontend/Flac.exe adding indicating it should add tags and replaygain info. Can EAC rip directly to Flac and add this info?

Yes it can. See the following page in the Slim Devices wiki for a pretty detailed guide to the setup for encoding in flac (2nd screen capture up from the bottom of the page): http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.cgi?EACInstall.


I cannot for the life of me figure out how to get Slimserver to recognize an album. Somehow, one of my albums (wav files) is recognized as an album even though the songs are just mixed in with about 100 other songs in the general music folder. Alternatively, I have put files in the hiearchy: Music Folder/Artist/Album Name/songs and they just show up as individual songs in Slimserver.

Did I do something in ripping that one album that made it get identified as an album? In Slimserver, it looks like I have two albums - the one that worked and "music folder" that has everything else.

If you were using Flac Frontend to encode the WAVs to Flac, then you may not have any tagging info in the files themselves.

SlimServer may be using its "guess tags" feature for that one track. It can guess at the album, artist, song title, etc. based on the folder and file names. It's not always reliable, so I'd definitely recommend properly tagging the Flac files.

[jerrym303]

Thanks for the help. I uninstalled and re-installed everything exactly according to the instructions and have re-checked my settings. EAC is still saving the files as WAV even though I tell it to compress and point properly to flac.exe.

Now, though Flac front-end, albums are being recognized. So, worst case, I need to rip in EAC and then encode to Flac in Flac Frontend. I ran FF mainly to test that my flac.exe is working.

[JJZolx]

Thanks for the help. I uninstalled and re-installed everything exactly according to the instructions and have re-checked my settings. EAC is still saving the files as WAV even though I tell it to compress and point properly to flac.exe.
That seems to be a common problem when first setting up EAC with Flac.

First, make sure you're either pressing the 'MP3' button in EAC when you rip (I know, doesn't make any sense, but it's the button to use when you want any kind of compressed output file), or use:

Action > Copy Selected Tracks > Compressed (or Shift+F5)

or

Action > Test & Copy Selected Tracks > Compressed (or Shift+F6)

The first is the equivalent of the 'MP3' button.

If that wasn't it, double-check your 'Additional command line options' section of the External Compression settings in EAC. An error there can cause Flac to fail. EAC rips a WAV file, then it hands the WAV to the Flac encoder. When the encoder fails to create the desired file for some reason, EAC will keep the WAV file intead of deleting it.

In the wiki page the Additional options are shown on two lines - make sure the entire string has been entered on a single line in EAC and that there are spaces between each option and parameter.

[Skunk]

EAC is still saving the files as WAV even though I tell it to compress and point properly to flac.exe.


Did you paste this:

-6 -V --replay-gain -T "artist=%a" -T "title=%t" -T "album=%g" -T "date=%y"
-T "tracknumber=%n" -T "genre=%m" -T "comment=EAC (Secure Mode)" %s

...into command line options?

...and put the full path to flac.exe e.g. C:\Program Files\FLAC\flac.exe instead of just flac.exe?

...and lastly, check the box to use external program for compression and other misc boxes shown here?
:http://wiki.slimdevices.com/plugin/attachments/EACInstall/eac_setup_external_compress.gif

If yes to all, consider DbPowerAmp :-)

[jerrym303]

Hi, thanks again.

I did originally ask for "compressed" when I ran it. After your message, I also pushed the mp3 button. The copy and save goes all the way through and the dialogue box says "compress track by external program" and the computer beeps. All I get is a wave file.

I checked my comments code and it is identical. I did discover that there was no space where the line break previously appeared. To look like all of the other instances of -T, I added apace before it.

I am pointing correctly to flac.exe and it is working. It works when I run flac frontend. To prove I was using the right flac.exe, I moved it. Two things happened:

1. Flac frontend no longer would run
2. The 'compression options" in EAC would not let me save changes saying that the path was wrong.

This seems like a lot of brain damage to do something that should be simple. I guess that I could start over with dbpoweramp, but then I need to start from scratch again.

Thanks again.

[jerrym303]

One more experiment: I removed the comments altogether - same result.

[JJZolx]

One more experiment: I removed the comments altogether - same result.

I still suspect it may be something in the "Additional command line options". Strip it down to only '%s' (without the quotes). This should give you a Flac file without any internal tags, at the default compression level of 5. For testing purposes you needn't do the whole album. One track should tell you whether or not it worked. Pick something short. :)

If that works, start adding options back. Each tagging option consists of a string such as:

-T "artist=%a"
-T "album=%g"

[jerrym303]

Thanks Jim. Unfortnately, I get the same result with %s

I also re-browsed to flac.exe and I went bsck through all of my settings versus the wiki.

It looks dbpoweramp is pretty cheap. Is ther any good reason to buy the "reference" version?

Thanks,

Jerry

[jerrym303]

I downloaded the trial for dbpoweramp and had it up and running in about 10 minutes. The default file naming looks good to me and it creates a file for each artist for me.

Seems like bid time-saver for newbies to me.

They also offer a bstch processor. I'm not sure if it is included. I wanted to ave mp3 alos, so I can just make a copy of my flac files batch process one copy of flac to mp3.

Thanks again for the help.