Overnigth batch .wav -> .flac ?

[Old Guy]

I may be asking impossible here. Thanks to many knowledgeable posters and those posts, I am finally getting a picture of how to rip CD in .flac using EAC. I will do so going forward for more usefullness of SB2. Needless to say, I am no-clue type of user.
The problem I now face is what to do with the hundreds of CDs I have already ripped in .wav. Is there any way to convert those .wav files to .flac in batch mode? I think I can do file-by-file or CD by CD "manually", but there are hundreds and I would prefer if it could be done "automatically" no matter how long it might take. Again, I am really a no-clue type of guy and please be gentle!
Ken

[PAUL WILLIAMSON]

>>> Old.Guy.1nqylc (AT) no-mx (DOT) forums.slimdevices.com 04/19/05 1:47 PM >>>
> The problem I now face is what to do with the hundreds of CDs I
> have already ripped in .wav. Is there any way to convert those
> .wav files to .flac in batch mode?

dbPowerAmp with the flac plug-in. I do this all the time. I now have

two formats (no loss FLAC and little loss mp3), but I use dbPowerAmp
on my Windows box to do this. I think you can do it in batch mode
as well.

Also, I think Pat Farrell and a few others have written how-to's
for this general issue.

Paul

[Old Guy]

Thanks. I just checked it out. Maybe promising, but not too clear to me whether I can convert all thousands of .wav files in hundreds of folders (normally, CD title under artist name folders) to .flac on the fly with one operation? I mean, I do not wish to come back to PC screen to do the next CD every 15 minutes, but rather sleeping in bed. Sure, it is OK to devide the task over the week or so. Thanks again. I am beginning to have hope here. I also checked some of Pat threads and sites but they were not clear with respect to this specific point. I truly appreciate any help here! Ken

[JJZolx]

Thanks. I just checked it out. Maybe promising, but not too clear to me whether I can convert all thousands of .wav files in hundreds of folders (normally, CD title under artist name folders) to .flac on the fly with one operation? I mean, I do not wish to come back to PC screen to do the next CD every 15 minutes, but rather sleeping in bed. Sure, it is OK to devide the task over the week or so. Thanks again. I am beginning to have hope here. I also checked some of Pat threads and sites but they were not clear with respect to this specific point. I truly appreciate any help here! Ken

You realize, of course, you'll have no tags within the FLAC files if you automate the conversion from WAV? IMO, SlimServer falls pretty flat on its face when trying to catalog files without tags (but you've probably noted this with your WAV files).

You could go back and tag the files later, but if you're going to manually go through each album you might just as well manually convert and tag the files in the same operation using something like FLAC Frontend.

Unless of course someone has an idea of how to also automate the tagging. A script could probably derive the album and artist names from the directory structure. If you have a consistent file naming convention you might also derive the track number and track title. Hmm... Now that I think of it, a tagging vbscript for Windows would actually be pretty easy. Tagging of genre and year probably wouldn't be doable, though.
________
Kawasaki ZR750K

[pfarrell]

On Tue, 2005-04-19 at 11:27 -0700, Old Guy wrote:
> whether I can convert all thousands of .wav files in hundreds of
> folders (normally, CD title under artist name folders) to .flac on the
> fly with one operation? I mean, I do not wish to come back to PC

Yes, it is easy to do.
Assuming you are on a Windows box, get Flacfront end.
It is free, etc. tell it to compress as many files as you
like, I usually do 10 or more CDs at a time while I sleep.

And flac front end will call 'tag.exe' what will set
the proper tags for you from the directory structure

Some hints are on
http://www.pfarrell.com/music/slimserver/tips.html


You can drag and drop files into the flacfrontend GUI.
You can drop a whole album worth at one time.

--
Pat
http://www.pfarrell.com/music/slimse...msoftware.html

[Old Guy]

Pat, thanks.
I just tried it. It's relatively easy. But I realized that I would have to manually adjust somewhat anyway. I am getting a hang on it. It will ba a long project, for sure. I wish I had know better about Flac back when I ripped whole my CDs!

By the way, about this "Level", what would be the difference between, say, 6 and 8? 8 takes much longer than 6. Is it just the difference of the compression ratio? The bit integrity is not affected, right?

[pfarrell]

On Tue, 2005-04-19 at 20:41 -0700, Old Guy wrote:
> I just tried it. It's relatively easy. But I realized that I would
> have to manually adjust somewhat anyway. I am getting a hang on it.
> It will ba a long project, for sure. I wish I had know better about
> Flac back when I ripped whole my CDs!

It is a long effort. I did over 700 CDs, it took roughly a month,
but I did it only during otherwise wasted time

I found it was faster for my time to extract a bunch of CDs to wav,
and then compress them at night. I could feed the disks faster
that way. The process became limited by the speed of the CD reader,
and not the speed of my CPU.


> By the way, about this "Level", what would be the difference between,
> say, 6 and 8? 8 takes much longer than 6. Is it just the difference
> of the compression ratio? The bit integrity is not affected, right?

Actually, Flac level is much less important than compression ratio.
You are correct, the bit integrity is not affected at all.
Flac decompresses to the original PCM data (.wav file format)

What the level does is control how hard the compression algorithm
tries to compress. It does all sorts of waveform testing, to see
if it can do a better job. It takes tons and tons longer to
use a higher level, and makes a tiny, small or insignificant
improvement on the compression ratio.

Remember, Flac is designed to be asymmetric. It takes a long time
and fairly interesting algorithms to compress, and takes very
little time and very simple algorithms to decompress.

Since I do the compression overnight, I set it fairly high, but
that is mostly because the computer will waste cycles anyway,
not that I've found a big improvement.

It would not be all that hard to write a perl script or
equivalent to do a better job of globbing together many
directory trees, but I never felt that the semi-manual
way was all that painful.

the 'tag.exe' program that comes with flacfrontend is pretty
simple, you can run it at any time, after the file is compressed, etc.
if you find it didn't do exactly what you want


--
Pat
http://www.pfarrell.com/music/slimse...msoftware.html

[Old Guy]

Pat,
Again, thank you very much.
I am not an IT expert, so I found "Tag&Rename" and am pretty happy with it. It will be a long way ahead, but I am sure it will be rewarding for use with SB2. Tag&Rename seems to be useful for classical music tagging which are majority of my collection.