freedb and tags help

[Bruce S.]

I now have what must be a good interface working between EAC and freedb since I can retrieve album/track info under Database->Get CD Information From->Remote freedb. What is not happening is this info ever going anywhere. I thought the idea was that somehow this data is embedded in the header portion of the file being ripped to my hard drive. I then thought it would show up in the right half of slimserver identifying by name each track that is queued up to play.

Am I off here or do I have the right idea? What am I failing to do to get this 'tag' info to actually be of any use to me?

Compressing with 'flac' has not come into the picture,although I have done it. It doesn't work when compressing either.

[radish]

Compressing with 'flac' has not come into the picture,although I have done it. It doesn't work when compressing either.

So what kind of files are you creating if not flac? If they're wavs you're out of luck because that's the one format which doesn't support tags!

[tyler_durden]

EAC rips CDs to .wav files which do not support any sort of tagging. But EAC WILL name the files based on the freedb song title data, depending on how you have set up your library.

If you use flac to compress the .wav files, you can then attach a tag with all the freedb info. The flac frontend comes with a program called TAG that creates and fills in the tags automatically. The tags get filled from the directory structure and file name of each song you compress (which came from freedb).

Here's what I did to automate the process:

Open EAC and press the F9 key. Under the "directories" tab, enter the your music library base directory (like d:\music). Under the filename tab, enter your desired library and filename structures into the box using the appropriate abbreviations. I use this:

%B\%A\%Y - %C\%N - %T

When I rip a CD, the wav files will go into the following directories:

d:\music\genre\artist\year - cdtitle\trackno - songtitle.wav

The genre, artist, year, cdtitle, trackno, and song title all come from freedb (when they are there and correct).

Now open flac using the flac frontend program. Click "Tag Conf." Select custom under filename scheme, and enter this into the box:
G/A/Y - L/N - T

Now when you compress a file, the flac frontend will pass this info to the TAG program (comes with flac frontend) and will automatically fill in the tag for each file.

I have flac set to delete the input files and store the output files in the same places as the input files. That makes it all nice and automatic and neat for display on the SB3.

You could automate further by having EAC call flac immediately after ripping a disc, but I think that can lead to tag editing headaches when you rip a "various artist" type CD. I usually rip a bunch of discs, clean up the freedb info as needed, then when I get tired of ripping, start flac and do a bunch of files in one shot.

You can adapt this scheme to any library structure you want. You may need to tweak SB3 to make sure things are displayed correctly, so whatever scheme you use, try it first with a disc or two and make sure you get the set-up you want with SB3.

TD