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Poll

Are you ripping to one file per album, or individual files for each track?

One file per album with cue sheet.
[ 84 ] (21.2%)
Individual files for each track with cue sheet.
[ 58 ] (14.6%)
Individual files for each track without cue sheet.
[ 254 ] (64.1%)

Total Members Voted: 473

Topic: Are you ripping to 1 file/album or multiple files? (Read 27836 times) previous topic - next topic
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Are you ripping to 1 file/album or multiple files?

Reply #50 –
I rip/encode one file per track, with no cuesheet, for the reasons of...

1.  I don't think the FLAC player in my car will read cuesheets anyway.

2.  Easier to rearrange music, make compilation playlists and transcode individual tracks.

3.  Better data integrity.  As someone said earlier, if a file gets corrupted, it's only one track instead of an album.

4. FLAC is inherently gapless, so no need to encode an album to one file to overcome gaps between tracks.

Are you ripping to 1 file/album or multiple files?

Reply #51 –
Can you take individual flacs + cue sheet and turn them into the kind of EAC image that can be mounted by DAEMON Tools?  If so, how?

Are you ripping to 1 file/album or multiple files?

Reply #52 –
Quote
I use both.

A cue/ape for archiving/transcoding, and individual .mpc files to store on the hdd.

++

Except I rip to single file FLAC / CUE, then transcode to individual MP3 files at --alt preset standard for portable use.  If you're wondering, if you rip into a single file, then load the .cue into Foobar, when you run the "convert" process in Foobar to transcode to a lossy format, it will split the tracks for you and tag each one properly.  If you want to transcode to another format but want to keep it as a single file, don't load the .cue, just load the audio file itself (the playlist will then only show a single entry for the entire album instead of showing each "virtual" track), and transcode that.  It works like a charm.  I find this the best method because I have my single file album images in FLAC for archive purpose, and traditional mp3s split into separate tracks for portable usage (one of these days I'll get an iPod  )

Are you ripping to 1 file/album or multiple files?

Reply #53 –
BTW, here's the output from EAC



And here's the result after Foobar parses the .cue and transcodes the file



Look in the address bar and you'll notice the directory structure is exactly the same except the top level directory is "D:\My Music\MP3" in the second image.  Foobar generates that directory structure for me automatically based on the tag information.  Open up the Foobar options and go to the diskwriter section.  For "Output Directory" I have:

"D:\My Music\MP3"

and for "Output File Name Formatting" I have:

"%ARTIST%\%DATE% - %ALBUM%\$num(%TRACKNUMBER%,2) - %TITLE%"

Make sure you have "Create Subdirectories" checked.

Are you ripping to 1 file/album or multiple files?

Reply #54 –
Quote
Can you take individual flacs + cue sheet and turn them into the kind of EAC image that can be mounted by DAEMON Tools?  If so, how?

No.  AFAIK Daemon tools will only work with .wav + .cue, but not with any compressed format.  Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

Are you ripping to 1 file/album or multiple files?

Reply #55 –
the last time i did a big set of rips i actually did index-based extraction and then encoded to mp3--the reason for this is that i wanted to see the structure of the cds, and also have total control over playing/not playing the pregap etc.    also i wanted hidden tracks shown clearly without having a different format for just one or two discs..

of couse, this makes your playlist look confusing (unless you blank out the 0x.00 entries) and also makes CDDB type lookups useless...  what i really would like is to see software (winamp? foobar? helium? jriver?) actually use the cuesheet to emulate a real CD-player's behaviour (i.e. alwasy seek to index 1, show negative numbers on index 0)---does anyone know any way whatsover to do this (no matter how ridiculous??)??

Are you ripping to 1 file/album or multiple files?

Reply #56 –
I think I have actually found the best of both worlds.  What I do is rip the CD to one flac file per song but get the cue sheet for the image.  If I go into foobar and convert an album to wav using single file output then you have exactly the image that EAC would have ripped for you.  I have verified this with 4 or 5 CDs (some of which have gaps and some of which do not) using the compare wav feature in EAC. 

I think this is the way to go.  It's easy to conver back to one file and burn a backup cd if you want yet you still get the compatibility with all of the media players that do not yet support cue.  Also, it is very easy from this point to mount the image in daemon tools and use whatever program you want to convert the files as needed. Anyway, if anyone has a better idea, please let me know.

Are you ripping to 1 file/album or multiple files?

Reply #57 –
Quote
the last time i did a big set of rips i actually did index-based extraction and then encoded to mp3--the reason for this is that i wanted to see the structure of the cds, and also have total control over playing/not playing the pregap etc.    also i wanted hidden tracks shown clearly without having a different format for just one or two discs..

of couse, this makes your playlist look confusing (unless you blank out the 0x.00 entries) and also makes CDDB type lookups useless...  what i really would like is to see software (winamp? foobar? helium? jriver?) actually use the cuesheet to emulate a real CD-player's behaviour (i.e. alwasy seek to index 1, show negative numbers on index 0)---does anyone know any way whatsover to do this (no matter how ridiculous??)??


Have you tried the Subtrack tagger in Helium? It can load cuesheets and save to a custom tag. Then you can play the file in Radon (Helium's player) and see information for the currently played subtrack and easily skip to another subtrack. Click here to view some screenshots

Are you ripping to 1 file/album or multiple files?

Reply #58 –
I use one Flac file per track, no cuesheet. Of course, Flac isn't supported by iTunes but you do have the option of using VLC (Mac OS X native) or XMMS (via Fink with X Window installed). As I just remarked in another thread, I rip by doing the following:

1. Rip the CD using CDDA2WAV with paranoia turned on.
2. Encode tracks to both Flac and MP3 (using lame --preset standard).

This is mostly automated with a Bash shell script. I also have a shell script to transcode Flac to MP3 with tags intact; adapted from a script I found in these forums.

(I swear that reading this board is the only time that I wish I had a Windows PC instead of a Mac. The Mac could really use programs like EAC and Foobar2K.)

Are you ripping to 1 file/album or multiple files?

Reply #59 –
heidgert: I was excited by helium's subtrack capabilities, but i can't get them to work for anything other than a Single-Wav cuesheet... what i have are rips of mp3s with gaps appended on the ends, (which will at least emulate proper CD seeking on my portable) and I was hoping for software to be able to read my CUE and know when to switch into negative numbers as it neared the end of the track, the way a CD player does...

Are you ripping to 1 file/album or multiple files?

Reply #60 –
Quote
As I understand it EAC appends the gaps to the previous track by default. If the gaps are included in the tracks why even bother with a cue sheet when ripping to multiple files?

So if you are interested in making an exact copy of the original CD, you should just be able to burn the wavs directly to a CD after setting the gap setting to zero on your burning software.

Is this true? I also didn't understand the point of having a cue sheet if the codec you are using is inherently gapless (flac, mpc, etc.)

How do you go about storing the cue sheet as part of the flac file itself?

Are you ripping to 1 file/album or multiple files?

Reply #61 –
Quote
Can you take individual flacs + cue sheet and turn them into the kind of EAC image that can be mounted by DAEMON Tools?  If so, how?

I'm not sure about with individual files, but I created a single mpc file with a cue sheet using EAC and was unable to load it with Daemon Tools.

Are you ripping to 1 file/album or multiple files?

Reply #62 –
Quote
Is this true? I also didn't understand the point of having a cue sheet if the codec you are using is inherently gapless (flac, mpc, etc.)

Yes, its true that EAC does this by default. If you want a closer to perfect copy, you can turn this off, and let a cue sheet handle the gaps, instead of adding silence to your tracks.

Quote
How do you go about storing the cue sheet as part of the flac file itself?

I've been using matroska for this

Are you ripping to 1 file/album or multiple files?

Reply #63 –
EDIT

A few questions:

1) How do you force EAC to not append gaps to the previous track?

2) Is this what is most commonly done when using multiple files with a cue sheet?

3) What technique should I use for creating the cue sheet?

Maybe somebody could describe in detail how they go about creating multiple files with a cue sheet and what settings (if any) they change in EAC for this process.

Any help is greatly appreciated. I'm also about the archive my CDs and really only want to do this once.

Are you ripping to 1 file/album or multiple files?

Reply #64 –
Quote
1) How do you force EAC to not append gaps to the previous track?


Whether to leave out gaps, append to previous or append to next track as well
as how EAC creates the cue sheet is under the 'Action' menu heading.

Are you ripping to 1 file/album or multiple files?

Reply #65 –
Quote
Yes, its true that EAC does this by default. If you want a closer to perfect copy, you can turn this off, and let a cue sheet handle the gaps, instead of adding silence to your tracks.

[span style='font-size:21pt;line-height:100%']BE CAREFUL[/span] doing this!  Not all gaps are silence!  They could contain audio!