Audio Directory structure...HELP before I make a big mistake

[jmv]

I am about to start ripping my CD library to use via Xlobby. I am using EAC to rip the tracks in .wav.

How should I name the files (ie Artist - Track - Track no.wav and how should I set up the dirctory strucutre (ie CD Rips\Prince\Purple Rain\*.wav) in order to integrate best with XLobby playback.

Also, how do I go about getting covers?

thanks,

jmv

[Colby]

You are crazy to ripp your collection to .wav. why not a compressed version called MP3, or WMA. I understand EAC makes an exact copy but if youre only going to be playing music from your computer why waste the space? 2 albums = 1 gig@.wav. .mp3= 1/10th the size. If I ripped everything as .wav I would need like 300 gig just for music; why do that? I still have the cd if I need to make and exact duplicate, which EAC recomends anyway. I have no complaints about my compressed music it is still very high quality, and I cant audably hear a difference on my high figh system.

But to answer your question. Xlobby will read an id3 tag great. So if you name your file artist-tack but the id3 tag has albumname, track#, year etc. than it will show up in xlobby. All of my mp3s are done this way. I also have one folder for evey artist and in it one folder for every album. But I rip with WMA, and cyberlink mp3 powerencoder so setting this up was easy fa-shneezy. automatic.

[archerkit]

If quality is a concern, go with either FLAC or WMA-lossless. I have a few hundred CDs already ripped with LAME/VBR, but I'll be redoing them in one of the two. Storage is cheap. On the other hand quality is in the ear of the listener.

On the root, I have all of the artist names.

Within each artist folder are the albums.

So It looks like:

Diana Krall
--Diana Krall - Live In Paris
----Diana Krall - Live in Paris - 01 - I Love Being Here With You.mp3
----Diana Krall - Live in Paris - 02 - Let's Fall in Love.mp3

etc.

To get the covers and tags, I use Tag & Rename. It can pull the info from allmusic.com to populate your tags and d/l the cover art.

[3rdman]

What I've done was allow WMP9 to organize it for me. I rip MP3 to a folder and the program takes care of the rest by automatically placing them in directories created by the program as well as automatically download the cover art. I'm sure that Winamp or J river would do the same. But, really don't use WAV...you'd be using up approx. 700mb of space for every CD ripped.

[Tracie]

jmv,
You won't get tagging support with wav, that's one reason that I didn't use it. Personally I use JRiver to rip/encode to .ape since that's supported within Winamp via the Monkey's Audio plugin. Very easy to use & you get secure ripping that rivals EAC's. For lossless you could use that or FLAC, or wma lossless (I'd be concerned about the DRM thing associated with wma, but that's just me).

As far as covers go, you can get them using the downloader within Xlobby or just copy & paste from Amazon (I do that most of the time). For hard to find covers, I use the Google image search - there's almost nothing that can't be found with that.

[jmv]

folks,

Thanks for all the feedback. I was going .wav because I have a limited CD collection (~250) and lots of HD space (~2 TB). But it sounds like that won't work for some of this tag stuff. Can some one explain tag and rename or how you would do it via an .ape?

Thanks,

mv

[Roscoe62]

HI JMV,

I'm in a similar situation to you. I have around 250-300 CDs that I have to rip and I wanted to make sure that I "get it right first time".

Anyway, I have gone with the application EAC (exact audio copy). It's a top quality ripper, but it will also rip to the APE format. The great thing about formats like APE and FLAC is that they are lossless. The files end up being 50-60% the size of the original wave file, but no bits are lost. So on high quality hardware you should not be able to tell the difference between the APE file and the original CD track or the WAV. There are many threads on the AVSForum about the merits of lossless over MP3, however as someone in this thread already stated, the quality is in the ear of the listener. I personally think it's worth it.

EAC is able to grab all of the tag information for you from CDDB I think so, in one step, EAC will rip to a very high quality, compress to APE format, and tag the file for you. It's all in the setup.

All you need then is the plugin for Winamp to be able to read the APE files and you're laughing!

BTW, I have heard very good things about JRiver stuff too, but I've had no experience with it. Tracie sounds like she's familiar with it.

Any more questions just post.

Good luck and good ripping. As soon as my new hard drives arrive I'll be doing the same thing!

[Tracie]

jmv,
Roscoe's got it dead on. The only thing I'll add is to elaborate a little on the difference between lossless & lossy (.ape/flac compared with .mp3/.wma/.ogg). When you rip & encode to a lossless format, you're just compressing all of the info that's in that file - not taking or removing anything from it. With lossy, certain amounts of info are actually stripped from the file to get it to such a small file, hence the terms lossless & lossy. One big advantage to using a lossless format is (for example) that you can go from .ape straight to .mp3 or .ogg or .wma or back to .wav without having to pull out your cd to do it (you need a separate tool for that, such as dbPoweramp, also free). With a lossy format, you can't really do that without major loss in quality of sound (that's a hotly debated issue, but it's really safe to say that the safe bet is with lossless for this kind of work). Of course the advantage to lossy is the files size - very, very small.

For ripping to .ape, you can use EAC, sounds like Roscoe's having good success with that. Big advantage there is that it's free. I use JRiver's Media Center because I had purchased it thinking that I would use my HTPC without a frontend & that would make a really nice media player. Well....then I discovered Xlobby. But I continue to use the ripper/encoder that's built in because it's so unbelievably easy, & the secure ripping feature is right there with EAC's. For the money, you may want to try EAC - it sounds like once you get it set up, you're golden. As far as playing the .ape files themselves, you just need the Winamp plugin which comes in the Monkey's Audio installer pack (also free) available at http://www.monkeysaudio.com. One thing that you'll need to check on is what version of .ape EAC is encoding to so that you download the correct version with the correct plugin from Monkey's Audio. That was one thing that I chased my tail on for almost 3 days with the JRiver setup - it turned out that they had included the latest beta codecs from Monkey's Audio, which you have to hunt a little to find on their site.

Anyway, lots of good info on the forums over on Monkey's Audio, AVS Forum, & I think that EAC has a forum too. Of course we'll try our best to help you out as well, but I'll never claim to be an expert at this. I just try to find something that works for me & then go with it!

[jmv]

Ok, sounds like I am almost there. I am going with APE based on the quality / size, desire for Tags, and no desire for audio quality loss.

My directory structure will mirror the one suggested above:
Directory Structure: C:\Ripped Music\Artist\Album\Filename.ape

Filename format: Artist – Album – Track No – Track Name.ape; In EAC: %A - %C - %N - %T


Now I need 2 more things and I am ready to go:

1) What parameters should I use when tagging (in Xlobby I would like to be able to sort by Artist, Album, Genre, Track Title)...how do I make sure that I can do that (if this is not a tagging function but something else, please help!!!) I don't understand all the EAC options...what is %I ID3 music type...is that Genre?)

2) How do I get EAC to auto convert to APE. Do I use the external compression option? If so, where do I find the external program (it defaults to MP3Encoder.exe but I don't have that on my PC).

Thanks again for all the support!

[archerkit]

Before going APE, you might want to read this comparision:
http://flac.sourceforge.net/comparison.html

[Tracie]

jmv,
Roscoe sounds like he's got a pretty good handle on using EAC, so hopefully he'll respond. Here's a link to another similar thread:

http://www.xlobby.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1319

[Roscoe62]

Sorry for the late reply guys....I've only just gotten to work!

Anyways, I'll try to remember how I have my EAC set up.

1) As long as you have the option to get album data from CDDB enabled all your tag info should be retrieved from the online database. I can't remember my exact settings, but I'm fairly sure I've selected ID3v2 tags but no more. I didn't even have to set up the format (i.e. A% C% etc) - it populated all of the fields automatically.

For the few albums I ripped when trying this out it populated all of the fields correctly - i.e. artist, album name, track no, track name, genre, year.....I think that's it. I will try to check my settings tonight and post a reply.....no promises though, it's my wife's birthday and we're going out to dinner to celebrate, so I might be home quite late.

One more thing. If you want to check on the tag to make sure everything looks OK - the fields have all been populated etc, and you DON'T have a dedicated tag tool, just open the track with winamp (I'm using v5.03), open the playlist editor (just hit the PL button on winamp) and select your track in the PL window. Then right click it with the mouse and select file info. A window will open showing all of the tag information.

There is an option here to add a tag using this function but I tried it and neither winamp or XLobby liked it - weird really, but it was bad enough that I opened another thread here on the forum and Tracie came to my rescue

2) No, don't use the external compression option. I tried that initially and couldn't get it to work. However, once you've inserted your CD to rip and it's gathered all of the data from CDDB, go to the action(?) menu, and select rip, you'll get a further option of compressed or uncompressed. If you select compressed it will automatically rip your tracks to APE format and, of course, if you've selected to add ID3 tag info then the whole thing is automated.

With EAC, it is a bit of hassle setting it all up, and so far I haven't come across any albums that the CDDB database hasn't been able to find data for so I don't know what'll happen then, but after all that it's quite easy to use. It does sound like JRiver's approach is much easier to use, but EAC is free. If you're the kind of person who doesn't mind perservering you'll do just fine, but if you want the results with a minimum of effort, it sounds like JRiver Media Center is the way to go.

I'll try to post my EAC settings as soon as I can, but in the meantime I hope this will be helpful for you.


BTW....Archerkit....I've never really looked at FLAC, but I will check out that link before I go any further.

Roscoe

[Tracie]

If you're the kind of person who doesn't mind perservering you'll do just fine, but if you want the results with a minimum of effort, it sounds like JRiver Media Center is the way to go.

Definitely agree with that. If you can afford the moula, I'd really encourage anyone to go that way. After using it, I would buy it just for the ripper. But if you like tinkering, go with EAC.

[jmv]

Well,

I have started the ripping process and I am about 20 disks into. Luckily I've got 3 computers in the office so it will only take a VERY VERY long time rather than forever .

I decided to go with FLAC based on the fact that it has a lighter decode load and seems to have a more open code effort.

Thanks for all the input...now off to figure out how to autopopulate my covers...

mv

[Arthur]

One remark about EAC. I use it to rip to ape format. It is evry easy and as ape is a lossless format, there are almost no settings. (with mp3 you have to use settings to decide how much of the info will be left out). I find it very easy, and EAC can use command lines, so you can send commands from Xlobby to eac (to rip a cd and close afterwards).
A last tip. EAC does an exact copy of your cd, to do this, especially on scratched cd's it will have to read the same part a lot of times. If you use an old cd player, it will take for ever (a day or so to rip a single cd). You can eitehr tell eac to use "burst" mode, in which case it behaves like an ordinaire ripper and doesn't care if a bit is reda wrong, or you should use a good cd player.

Arthur