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just brew it! wrote:

biffzinker wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

The one in the original Clip was an oddball thing, little foil pouch with wires sticking out of it. I imagine the one in the Clip+ is similar.

So Lithium Polymer?

I imagine so.

That's all I get for naming described object?

In this topic: dbPowerAmp is the best ripper/encoder I've ever seen. The UI's look won't win it any awards but it's the only tool I've used that does parallel encoding/processing. Using all your CPU cores for separate files = teh good.

morphine wrote:

In this topic: dbPowerAmp is the best ripper/encoder I've ever seen. The UI's look won't win it any awards but it's the only tool I've used that does parallel encoding/processing. Using all your CPU cores for separate files = teh good.

I've been using it for years now. If you buy the add-on pack (not required for the core functions) the cover art search and de-dup are worth every penny. Watching all 4/8 cores working their hearts out was enjoyable.

biffzinker wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

biffzinker wrote:

So Lithium Polymer?

I imagine so.

That's all I get for naming described object?

Happy now?

I did my great re-encoding about 3 years ago.  I used EAC to rip to FLAC, and then Foobar2000 and LAME to transcode a separate MP3 copy for portable players.

The problem with using WAV rips is that your newly encoded files are going to have blank metadata/tags.  Depending on your playback device/software, this can become annoying (it certainly is with any Apple device).  If your wav files are sufficiently labeled with track numbers and song titles in a consistent manner, you should be able to use a program such as Mp3tag to create metadata from the filename with a bit of fiddling.  I used it extensively for metadata cleanup, correcting capitalization on filenames, etc.

Foobar2000 for CD to FLAC or CD to MP3 320, or FLAC to MP3. I dug out my CDs and converted them all to FLAC. Correct names, artwork, ect. And made a copy as MP3 for the non FLAC players. I still had songs from 2002 saved as mp3 128 or 96kbps back from my Win 98 box...all as Track 1, Track 2, ect. It was nice to bring everything up to the same high quality standard.

This project took me about 2 full weeks, doing about 8-9 CDs a night.

I use Foobar for listening but have never wandered into its transcoding zones. Is it really that good?

Captain Ned wrote:

I use Foobar for listening but have never wandered into its transcoding zones.  Is it really that good?

You can set it to use LAME as a 3rd party encoder, which is the defacto standard for quality.  As for everything else, it can output using the same naming and folder structure, as well as automatically copy the metadata and album art from the FLAC source.
Once properly set up, it's basically just a few clicks and then walk away while it transcodes your entire library.

The Egg wrote:

The problem with using WAV rips is that your newly encoded files are going to have blank metadata/tags.  Depending on your playback device/software, this can become annoying (it certainly is with any Apple device).  If your wav files are sufficiently labeled with track numbers and song titles in a consistent manner, you should be able to use a program such as Mp3tag to create metadata from the filename with a bit of fiddling.  I used it extensively for metadata cleanup, correcting capitalization on filenames, etc.

From day one I have been very meticulous about ensuring that all rips are in a strict Artist/Album/Track name hierarchy, with a 2-digit track number at the start of each file name. So all of the critical meta-data is derivable, and the scripts I use for encoding/transcoding populate the meta-data based on this.

Captain Ned wrote:

I use Foobar for listening but have never wandered into its transcoding zones. Is it really that good?

I used it before I jumped ship for Linux. Missed it enough that I actually tried running it on Linux for a little while (using Wine). EAC and Foobar really are excellent applications, with no direct replacements in the Linux world AFAIK.

These days I typically use K3B for ripping; it is as easy to use as EAC, and with the "paranoia" level cranked all the way up it does a comparably good job. The one area where it falls short is multiple instances -- I can't rip multiple discs in parallel from multiple drives by running multiple copies. Since I have no plans to re-rip the entire collection (I just need to rip new purchases), the single drive restriction is not a big deal. (And my latest desktop build only has one optical drive anyway, though I could plug in an additional external USB one if I really had a need.)

For playback I use Amarok, through the JACK audio stack. I disable all of the silly plugins that come enabled by default, to strip it down to a simple (and somewhat Winamp-ish) UI. I used Audacious for a while, but at some point they introduced a really annoying memory leak bug which would hose your system if you left the player open for several days; this is why I am using Amarok now.

For encoding/transcoding I use a collection of ad-hoc custom shell scripts...

Since foobar2000 was brought up, new beta version available for download.
Neowin Software News - foobar2000 1.3.12 Beta 1

Finally getting back to finishing this. Except for some of the classical albums (which I want to go back to and fiddle with to make the tags more sensible) everything's in FLAC format now. I currently have a batch script running that is doing a mass conversion of everything (using multiple threads) from FLAC to OGG, for loading onto my Clip+.

Gathering up the stuff that wasn't on the archive DVDs proved more challenging than expected. At some point, I stopped religiously archiving raw rips to optical media, so a lot of the original WAVs/FLACs were scattered across multiple old backup drives from my past 3 desktop PCs. Tracking all of those down was a major PITA; I'm probably still missing a few, but at least I have the original CD media... somewhere. In the crawlspace. *shudder*

FLAC encodes from Bandcamp seem to have occasional issues which cause the replaygain tagger in Linux (metaflac) to choke. Not sure if this is a Bandcamp issue or a metaflac issue.

I'd forgotten what a PITA Rhapsody was (I bought MP3 downloads from them before I switched to Amazon and Bandcamp, sometimes they were cheaper than Amazon). Half of their album downloads would have corrupted files; usually this would correct itself if you downloaded again, occasionally it would not, or different files would be corrupted. Sorting through the mess of archived Rhapsody downloads to find the good versions of everything was pretty annoying. RIP and good riddance to Rhapsody.

I debated what to do with stuff which was originally purchased as downloads in MP3 format. Converting to FLAC has no sonic benefit, and actually increases the amount of storage used. However, I find that I frequently go back and edit the start/end of tracks I've purchased in MP3 format (especially live albums, or stuff where tracks flow one into another), because MP3 encoding tends to insert small gaps (and occasionally, even glitches) at the start and/or end of tracks. Anything that is going to be edited and re-saved should be in a lossless format to prevent further degradation. So for that reason (and because I'm OCD) I transcoded the MP3s to FLAC. The directory names of the transcodes have a suffix to indicate that they came from a lossy source, as a reminder to myself that I don't have a lossless source for that album.

And then there are the cases where I have both the lossy download and the physical CD, but the lossy download has extra bonus tracks.

Vinyl rips also get tagged with a suffix on the directory name to indicate the source. These were a PITA too, because there were multiple archived versions of many of the vinyl rips on the optical media, representing different iterations of cleaning up clicks, pops, and other sonic defects. Had to sort out the duplicates.

Fun times. But I'm in the home stretch now!

Edit: The OGG transcode job is on the Bs now... B is for Buckethead (all threads chewing on Buckethead albums ATM)! I set it up to use 6 streams (i.e. it processes 6 albums in parallel, each in a separate background job). It's keeping my FX-8350 pretty busy (load average hovering around 8, so all cores are loaded but nobody is starved for cycles), which is just about right to get it done as fast as possible without making the system noticeably laggy.

Mission accomplished. Everything transcoded, FLAC versions copied to my file server (will also copy to a removable HDD for archival purposes), and made a FAT32 disk image of the OGG versions that I imaged to the SD card in my Clip+. Initially forgot to mark the partition as a DOS LBA partition in the partition table, and the Clip+ refused to recognize it even though it was FAT32 formatted. After a few minutes of head-scratching I got that sorted.

Still finding a few cases where I want to rearrange stuff (e.g. I like to collapse multi-CD albums into a single folder, which then requires re-tagging the files so the track number metadata is correct), but the grunt work is done; the rest can be an ongoing low-level thing as I find stuff I want to fix.

Good job on finishing the project.

I use EAC for CD > FLAC rips (I use settings that used to be required for some high end torrent site whose name escapes me)

For FLAC to anything else I use Foobar.  Used to use DBpoweramp, and I like it but Foobar is free and can be used for more than just transcoding. 

Currently have about 3tb of music almost all FLAC.  I'd say a good 1/3 of that is live concerts (Grateful Dead and Phish)....they take up a lot of space but hey, the improvisation means no two shows are alike

A lot of the original rips were done with EAC, since that was before I switched to Linux. In recent years I've been using K3B, with the error recovery level cranked all the way up. Takes a long time to rip, but gives very high odds of a perfect rip unless the CD is pretty messed up (similar to EAC in that regard).

The encode/transcode went quicker than expected; I didn't even bother firing up the extra PC to share the encoding load.

I've still got about 5GB free on the 128GB micro-SD card with all of the OGG transcodes on it, so I've still got a while before I need to start being more selective about what I put on there. Maybe by then micro-SD cards larger than 128GB will come down in price.

Edit: Hmm... looks like the 200GB ones aren't too ridiculous any more. 256GB ones are still stupidly expensive.

...and a spinoff project for the todo list:

I really should scan the entire collection for CDs with HDCD encoding. Most of the physical CDs are packed away in boxes so it would be a PITA to check for the HDCD logo, and some CDs are HDCD even though they are not labeled as such, so the best way to do this is with a batch script of some sort. The hitch is that the only freeware CLI HDCD tools I've found so far are Windows-based, so it'll involve either a Windows VM (and brushing up on my Powershell, or using Python) or wine.

I've already identified a handful of them and processed them to recover the additional dynamic range. A few of them have benefited; on others it has little or no effect because they've apparently been brick-wall limited BEFORE the HDCD encoding was applied (duh).

While I've been reading over this thread I was wondering why you bothered to transcode from FLAC to mp3, then I got to the part where you stated how much music you had. I'm topped out at 20GB in my music folder, all ripped form CD to FLAC using EAC, and I keep only 15GB on my phone for playback in VLC with the entire collection backed up to Box, Dropbox, Mega, and Google drive in case bad things happen.

Philldoe wrote:

While I've been reading over this thread I was wondering why you bothered to transcode from FLAC to mp3, then I got to the part where you stated how much music you had.

Decades of music collecting will do that. The oldest albums in the collection are vinyl which was purchased in the 1970s, and yes some of those are included among the rips.

With the trend away from memory card slots in portable devices I may never be able to fit the whole collection on a portable device in lossless format, but OGG encoding is good enough for portable use. And if my Clip+ manages to survive until 512GB micro-SD cards become available (and affordable), that'll come close.

I must be too much of a "big" band geek because when i read:

Nearly a a decade and a half ago, I ripped my entire music collection 

I let out a gasp. All those poor sheets of Bach, never to be played again.

just brew it! wrote:

Philldoe wrote:

While I've been reading over this thread I was wondering why you bothered to transcode from FLAC to mp3, then I got to the part where you stated how much music you had.

Decades of music collecting will do that. The oldest albums in the collection are vinyl which was purchased in the 1970s, and yes some of those are included among the rips.

With the trend away from memory card slots in portable devices I may never be able to fit the whole collection on a portable device in lossless format, but OGG encoding is good enough for portable use. And if my Clip+ manages to survive until 512GB micro-SD cards become available (and affordable), that'll come close.

I think if my collection ever got too big for my phone I'll just start streaming it from my computer when I'm out and about. One of the many perks of still having my 2006 era Unlimited Data plan.

For a moment I forgot how far CPU power has come when I initially went 'oh wow it only took him a few days to reencode his music, it must not be a very large collection.'

Last time I did any serious batch encoding, IIRC it took like an hour to do a single album on my Pentium II/300

SuperSpy wrote:

For a moment I forgot how far CPU power has come when I initially went 'oh wow it only took him a few days to reencode his music, it must not be a very large collection.'

Last time I did any serious batch encoding, IIRC it took like an hour to do a single album on my Pentium II/300

Yeah, surprised me a little too. The last time I did a mass encode run was probably on a dual Athlon MP system; since then it has just been a couple here and there as I have acquired new CDs. With this latest project, 8 x86-64 cores burned through the whole collection in fairly short order.

just brew it! wrote:

This has also served as an interesting anecdotal data point for longevity of burned optical media. I just finished re-loading 168 DVD-Rs worth of WAV files containing the CD rips (over a half TB total) from discs which were burned anywhere from 5 to 13 years ago. Every single one of them read without incident. (Now I move on to the vinyl rips...) Disclosure: All discs were verified after burning, and if a batch of media had a tendency to exhibit repeated verify errors, I tossed it.

I had the same thought a week ago. I got a new pair of headphones which lead me to dig out my old CD collection. Lot's of the CD's were user copies I made so the original CD could be safely stored. These things are scratched to hell and many also have adhesive labels on them. Only one single CD out of a few dozen gave me troubles when re-ripping last weekend, and it was so badly scratched I was surprised it ripped at all.

A decade ago - last time I bothered ripping anything - I was ripping at 128kbps to keep disk use to a minimum. Last week I ripped at 320kbps. I'm not an audiophile by any means so mp3 @ 320kbps is better quality than necessary for me.

Side note - when did Windows Media Player become an awesome tool for CD ripping? Probably a long time ago but I just discovered its usefulness last weekend. It's friggin great. Only problem I had is that WMP on my computer does not refresh the disc data when I ejected one disc and put in another. I had to close and reopen WMP. That was annoying, but given that I don't really have a lot of CD's to rip it is a tolerable annoyance.

flip-mode wrote:

Side note - when did Windows Media Player become an awesome tool for CD ripping? Probably a long time ago but I just discovered its usefulness last weekend. It's friggin great. Only problem I had is that WMP on my computer does not refresh the disc data when I ejected one disc and put in another. I had to close and reopen WMP. That was annoying, but given that I don't really have a lot of CD's to rip it is a tolerable annoyance.

I used EAC pretty much exclusively for ripping in my Windows days. How long did you wait to see if the info refreshed? My Linux systems (using K3B to rip) take a minute or so to update the disc info when changing discs; not sure why, as disc changes seem like something that should be pretty easy to detect in a timely manner.

just brew it! wrote:

How long did you wait to see if the info refreshed?

Long. I put the next disc in and then left the house for some reason or other and it still hadn't refreshed later that day. Restarting WMP gets new disc info in less than 5 seconds. It could be an issue with my system in particular. My system does some other annoying things. Monitors only go into power save mode at random. Sometimes I shut down the computer and it flipping turns back on just because (I actually suspect I could have a wonky power button). My task bar only hides on one monitor. Random nonsense. I just accept most of it anymore as long as it doesn't actually interfere with what I need to get done.

Noticed a few albums missing from the collection...

Turned out that a bunch of stuff that was bought only as Amazon digital downloads (no physical media) back in 2013 somehow didn't make it into the first cut. Found copies of the original downloads on a backup drive, which saves me having to go and re-download them all.

Might be worth seeing if Amazon has a higher quality version available now than originally?

Usacomp2k3 wrote:

Might be worth seeing if Amazon has a higher quality version available now than originally?

Well, their downloads are still VBR MP3s with bitrates typically in the mid-200s. MP3 encoding tech hasn't changed much in the past few years so I don't see why they would've bothered re-encoding anything. I suppose I could try downloading something again and see if the files are different...

Wishful thinking that they might have added FlAC or at least 320kbps as options and then upgraded the back catalog.

AFAIK the only ways to get FLAC downloads are to pay exorbitant prices (and deal with limited selection) at hdtracks.com, or buy indie releases at bandcamp.com. Reasonably priced lossless downloads of mainstream(ish) stuff do not seem to exist.

Slightly off-topic (ogg-topic?) but related...

I'd originally decided to stick with my workhorse Clip+ (with Rockbox firmware) for portable use because I hated the Google Play Music app that came with my G4. But Poweramp for Android seems to be excellent (and well worth the $4), and the fidelity of the G4's DAC seems to be decent.

As small and unobtrusive as the Clip+ is, it's still one more device to carry (and charge), Poweramp's UI is easier to use, and I don't use the Clip+'s FM radio, or any of Rockbox's advanced features beyond the 10-band EQ (which Poweramp has too).

So... as of about an hour ago, the 128GB micro-SD card with my entire re-encoded music collection has been moved from the Clip+ to the phone. (I'd already put a smaller card with a pared down copy of the collection in the phone to test drive Poweramp, but the test drive is now complete with favorable results.)