Calling all Squeezebox experts

Oh, and don't forget the very helpful SlimDevices forum which will overwhelm you with advice, tweaks and the like.

 

Perhaps you could list the pitfalls, if you were wanting to offer advice.

 

Well the first and major pitfall is with filenames. It is important that you keep organised when ripping. This is particularly true if you have a lot of classical music. The worst case scenario is ripping a CD with Baroque Concertos where the file names are "Allegro", "Adagio", "Allegro" etc. Your PC will overwrite filenames with the same name so in worst case scenario you might finish with only two tracks. To avoid this

• Create a folder structure to hold the music, then add subfolders for artist/composer and sub sub folders for album"
• In EAC Select EAC/Options/Filename and enter %T - %N whic will rename each track with the original name plus a unique number

That way you won't have duplicate file names.

Next in EAC/Tools select "Start external compressiors queued in background" and set the number to 3-4

In EAC/Extraction set Error recovery to High

In EAC/Compression Options/External Compression you will need to add the line -8-T "artist=%a" -T "Title=%t" -T "album=%g" -T "date=%y" -T "tracknumber=%n" -T "genre=%m" %s then set the Use File Extension to.flac, the Parameter passing scheme to "UserDefined Encoder, then include the path to where FLAC is stored on your PC. Set the bit rate as high as possible, check Delete WAV after compression.

That should cover EAC so we need to make a quick adjustment to FLAC The compression rate should be set to 8. This slows things down a little but it does save space.

Does that help? I'm sure others may have tricks to share.

 

Sure,

If you take a look at AH's post above that's a good start. It's important that you save this as an EAC profile. Why? Sometimes you come across discs that are damaged and will not rip in a month of Sundays using EAC's accurate mode, in which case you need to switch to burst mode or use a different ripping tool.

When ripping multiple discs in a single session, keep an eye on the the number of compression tasks queing up in the background. If the machine crashes during this period you need to go back and work out exactly where you got to.

All of the above assumes of course that you're using EAC, but I'm sure the same principles apply whatever you end up using.

Follow the advice about the slimdevices forum. There are many very helpful people there who really buy into the whole "open source" thing. If you post a problem you generally get very helpful replies.

Don't worry about CDRDAO unless you want to write CDR's from EAC. The main difference between the Tag & rename versions in practice is the user interface options, but both seem to do the job well.

Hope this helps a little.

 

It helps if you can use more than one PC. That really speeds things up.

 

Absolutely. We use two, each with three plextor CD Rom drives. The machine with an Athlon processor seems to be faster at the compression tasks.

 

Which is one more good reason for getting two HDDs instead of one.

I downloaded EAC which was kinda scary at first, mainly due to the lack of Help file. I'm probably gonna sound very dumb in my next posts

 

The advice about filenames is good, but I haven't ripped my classical discs yet, so I haven't hit it in practice. Another reason why things have gone painlessly so far is that I actually rip to mp3 using default set-ups, i.e., filenaming is taken care of. I use either iTunes or windows media player set at 320 kbps. Since everyone I tried it on lost the ability to tell the difference by about 192 kbps I'm confident that I'm losing little if any quality and the result is good enough for me and those that use the SB. Sir G you may prefer to use one of these more user-friendly options if you have problems with setup of EAC.

 

I don't know if I'm misreading your post Steve, but are you really suggesting that you can't hear the difference between an mp3 @ 320kbps and FLAC or AAC? If so I'd have to disagree.

 

I haven't done the comparison, but I suspect not, since what I was suggesting is that most people cannot hear a mp3 get better at or before 192 mbps, so 320 is fairly safe

 

disk space is very cheap

ripping is very time consuming (as is correcting freedb data)...

so, my advice is rip to everything to a lossless format first and keep those no matter what. Then convert them to additional MP3 or other lossy format...

The reason is that sooner or later there will be a new lossy format and having those lossless files is likely to work better than mp3 as source material for input to the new converter...

Also keep a back up...