EAC and FLAC

Gaara

For those of you who use these products I have a few questions.

I understand the reason EAC, it rips songs of cds and will read them over and over to make sure it is perfect. So I tried using it and it outputs in either WAV or MP3 so I choose MP3, and each song was around 35-40mb.

What is the purpose of FLAC? It sounds like a lossless compression codec, but what is it's purpose? I tried using it on some songs and it shrunk them down to around 25mb, a difference but not huge. Looks like it decreases the size by around 30%.

I am trying to make some mix cds and will be burning songs off around 250 cds. On average I am taking 2 songs per cd at ~35mb each I am looking at 17.5gb of music. I have about 200gb of free space so is there any benefit of me ripping the songs to FLAC?

One more thing, can programs like Nero burn FLAC files to a disc? I would hate to convert all my songs to FLAC and then can't even burn them.

Just wondering before I start. Thanks.

Jared

C J T

Hi Gaara. I use Winamp to convert FLAC to WAV and then use EAC to convert WAV to MP3 using the LAME converter plug in. 192 VBR. I am going through most of my CDs now and doing this for my Disc Jockey job, using a laptop now.

That is of course when i download FLAC files. If ripping from CD I just use EAC/Lame straight to MP3. Flac is less lossy so when downloading, look for FLAC files. I have not burned a CD with FLAC but I think Nero will convert FLAC to WAV on the fly.

Hope that helps.

phipiper10

Mostly I don't find the practical purpose of converting your wavs to flac. I've downloaded a lot of live music over the years and the files are often in shn (shorten) or flac. It keeps the downloaded files smaller than a full wav without being lossy. As you note many programs won't be compatible. It's mostly a transportation method at least in my experience though some mp3 players will play this file type.

So for people who record and trade live music via download/bittorrent (think phish/dead) it just creates shorter download times without degrading the quality.

So process was to DL the flacs and convert to wav or mp3. Harddrive space is so cheap you probably don't need to convert to flac to save the 30% in space. 200gigs is under $100 now.

Spare the flames regarding flac/shn lossless etc..

Gaara

CJT,

Didn't realize you could download FLAC files, learn something new everyday. So it doesn't matter if I use FLAC or WAV I can still burn them with Nero, good to know.

phipiper10,

So the main the only real benefit of FLAC is some lossless compression? Not a big deal for me as even if I copied all of my cds to WAV I would be looking at about 100gb. Of course I don't plan on doing that so it isn't an issue, but if I was I could see where FLAC could be beneficial.

I think I will just stick with using EAC to rip my songs to WAV and if I need space in the future can find a FLAC converter.

Thanks for the help both of you.

Jared

Lowell_M

I have never used FLAC, but have had great success lately with Apple Lossless in Itunes. I have two separate libraries on my computer.

1) the Party library that is all MP3's.

2) The Apple Lossless library that is reserved 100% for Lossless ripping of redbook CD's. HDCD content even remains intact. I think the file size is an average of 25mb.

C J T

If you have the space on your hard drive, rip your CD's to WAV and avoid MP3's all together, no loss whatsoever. If you are downloading torrents, look for FLAC and convert them to WAV using Winamp. Best quality. If you want to use MP3's, use EAC with LAME. It defaults at 192 VBR. Apparantly Lame at 192 is equal in quality to 320 MP3's but smaller size. I am filling up a 300 gb hard drive for my DJ biz so I am doing it this way.

Hope that helps....oh and yes Itunes with Apple Lossless is very good but some compatibility issues if you want to burn those to a CD later and play on a CD/DVD player.

Gaara

Disregard, I figured it out...I am an idiot.

C J T

Gaara wrote:

Disregard, I figured it out...I am an idiot.

Don't be so hard on yourself!! Takes lots or trial and error and reading stuff like this to get it right...enjoy.

TitaniumMan

Way to go, Gaara! You can't be an idiot if you've figured out that stuff. And you saved me a lot of typing.

phipiper10

Yes, getting it all straight is no easy task! Especially if you actually try to use all of the correct error settings and offset stuff in EAC. There are a lot of resources however for this stuff particularly in the tape trading community. (Remeber back in the day trading tapes?) Now it's the file sharing community.


For anyone who loves live music and isn't afraid of using BitTorrent check out the site below. The music is all free and legal and the people(Tapers) work really hard to make this stuff available. The FAQ is a great guide to get started.

http://bt.etree.org/

There is a bunch of other info about etree here with some great applications listed on the right.

http://etree.org/

I'll post in clubhouse in as well.

Gaara

Thanks for the support everyone. I download flac front end which I guess is a program to convert wav files to flac, but it doesn't work automatically with eac. I had to download a different program to automatically convert the rips from my cd to flac.

Doing this also fixed the problem of not having all the info in the file when ripping. Converting to wav all I got was the song title, converting to flac I also had the cd name, track number, and artist. Must be the tags used by flac.

Jared

C J T

I am not sure how to make FLAC files from CD, I only know how to convert FLAC files to WAV and MP3. Like I mentioned, I use EAC to make MP3's with Lame. Perfect balance of sound quality and smaller size as I have over 1000 CD's to convert.

jflail2

Thanks for asking Gaara, I had no idea either. It looks like I'll be reloading all of my cd's this weekend.....