lossless compresion - what to use

jon

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I'd like to store a load of CDs of my laptop, so I can take them with me without having to carry the CDs (ultimately planning to play them through an external dac in my office
cool.gif.9d6c72c555b38e519336a6d9b55ca875.gif
). I'd like to use lossless compression to store these - so want software that maintains sound quality, makes files smaller, is preferably free or cheap, and prefarably with a UI that doesn't suck.

I've got Sony's multimedia software on my laptop, but see the last comment about UIs. I could obviously use Windows Media Player, but is there something better I could use? (I've tried iTunes, and don't like it...)

Thanks,

Jon

 
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John not sure exactly how it works, but those that do seem to use FLAC lossless compression, do a google on it (oh and it's open source ie free), "Julian 2002" on HFC and Zerogain uses flac into a squeezebox and then a dac into his main rig, it's his main source.

 

jon

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Thanks AK - sounds like what I want
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There seem to be load of possible from ends to use - if anyone has experience of this and can recommend a good windows front end would be nice, if not I'll either suck it and see or see what folk say elsewhere.

Jon

 

meninblack

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I recommend Exact Audio Copy (EAC) to rip the CD's to disk, and the FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Compression) codec to compress the files. There is a graphical interface which will rip and compress as one operation. For playing, Winamp (www.winamp.com) is an excellent front end.

And it's all FREEWARE!
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jon

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thanks - will give it a try.

One other thing that'd be handy - I should get round to listing my CDs for insurance purposes... If there's a piece of software that will read the CD when I put it in and then get name/artist etc. off the web, and make a list/db of all my CDs that'd be v handy - I imagine that typing in titles etc. would get dull after the first hundred
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Jon

 

jon

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Thanks AK - collectorz looks good.

meninblack - I've installed EAC, FLAC and Winamp; what it seems to do, though, is to write the .wav files as well as the flac files (I've checked the box to delete wav files after compression, but it doesn't). Also, the wav files are named correctly - they take the name of the track in question - while the flac files have unintelligible names. Any suggestions?

Anyway, the flac files sound fine - can't tell the difference between them and CDs...

Jon

 

meninblack

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jon wrote:

Thanks AK - collectorz looks good.meninblack - I've installed EAC, FLAC and Winamp; what it seems to do, though, is to write the .wav files as well as the flac files (I've checked the box to delete wav files after compression, but it doesn't).  Also, the wav files are named correctly - they take the name of the track in question - while the flac files have unintelligible names.  Any suggestions?

Anyway, the flac files sound fine - can't tell the difference between them and CDs...

Jon
Hmm, works for me. It creates trackname.wav, then spawns FLAC.exe in a DOS box which renames it to unintelligible.wav and compresses to unintelligible.flac, control then goes back to EAC which renames unintelligible.flac to trackname.flac and deletes the wav. You can see this all happen if your monitoring the download directory with windows explorer while EAC and FLAC are running.

 

jon

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Yeah, hmm indeed. Just a thought - as suggested in web instructions on setting EAC up with flac, I've set the additional command line options from the compression options dialog to "-6 -V -T "artist=%a" -T "title=%t" -T "album=%g" -T "date=%y" -T "tracknumber=%n" -T "genre=%m" -T "comment=EAC 0.9beta4 / FLAC 1.1.0 q6" %s" Is this what you've got down?

Cheers,

Jon

 

meninblack

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I don't have the "comment" field, Jon. The rest are all the same.

The version of EAC I have is V0.95 prebeta 5, dated 8th March 2004.

 

jon

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very strange. Anyway, will have a proper play when I've got some time to kill - I may just be missing the obvious...

Jon

 

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