[Empeg-general] Re: I've never ripped CD's and I want to do it right

[Tony Fabris]

> That's a good idea about using my time at work to rip the CD's and then encode them overnight. But how do you get the ID tag information preserved from the rip to the encode if they are two steps?

Generally, you don't. Unless the ripper supports some kind of batching option, which I don't know if any of them do.

What you'd want to use is a separate encoder front-end which group-adds the tags for you, such as my <A HREF="http://www.jps.net/tfabris/jack.htm" target="_new">Jack</A> program. I wrote jack because I was doing the same thing: Having my computer rip CDs in the background as I worked, then running the command-line encodes overnight.

I recently even modified it so that it has presets for LAME since I was experimenting with that software. (Side note: I'm pretty happy with LAME for now, although I'm not certain whether I can tell the difference between its encoder and the Xing encoder. I'm still on the fence between Xing/AC and LAME.)

My Jack program doesn't access the CDDB. It requires that you type in the song data, but it does its best to make that process as painless as possible (i.e., no Ctrl-V-fests, all logical defaults for hitting the Enter key, easy moving from field to field without the mouse, etc.). In practice, it only takes me a couple minutes to fill in an album's tags. Jack avoids the CDDB on purpose, because I don't trust the CDDB. As was pointed out elsewhere on this thread, the CDDB is filled out by people, and therein lies its problem: The consistency is all over the map. Not to mention that the Year information isn't stored in the CDDB and you have to enter that yourself.

Jack can do a batch of multiple CD encodings in one run, although there is an upper limit (I think it's nine albums although I'm not sure right now). With Jack, if you want to do multiple album rips in one batch, you just save your "track01.wav" "track02.wav" files into different-named subfolders. Then you run jack and feed it each of those folders. It'll let you fill out the tag data for all the tracks of all the albums before committing to the final bulk-encode.

Of course, Jack isn't the only software which works as an encoder front-end. Check out the software library at MP3.COM for more options.

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<A HREF="http://www.jps.net/tfabris" target="_new">Tony Fabris</A>_