I have a new 2006 Scion now, the speakers are markedly better than what I had on my 15 year old Altima so I now notice quality issues in my digital files (almost all mp3, of a wide variety of bitrates)

I've noticed that there are many albums that I've ripped in the past that are now missing tracks and between retrieving the missing songs and quality issues, so I'm getting ready to rerip 400+ CDs.

I wanted to use a lossless codec, but Itunes lossless is proprietary and doesn't support FLAC. I can use FLAC with Tversity for Xbox streaming though. Using Lossless is also basically useless on my Ipod because I can easily carry more CD's with me than would fit on the Ipod.

After some thought and conversations with Sketch, here's what I'm thinking of doing:

- Use an open source encoder (does LAME do CDDB?) to create FLAC's of everything I have so I'll never have to rip my collection again.
- Batch encode everything to 256K AAC for use with Itunes (does LAME do batch encoding?)
- Import only the AAC's into the Itunes library

Is this the way to go?

Also is there any kind of software I can use that can interface with CDDB and flag albums with missing tracks? Or at least one with scripting capabilities so I could build the function myself?

so...

you want to rip your entire collection AAC/MP3 essentially? what do you do with the FLAC?

I have ripped my CDs to FLAC and burned them onto CD-R and store about 1500 of them on a bookshelf, and then have sold off most of them. I use MAX, but EAC works as well for windows, and it encodes MP3 or AAC simultaneously with FLAC encoding so I just use that on the ipod. I also have an old 30gig ipod that I have rockbox on that I put some of the FLAC albums on when I want to listen to higher quality stuff or if I dont want to fire up itunes and resync the iphone, it holds about 120 full size albums

Even if I don't listen to the FLAC's, I'm thinking that going the FLAC route would ensure that I NEVER have to manually rip 450 CD's again. I can put them all on a 500 GB external with room to spare.

In binders, the CD's don't take up much space, and I'm a packrat, so it'd be really hard for me to sell them. Hell, it was a challenge just tossing the jewel cases when I moved them into binders.

If I were you, I'd re-rip my entire collection at a quality that meets my standards. I'd make sure all my discs were ripped, all art was embedded, and all tracks were accounted for.

if we are only talking 500 CDs and you cant really sell them then i wouldnt rerip to FLAC just to good quality MP3 (V0) and do what timmy says

Although lossy formats are designed to remove unimportant/irrelevant frequencies, and with average equipment (car stereos/earbuds) you can't hear what's missing. I have a pretty darn good home theater/stereo though and I can stream FLAC to my Xbox jukebox. My hearing's still pretty good for my age, so I think having the lossless around is probably worth it since I have storage to spare. I'm just not into the rockbox thing, so I need a lossy copy too.

If EAC can transcode the AAC at the same time as FLAC, I think that may be the direction to go. If it can do CDDB and embed cover art at the same time, I'm all over it.

yeah it can do those things and i see why you want to keep FLAC copies as well, i guess i missed that part. certainly the way Id go

i went through this. recorded all my music at 192k cbr and decent vbr, then wanted a higher recording and went back through all 1000-ish albums at high vbr. kind of wish i recorded in lossless flac, but at the same time, i'd never use flac and the recording time would take so long in comparison to paranoid high vbr. i guess it depends how worried you are about losing the lossy copies and how much spare time you have.

Downloaded EAC, I can't find settings in it to transcode mp3/aac at the same time as FLAC. I've found references to a scripting app called REACT after some digging around--do I need to grab that too?

When encoding to FLAC, is one track per CD w/cuesheet the best way to go?

No, rip the tracks separately so if you need to re-encode in the future it'll be less work.

HELP! I've been searching the internets all day to determine the best softwares and workflow to get this done and am now utterly baffled.

I've got the EAC->FLAC part down, but what tools should I use for the lossy batch encoding, tagging and cover art? All the articles and posts I'm digging up are at least 2-3 years old.

this sounds way way too fucking confusing

Pretty much, which is why I've never done such a thing. Unless I'm going to go full-tilt boogie and do away with all hardcopy matter, then it really isn't worth it. Also, I have a bad habit of killing harddrives. They just don't like me.

Foobar2000 will do the conversion, and will tag the files for you too. Then use Album Art Downloader XUI to get the artwork.

Thanks Don