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Topic: Vinyl to Wav to FLAC.EAC & Audiograbber (Read 3788 times) previous topic - next topic
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Vinyl to Wav to FLAC.EAC & Audiograbber

Hi all
Have just started to rip a bit of my old vinyl collection to the HDD. (Rega Planar 3, RB300 moving coil cartridge, IncaTech Claymore amp, and TASCAM pro tape deck being used for level adjust and monitoring) Sound card is the built in unkown on the VAIO laptop

Just done a few using Audiograbber....is this OK or are there better freeware software products out there?

Only done three albums so nothing lost if I have to start again.

I did a test using both Audio grabber and EAC to send the same WAV file to flac.exe as external compressor.

Additional command line option in both programs was:

-T "artist=%a" -T "title=%t" -T "album=%g" -T "date=%y" -T "tracknumber=%n" -T "genre=%m" -8 %s.

I think this came from one of the EAC setup stickies on this or another forum.

I noticed that each flac file of the same track was of a different size.

On viewing the flac dos box as compression took place, options both show different settings.

Files sent from audiograbber into FLAC gave:
-p 4096 -b 4608 -m -l 8 -q o -r 3,3
Files sent from EAC to FLAC gave
-p 4096 -b 4608 -m -l 12 -e -q o -r 0,6.

Audio quality on both FLAC files was no differnt to the human ear (at least my ear!), so this is more a question to aid my understanding of what is going on.  Have had a search for FLAC and Audio grabber on here but saw nothing that shed anylight ....so anyone any ideas?  Something to do with the way Audio grabber sends the extra command parameters to FLAc is my guess, but how to and what?

Thanks for taking an interest, and reading this far

Neil

Vinyl to Wav to FLAC.EAC & Audiograbber

Reply #1 –
Quote
Audio quality on both FLAC files was no differnt to the human ear (at least my ear!)

Of course not. FLAC is lossless.

Vinyl to Wav to FLAC.EAC & Audiograbber

Reply #2 –
Quality won't change, only the amount of compression.

-T "artist=%a" -T "title=%t" -T "album=%g" -T "date=%y" -T "tracknumber=%n" -T "genre=%m"

That part of the command line is only for transferring tag data. EAC shouldn't be bothered by it, but I don't know about Audiograbber.

Does the output change if you move "-8" (the compression setting) to the front of the line?
- or just change the whole line to only "-8 %s" or "--best %s"

Quote from: Neil on
....is this OK or are there better freeware software products out there?

I don't know, it may be OK. But Audacity is very good, if you want an alternative.
FLAC frontend is a safe choice for converting. It just feeds your commands directly to FLAC.exe.

Vinyl to Wav to FLAC.EAC & Audiograbber

Reply #3 –
The reason I mention that the quality is the same, was not so much because I was worried about what FLAC was doing to the signal, but more what Audiograbber may having been doing to it while sending the wav out to the external compressor.

I have been playing around with it since posting, and it took me a while to discover what was going on.

In Audiograbber there is a drop down box to select predefined arguments for your choice of external encoder. 
Below this is a box where the argument is displayed.
Overwriting this predefined argument with your own while FLAC is selected in the drop down menu does not actually allow your entry to be processed.  You can OK it and close the window, open it againand  your entry is still there, but not functional till you deselect the FLAC option in the drop down menu.

So thanks again for the input, and looking at Audacity now

Thanks for your time

Neil