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Topic: Flac Library in Foobar2000 and Conversion to MP3 (Read 4463 times) previous topic - next topic
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Flac Library in Foobar2000 and Conversion to MP3

Namaste, Brothers.

I have some questions and I decided to ask them all in one post. My English is not so good, I tried to find the answers on this forum, but I cannot. I am a coordinator and developer of a musical project based on the radio program by the  famous Russian musician Boris Grebentshikov (BG). May be you know Russian band "Aquarium", the recent albums of which are very nice. Page of project (in russian) can be found at CUE-Aerostat. Now there are about 100 people involved in the project, and our plan is to use the afore-mentioned radio programs as the basis for the internet-radio to share good music  with brothers and sisters. We have big collection of music in format CUE+Image Flac.
* * *
1. We want to add our own tags to the library and be able to see all of them in Foobar. Another goal is to have these features available on other platforms (Linux and Mac).
2. We would like to keep all additional info (lyrics, info about musicians, discographies etc.) inside the library, preferably as CUE with additional fields or, alternatively keep it as separate files but with the possibility to view everything in the audio player interface (e.g. using some plugins for Foobar or other software). We use full replaygain info inside all the collection.
3. We want to convert all FLAC music to per track MP3 for convenience and possibility to use in ipods, mp3-players, writing separate songs to CD/DVD, ...).
Hence we need to solve the following problems:
  3.1 Normalize all collection to maximum level to get the same level of all audio tracks in devices without ReplayGain functionality. What would be the best settings in Foobar interface to do so?
  3.2 Copy ReplayGain info from CUEs to corresponding MP3-tracks with some additional calculations to get original music album idea of a sound director. I.e. if we use Foobar2000 to listen to this MP3 collection and shift to the ReplayGain (track mode), we get original relations if sound volume inside the same album. However, if we want equal volumes of all tracks we should switch off ReplayGain and get the same volumes because all tracks were normalized in conversion step. Could you please suggest possible ways of doing it?
    3.3 We need to create MP3 playlist of the whole music collection, which should be equal to FLAC library except for having smaller size and another ReplayGain info in tags (see 3.2). For mobile devices we want some script or functionality in interface to create playlists (default or shuffled) of defined size of all included tracks. By this I mean that if we have a flash card of, say, 8GB and want to fill it with tracks from MP3 collection, we select tracks in MP3 playlist, set desired size and conversion mode (shuffled or default), folder for copying and press RUN. The result would be any of us getting new unknown music to listen to in the player or give out to people who are interested, but have no free space to copy all music in FLAC.

Sorry for long question.
We want to make
project, not war!

Namaste.

Flac Library in Foobar2000 and Conversion to MP3

Reply #1 –
This should/will get moved to the appropriate foobar subforum, but in the meantime I will try to answer some of your questions...

1. Tagging flac+cue albums can be done easily enough in foobar.  Make sure your cue file references the flac correctly and load the cue in a foobar playlist, select all the tracks that make up the album, then right-click > Properties.

2. Tagging edits you make with foobar will be stored in the cue file.  You can always open up a cue with a text editor (notepad for example) to confirm or to edit anything manually.

3. foobar's converter (right-click > Convert) can be used to convert your flac+cue to mp3, and all of your mp3 files will inherit the metadata (tags) from the source files.  You simply need to download a compile of the Lame executable for foobar to use in converting to mp3.

3.1 and 3.2 You can't do both of these things with one mp3 output.  If you want consistent level on all tracks/albums for players that don't support ReplayGain, when converting you can select ReplayGain (under Processing) and this will "normalize" the level of all output tracks, however this operation irreversibly alters the gain of the output file.  OR, if you want to simply leave ReplayGain info in the file tags (which can be read by foobar, Winamp, etc.) and adjusted for playback, select under other "ReplayGain-scan output files as albums."

Flac Library in Foobar2000 and Conversion to MP3

Reply #2 –
Quote from: IamDimulya on
3. We want to convert all FLAC music to per track MP3 for convenience and possibility to use in ipods, mp3-players, writing separate songs to CD/DVD, ...

Writing separate songs to audio CD? If you suggest that people do this, they need to realize that the MP3 does not match the original audio, and it is also going to be longer; a tiny but difficult-to-predict amount of silence or junk samples will be added to both ends of the MP3. This will interfere with the playback of any segued tracks. A click will probably be audible at the seam.

If you're encouraging people to burn an audio CD of a complete album, then they really should use the cue sheet and the FLAC image file with their favorite burning software; that's what cue sheets are designed for. If the burner doesn't support FLAC, convert the image to a single WAV first, and adjust the filename in the cue sheet so it matches.

If the idea is to have separate tracks so people can choose which ones to burn, again, the output format should be WAV, unless the burner can handle FLAC. Load the image FLAC's cue sheet (not the image itself) in foobar's playlist, highlight all the tracks, and in the converter setup use "Convert each track to an individual file", making sure the name format is likely to be unique (e.g. %artist% - %title%).