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Topic: Music Formats? (Read 1456 times) previous topic - next topic
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Music Formats?

Pardon me if this is common knowledge or already posted. I am new to Foobar2K and all things beyond shoving in a CD and hitting play.

I am wanting to rip my CD's onto my computer and play them on Foobar2K but I see no option in FB2K to rip. Also discovered that there are more formats than you can shake a stick at. Why should I use anything other that just simple ripping. I see that there is a lot of talk about FLAC, Is the best format or something?

EDITED. Just found the place in FB2K for ripping. I still dont see an option to rip for FLAC?

Re: Music Formats?

Reply #1 –
I would suggest using EAC (Exact Audio Copy) for ripping music CDs. This app is dedicated for that purpose. There are many detailed tutorials on the web how to configure EAC for ripping music in FLAC (which is lossless format) and MP3 (which is lossy format).

Re: Music Formats?

Reply #2 –
FLAC is an audio format that is popular as it's an exact copy of the original audio from the CD while still reducing its original size via compression (think something like a ZIP, which when restored contains everything as it was placed in there to begin with). Because of this it's a 'lossless' format. No audio info was lost, which is why many like to rip to it.

Not sure what formats you're used to but MP3 for example is a 'lossy' format, meaning it's not an exact replication of the original audio, however at high enough bitrates (conversion quality) I've seen results from some public listening tests that have found it indistinguishable from lossless anyway.

If you have the storage space then FLAC is definitely worthwhile for ripping. To use it in foobar2000 download the official zip, and inside the win32 sub-folder copy flac.exe into foobar2000's encoders folder.

From there follow this wiki guide for foobar2000 CD ripping.

Re: Music Formats?

Reply #3 –
EAC has better error handling methods and supports newer AccurateRip version, but foobar2000 can be used for ripping too. If the CDs are in flawless condition the results with different programs will be identical.

Though I have to recommend using Free Encoder Pack to get FLAC encoding support instead of downloading the official zip. The pack is easier to install, the binaries in it don't have any instruction set requirements beyond what foobar2000 itself requires, and it includes a fix for a bug that was found after latest FLAC was released.

Re: Music Formats?

Reply #4 –
Like people already said, use EAC for ripping cd's and foobar for converting.

Re: Music Formats?

Reply #5 –
Quote from: eartheater on
Like people already said
Who said this? IMHO it's just a waste of time. It's much more convenient to do conversion automatically during ripping.

Re: Music Formats?

Reply #6 –
Well the reply's above my comment and I once e-mailed the developer of EAC and he told me this and recommended foobar for converting. This is how I learned of foobar! :)

Re: Music Formats?

Reply #7 –
Choose “Open Audio CD…” from the “File” menu.

Choose the drive containing the CD you want to rip.

If this is the first time you’ve ripped something in foobar2000 with this drive, check the “Drive Settings” dialog and confirm the settings there.
Read offset correction – Here you can enter the read offset correction value (in samples) for your drive. The ‘auto’ button will query the AccurateRip database and will fill in the offset value automatically if your drive is listed there if auto lookup  does not work you can find the database here and look up your drive manually

Ripping security – “Security” refers to the level of error detection and whether correction is attempted by trying to get identical results through re-reads. Security allows damaged or defective discs to be read  and also inssures the stability and accuracy of the files that are generated

disabled – Whatever audio data the drive sends in a single read is simply accepted as-is.
standard – Two identical CRCs on each block are required; it will keep rereading and error out if it can’t get consistent results after 128 reads.
paranoid – The same as “standard” but requires four identical CRCs on each block to pass.
In this case always set to paranoid and check Limit drive speed while reading because most drives can rip at their default speed, but some do better at a slower speed and your rips are more likely to be error free

Choose “Rip” to get the “Rip Audio CD” dialog.

Album information – Here you can enter basic metadata about the album (Artist, Album Title, Disc Number, Genre, Date).
Track information – Here you can select which tracks to rip, and you can enter basic metadata about each track (Title, Artist). Artist need only be entered for various-artist compilations; otherwise it will be derived from the Artist entered in the Album information section
Information lookup – This can be used to automatically fill in the preceding sections with info obtained from an external database,  choice musicbrainz from the drop down  look up save the data
Proceed to the Converter Setup dialog

uncheck any processing so it says “none” choose .flac as your desired output format or WAV/AIFF if you prefer uncompressed content

once everything is set and confirmed  sit back relax and be happy

For a properly configured rip at low speed it could take up to 40 minutes but it is worth it as it will result a archival digital copy of the disc 🙂

 

Re: Music Formats?

Reply #8 –
I used dBpoweramp when I ripped my CD collection. Today I would have also considered CUERipper (part of CUETools).
It shares some features I liked about dBpoweramp: easy to set up, can do some cross-pressing AccurateRip verifications (EAC still can't, right?), and has pretty decent metadata support. (I still think it falls short of dBpoweramp, but MusicBrainz has gotten much better coverage in ten years.)

More: http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Comparison_of_CD_rippers , to the extent it is updated.  (Seems that the "in beta" part of dBpoweramp refers to features implemented in version 14?)

Re: Music Formats?

Reply #9 –
Quote from: lvqcl on
Quote from: eartheater on
Like people already said
Who said this? IMHO it's just a waste of time. It's much more convenient to do conversion automatically during ripping.
Well, I said this, plus Case pointed out better error handling in EAC (which is useful if your CDs turn out to be scratched, especially on printed/reflective layer side).
What is the problem of setting up EAC to convert ripped .WAVs on-the-fly to FLAC, WMA, MP3, whatever using external CLI encoder? You don't need any other manually configured app to do conversion. Files will be also properly tagged at the same time and may even include embedded images. Online tutorials give you even optimized commands (compression/quality, tagging - based on EAC inputs) for most popular encoders, just ready to copy and paste - you don't have to study commandline parameters on your own.
Thanks to EAC and my non standard usage of certain of its text input fields I can extensively tag ripped music with custom tags without any other manual job, than simply putting certain text in single EAC box (catalog numbers, release dates, etc). Also - EAC has brilliant character substitution mechanism, which allows me to keep nice tags and flexibly omit problematic chars in filenames. For example using extended Unicode characters as replacement for certain reserved chars like ? / or * .
In the end I just do RelayGain scan in foobar. And that's all.

Re: Music Formats?

Reply #10 –
Quote from: EpicForever on
better error handling in EAC
If we don't use C2 pointers (because drive doesn't support them or reports them unreliably) and drive is caching (and doesn't support FUA), then isn't EAC doing exactly the same what fb2k is doing: reading the same sectors multiple times (by big blocks to flush cache)?

Re: Music Formats?

Reply #11 –
Maybe. But still automated conversion and tagging based on EAC text input fields and it's character substitution for file names is a big deal for me. Plus I have also suspicion that foobar modifies / limits somehow command line parameters sent to CLI encoders. Today or tomorrow I will do tests with older LAME 3,97 and option for disabling lowpass filtering. I remember that it worked in EAC in the past (now I rather rip everything to FLAC so haven't been doing this for a longer while in EAC) but for sure it doesn't worked very recently when started from foobar - resulted mp3 was still lowpass filtered. 
And I don't like the fact that foobar suppresses CLI encoder window - just matter of taste here.
 

Re: Music Formats?

Reply #12 –
Quote from: Rollin on
If we don't use C2 pointers (because drive doesn't support them or reports them unreliably) and drive is caching (and doesn't support FUA), then isn't EAC doing exactly the same what fb2k is doing: reading the same sectors multiple times (by big blocks to flush cache)?
dBpoweramp's method: a burst read, check AccurateRip and if there is no match, it goes for plan B: several reads.

In "your" case where C2 is not used, dBpoweramp will
* do a single burst, check AccurateRip,
and if mismatch:
* one more burst, check AccurateRip,
and if mismatch:
* try to combine those two bursts into one that matches AccurateRip.
Then plan B.
I have no idea of the chance to get a spurious false positive AR match this way. (It doesn't frighten me. Edit: on a general note, though: if you move your drive to a different mobo, AccurateRip will not know that a previous submission is yours, so if you try to re-rip later, you can get a false match against yourself.)