Skip to main content ↑ ↓

Notice

Please note that most of the software linked on this forum is likely to be safe to use. If you are unsure, feel free to ask in the relevant topics, or send a private message to an administrator or moderator. To help curb the problems of false positives, or in the event that you do find actual malware, you can contribute through the article linked here.
Topic: Converting CD to single Flac file - help! (Read 6139 times) previous topic - next topic
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Converting CD to single Flac file - help!

I'm a musician and I would like to offer Flac downloads of my albums.
However, I don't want to sell separate tracks so I'm trying to convert a whole CD to a single Flac file.
I'm using xAct (for Mac OSX) and so far I can't seem to work out how to do it (I can only encode each separate track to a flac file).
Is it possible to convert the whole Cd into one single Flac file? And if so, can someone tell me how to do it?
Thank you 

Converting CD to single Flac file - help!

Reply #1 –
it is possible
do you have a wave editor (eg. Audacity) line up the tracks with that program, and export it to wave, then convert to flac, or just export to flac

thats one way to do it, i dont know if audacity has a mac build but i think it does
My $.02, may not be in the right currency

Converting CD to single Flac file - help!

Reply #2 –
Quote from: thundat00th on
it is possible
do you have a wave editor (eg. Audacity) line up the tracks with that program, and export it to wave, then convert to flac, or just export to flac

thats one way to do it, i dont know if audacity has a mac build but i think it does



Thank you! I do have Audacity so I will try it!

Converting CD to single Flac file - help!

Reply #3 –
Quote from: edem on
Quote from: thundat00th on

it is possible
do you have a wave editor (eg. Audacity) line up the tracks with that program, and export it to wave, then convert to flac, or just export to flac

thats one way to do it, i dont know if audacity has a mac build but i think it does



Thank you! I do have Audacity so I will try it!


Sometimes I find that when I try to edit a track on Audacity it slightly looses it's quality. Is that possible?
Also, I was wondering if you think it's a good idea to offer the download of the whole album or maybe, even if you have to buy the whole album, whether it would be better to download it track by track?
Thanks again. 

Converting CD to single Flac file - help!

Reply #4 –
it may sound worse when you play it back in audacity, thats because it takes some shortcuts for realtime playback, so you can play multiple tracks if you were mixing different insturments together, but once you export it, it should sound the same

personally, individual tracks would easily be my choice
i would also put a zip file with all the tracks in that zip file (or .rar file or other compressed file) in addition to individual tracks
My $.02, may not be in the right currency

Converting CD to single Flac file - help!

Reply #5 –
Take a look at this link

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=EAC_and_FLAC

The 2 softwares you need are EAC and FLAC 1.2.1

EAC rips the CD accurately, without errors.
FLAC 1.2.1 is to compress the WAV file to FLAC format.

In EAC, you can configure whether you want to rip the CD as a single file or as individual tracks.

However, if you do have the original WAVs, you can skip the EAC step and download FLAC 1.2.1 directly to compress your file.
 

Converting CD to single Flac file - help!

Reply #7 –
Thank you for all your suggestions!


Quote from: thundat00th on
it may sound worse when you play it back in audacity, thats because it takes some shortcuts for realtime playback, so you can play multiple tracks if you were mixing different insturments together, but once you export it, it should sound the same

personally, individual tracks would easily be my choice
i would also put a zip file with all the tracks in that zip file (or .rar file or other compressed file) in addition to individual tracks



So you would offer two options - to download individual tracks (even if you buy the whole album) and also put all the tracks in a zip file?  Would you put them in a zip file as .aiff/.wav or as flacs? And  wouldn't that affect the  quality? Thank you again.

Converting CD to single Flac file - help!

Reply #8 –
probably flac, i wouldnt want to download wav. files, even zipped wav. files, and no it would not effect quality

i also want to clarify that im mostly just guessing on the playback in audacity, but its probably something like that, either that or your just imagining the difference
My $.02, may not be in the right currency

Converting CD to single Flac file - help!

Reply #10 –
huh, i didnt know about that, but i would still rather have the flac files for the tags
My $.02, may not be in the right currency

Converting CD to single Flac file - help!

Reply #11 –
Quote
Sometimes I find that when I try to edit a track on Audacity it slightly looses it's quality. Is that possible?


Sad but yes this is possible.
The dafault Audacity settings set default sample format to FLOAT32 while your flac files where probably INT16, and when you exporting back to flac it converts float32 to int16 and uses DITHERING.
So if you simply whant to stick files together in LOSSLESS manner swich off dither for this purpose.