Flac - Sep 2004 - Archiving CDs w/ Flac on Linux (and subsequent re-encoding)

This must be possible; not sure how to do it yet.  :)

After facing the thought of going through my cd collection for a 3rd 
time for re-encoding, it occurred to me that I should just flac the 
whole CD and add a cue sheet, and then back up to DVDs.  That way -next- 
time I need to re-encode to any format, I can handle ~1/20th the discs, 
compared to my whole cd collection.  :)

Wondering if anyone has a good way to do this; my primary questions are:

1) how to generate a cue sheet to store in the flac file (on linux?)
    I've seen cddb2cue, is this a decent way?  or cdrdao can generate
    a toc file, then convert that to a cue sheet....

2) after I've got a full-CD flac file with a cue sheet and seek points,
    how to re-encode this track-by-track, to ogg or mp3?  I don't see
    any command-line flac decoder that can say "play from seek point
    3 to seek point 4"... looks like the flac executable itself can only
    seek based on nr of samples, or hh:mm:ss?

3) Finally, can vorbis comments in a flac file store binary data, such
    as album art?

Thanks for any info & pointers (and I hope this reaches a person or two, 
what with the recent mailing list hosting change....)

-Eric

--- Eric Sandeen <sandeen@sandeen.net> wrote:
> 1) how to generate a cue sheet to store in the flac file (on linux?)
>     I've seen cddb2cue, is this a decent way?  or cdrdao can generate
>     a toc file, then convert that to a cue sheet....
I think whatever provides cdrdao also provides toc2cue which
will convert.  one of the flac TODOs is to take cdrdao toc files
as input.
> 2) after I've got a full-CD flac file with a cue sheet and seek
> points,
>     how to re-encode this track-by-track, to ogg or mp3?  I don't see
>     any command-line flac decoder that can say "play from seek point
>     3 to seek point 4"... looks like the flac executable itself can
> only
>     seek based on nr of samples, or hh:mm:ss?
the upcoming flac 1.1.1 release has a new option called --cue, e.g.

$ flac -d --cue 4 -c file.flac | lame ...

will pipe track 4 to stdout.
> 3) Finally, can vorbis comments in a flac file store binary data,
> such
>     as album art?
no, comment values are UTF-8.  better to put it in an APPLICATION
block if you have to have it.

Josh


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Josh Coalson wrote:
> --- Eric Sandeen <sandeen@sandeen.net> wrote:
> 
>>1) how to generate a cue sheet to store in the flac file (on linux?)
>>    I've seen cddb2cue, is this a decent way?  or cdrdao can
generate
>>    a toc file, then convert that to a cue sheet....
> 
> 
> I think whatever provides cdrdao also provides toc2cue which
> will convert.  one of the flac TODOs is to take cdrdao toc files
> as input.
cuetools looks good, too.... guessing toc parsing might not be so bad to 
implement either, though.
>>2) after I've got a full-CD flac file with a cue sheet and seek
>>points,
>>    how to re-encode this track-by-track, to ogg or mp3?  I don't
see
>>    any command-line flac decoder that can say "play from seek
point
>>    3 to seek point 4"... looks like the flac executable itself can
>>only
>>    seek based on nr of samples, or hh:mm:ss?
> 
> 
> the upcoming flac 1.1.1 release has a new option called --cue, e.g.
> 
> $ flac -d --cue 4 -c file.flac | lame ...
> 
> will pipe track 4 to stdout.
cool!

OTOH I've already started archiving with 1 track per flac file; I don't 
suppose I lose anything by this, if I keep the toc file around I can use 
the decoded flac files to recreate a cd that way too.

Also, not sure there's a good way to put all track name information into 
a single flac file of a CD?

Thanks,

-Eric

Eric Sandeen wrote:
> After facing the thought of going through my cd collection for a 3rd 
> time for re-encoding, it occurred to me that I should just flac the 
> whole CD and add a cue sheet, and then back up to DVDs.  That way -next- 
> time I need to re-encode to any format, I can handle ~1/20th the discs, 
> compared to my whole cd collection.  :)
For what it's worth, I think I've decided to forgo the single-flac-file 
scheme.  Ripping individual tracks with cdparanoia does not leave out 
any sectors, so I can always un-flac back to one wav per track, and 
splice them together.  I'm using cdrdao to save a toc file for later cd 
creation if that becomes necessary.  Tested this on a live album (Johnny 
Cash Live at Folsom Prison) and there is no lost audio; tracks segue 
seamlessly as on the original disc.

The downside of one flac per trac seems to be a little added complexity 
of stitching them back together*
The upside is that I think it's simpler to store track metadata, 
especially for later conversion to other formats, since it can operate 
file-by-file.

Unless anyone has other reasons to avoid the flac-per-track method, I'm 
about to go burn my dvds.  :)

Thanks for all the input guys,

-Eric

*I'm not sure why flac -d 1.flac 2.flac 3.flac outputs sequential wavs 
rather than one big wav; is this intentional and/or needed?  I suppose 
the "one big wav" approach would require flac to look at all input
files
to write the proper wav header at the front, but that should be do-able...?

On Mon, 13 Sep 2004, Eric Sandeen wrote:
> Tested this on a live album (Johnny Cash Live at Folsom Prison) and
> there is no lost audio; tracks segue seamlessly as on the original
> disc.
Did you check that a) the cue points are the same, and b) you're getting
back CD-Text as well?
> ...it occurred to me that I should just flac the
> whole CD and add a cue sheet, and then back up to DVDs.  That way -next-
> time I need to re-encode to any format, I can handle ~1/20th the discs,
> compared to my whole cd collection.  :)
Well, probably more like 1/15 to 1/16, if my stats are anything to go by:

      Count: 831 flac files
      Total: 229 GB
    Average: 282 MB/file

Looking at that, and realizing that I've got probably another hundred
CDs not yet ripped, it hardly seems worthwhile to spend the time and
money burning more than 60 DVDs.

Maybe once we get blu-ray, and I can reduce it to 15 or so....

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson  <cjs@cynic.net>   +81 90 7737 2974   http://www.NetBSD.org
     Make up enjoying your city life...produced by BIC CAMERA

--- Eric Sandeen <sandeen@sandeen.net> wrote:
> *I'm not sure why flac -d 1.flac 2.flac 3.flac outputs sequential
> wavs 
> rather than one big wav; is this intentional and/or needed?  I
> suppose 
> the "one big wav" approach would require flac to look at all
input
> files 
> to write the proper wav header at the front, but that should be
> do-able...?
if you mean (I think)
  flac -d -c 1.flac 2.flac 3.flac
it's doable and seems intuitive... I'll add it to the TODO list.

Josh



		
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