[Flac-users] Using Grip with FLAC

[Dan Clemmensen]

I looked around on the web, but I found no guidance on this subject, so
I'm guessing. Here is what I came up with. It appears to work on a 
limited sample of CDs. Can anyone comment on whether or not this
is OK?


My system is Mandrake 9.0. My Grip is 3.0.1 (as supplied with
Mandrake 9.0)

My flac is 1.1.0, built from the source tarball. Mandrake ships
with 1.0.3, which does not appear to have support for vorbis comments.

In Grip, under the CONFIG->MP3 Tag, I chose the "flac" encoder.
All this does is seed the three config lines. The resulting values
were not inspring. In particular, even though grip claims to try to
add ID3 information, XMMS was not getting any information. Therefore,
I took matters into my own hands. First, the FLAC web site ecourages
the use of vorbis comments rather than ID3, so I looked at the FLAC,
grip, and Vorbis documentation. Then, I changed the three config
entries as follows (note that the second entry is wrapped to get
it to fit in this e-mail. it is on a single line in the config.

MP3 exectuable: /usr/bin/flac

MP3 command-line: -V -T TITLE='%n' -T ALBUM='%d'  -T TRACKNUMBER=%t
-T ARTIST='%a -T GENRE='%G' -T CDDB=%i' -T DATE=%y -o %m %w

MP3 file format: ~/flac/%A/%d/%t_%n.flac



Notes:   This causes the flac plugin for XMMS to create an acceptable
playlist, which is all I want right now. I'm requesting comments because
I want to start a major rip on my entire CD collectin, and I do not want 
to forget something. To this end, I've added the CDDB disc nynber to the
vorbis comment: this should let be go back and to an automated fixup
later if needed.

This configuration causes grip to tell FLAC to add seven fields to the
vorbis comment. Each field is added by the -T <fieldname>='%x' 
construct, where <fieldname> is a well-known name from the vorbis
documentation, and %x is the corresponding parameter from the grip
documentation.  If there are any experts out there, PLEASE theck this!
(note that 'CDDB" is not well-known: I made this up myself.)

As you can see, my 'MP3 file format' uses a main directory names ~/flac,
into which it places a hierarchy: artist/disc/trackname. The trackname
starts with the tracknumber (to preserve disc order) and ends in .flac

Also, I told grip to not add ID3 information, since that did not appear 
to work anyway.