[Flac-users] Re: CD archival best practices?

[Curt Sampson]

I've just started to archive my CD collection (about 800 CDs), and
my criteria are pretty much the same as the original message under
this subject, except that I'm doing one file per CD. One file per song
is just too much of a pain, and there's really no need, given FLAC's
ability to have metadata in the file.

The first thing I do is run cd-discid against the cd, and store that
information in a file. I'm hoping at some point to have the ability to
get that information out of the TOC in the FLAC file, but at this point
I can't do it, so I'll just keep the .discid files around until I can.

Next, I rip the entire CD using cdrdao. This generates a .bin file
containing the raw audio data and a .toc file containing the table of
contents of the CD. There's still a problem here: I don't have the
subcode data (from channels R through W). There's a possiblity that
cdrdao will keep CD-Text data, since the TOC file supports that, but I
don't know yet because I've dug up a CD that uses CD-Text. (I'm not even
sure if I have one.)

cdrdao does actually have the capability of pulling out the subcode data
as well, but unfortunately it puts this subcode data in the binary file
it generates, thus meaning you can't use it as a straight audio file any
more. I've put in a feature request on sourceforge to have it put the
subcode data in a separate file.

After ripping, I use toc2cue to generate a .cue file, and feed that and
the audio data to flac. This is not really optimal, as toc2cue seems to
do a pretty bad job of the conversion (leaving out such simple things as
the ISRC, but I'm not familiar enough with the cue file format that flac
reads to do better. So I keep the toc file, as well as the flac, in the
hope that I'll be able to fix this later.

So my biggest problem at this point is metadata; I really ought to be
able to store all of cdrdao's TOC information in the flac file, and get
it out again as a TOC file so I can re-burn the CD, and I ought to be
able to generate a CDDB discid from the TOC file as well. I assume that these
things will come eventually.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson  <cjs at cynic.net>   +81 90 7737 2974   http://www.netbsd.org
    Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light.  --XTC