[Flac] FLAC CD Archive

[Dan Phillips]

Charles Steinkuehler wrote:
> The recent discussions about archiving CDs with flac prodded me to get
> abcde working again.  I've filed a debian bug report with patches to the
> latest abcde that enable generating a toc file from the disc with cdrdao
> (rips CD-TEXT data and creates index points from subcode data).
>
> Combined with my patches to toc2cue, this is enough to rip even
> "problem" discs (track 1 doesn't start at frame 0) and wind up with
> (hopefully) enough data to re-create the original CD with great accuracy.
>
> The patches and more details on use are available via the debian BTS:
>   http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=389975
>
> For those who can't do the patch/compile thing, I've got a statically
> linked version of toc3cue (should work on most any linux disto) and a
> patched version of abcde on my website:
>
>   toc3cue:
>     http://www.steinkuehler.net/abcde/toc3cue
>   abcde:
>     http://www.steinkuehler.net/abcde/abcde.svn.toc
>
> You might also need to look at my abcde.conf to see how I've got things
> setup:
>
>   http://www.steinkuehler.net/abcde/abcde.conf
>
> NOTES:
> I'm currently passing flac the '-S X' switch to avoid inserting
> seekpoints other than those created from the cuefile import (at disc
> track/index points).  You may or may not want this behavior.
>
> You'll probably also want to change the sample offset passed to
> cdparanoia to match your drive! :)
>
This is great news. I am looking forward to trying this out. After
looking at some other formats  - that I was not aware existed until
pointed out to me - I'll be staying with FLAC and looking at keeping all
my CD's in single file FLAC archives. For me this is mainly due to FLAC
being well supported in Linux and the fact that my dated archive is in
FLAC (multi file).  I am now going to look at the possibilities of
single file archiving, playing of single file format and converting
single file to lossy. I believe XMMS has a plug-in for playing single
file, although I have yet to find it. With this I hope FLAC continues
it's growth and popularity.

I will also be setting up abcde as my primary script for easing the pain
of updating my archive with the rest of my CD's and possibly the old
ones too.

Good luck with the script!