People who switched your library from MP3 to FLAC how did you go about doing it?

[Daverz]

I have a related question - anyone know a good ripping service? I have about a hundred more CDs to do. The guy who did it last time is focusing on something else.

If would get a computer optical drive that will read CDs, if you don't already have one, and some ripping software (I use dBPowerAmp). Set up the software to automatically eject after ripping and to start ripping as soon as the drive closes. Then it is pretty easy to get a CD ripping workflow going while sitting at your computer that takes minimal attention. You could easily rip 100 CDs in a week.

 

[Chrispy]

I didn't have a lot of downloaded MP3s to begin with, altho did rip some cd's while I briefly used iTunes into AAC until I realized it was doing that rather than a lossless version, and after some frustration trying to move iTunes from old to new computer pissed me off I was motivated to do better. That and a knee injury gave me plenty of time to sit down with all of my cds and rip them to flac. The only mp3s I use are the ones I create from the FLACs for use on drives for car/portable devices. These days when I get a new cd I play it and immediately rip it. I still rarely download, and generally only from the artists' site, but always look for a cd level download. Use Foobar2000 as player/organizer/streamer.

ps My preferred ripper is EAC.

 

[NoteMakoti]

You can automate a bit of the process with a really good Lidarr setup.

 

[Berwhale]

If would get a computer optical drive that will read CDs, if you don't already have one, and some ripping software (I use dBPowerAmp). Set up the software to automatically eject after ripping and to start ripping as soon as the drive closes. Then it is pretty easy to get a CD ripping workflow going while sitting at your computer that takes minimal attention. You could easily rip 100 CDs in a week.

Yes, and if you buy the right drive and have a modern, multicore CPU, it will rip and encode a CD in a couple of minutes (I can't remember if it used all 16 logical cores on my Ryzen 7 1700X, but it was very quick!).

Most accurate drives for dBpoweramp: https://forum.dbpoweramp.com/showthread.php?48320-CD-Drive-Accuracy-2022

 

[raif71]

You said that you converted to APE. Maybe you should have stuck with that format. No point saying it saves on CPU power as CPUs are getting more powerful. As for me, most of my CDs are converted to FLAC as that was decided long ago. Now back to your question, I did in my earlier days converted them to WAVs but after that, I did use shntool to convert them to flac. Shntool is a command line tool and I used that on linux. Might be available on other platforms. Need to have flac encoder tool somewhere in your executable paths.

 

[Berwhale]

You said that you converted to APE. Maybe you should have stuck with that format. No point saying it saves on CPU power as CPUs are getting more powerful. As for me, most of my CDs are converted to FLAC as that was decided long ago. Now back to your question, I did in my earlier days converted them to WAVs but after that, I did use shntool to convert them to flac. Shntool is a command line tool and I used that on linux. Might be available on other platforms. Need to have flac encoder tool somewhere in your executable paths.

CUETools works pretty well for format conversion on Windows: https://github.com/gchudov/cuetools.net

Or you could use FFMPEG from the command line (although I haven't done that for a very long time).

 

[Grumpish]

Thats not what I meant. I meant if someone else had a mixture of MP3/FLAC like I do how did you go 100% FLAC? What sources did you use hunt down a new source for every last MP3 and replacing it with FLAC?

The hard way - I re-ripped the stuff that I had ripped as .MP3 as .FLAC. I was bored stupid at the time, I was off work with a broken leg after a motorcycle accident (some ... stupid taxi driver had done U-turn right in front of me). dbPowerAmp to start with, then EAC (which is still my preferred ripper).

 

[ThatM1key]

Going from MP3 to true quality FLACs is like a phase. I went three phases.

1. Any MP3/WMA Phase. I didn't care about sound quality and didn't care about bitrate, I just wanted the tunes. DAC Quality? Speaker Quality? Mastering quality? Who cares music is music! Have old CDs from the 90s? Rip in WMA. Error Correction? Phh, Fastest rip speed possible!
2. Gimma Hi-res Phase. I wanted everything in hi-res, including DSD and sadly MQA. At this phase, I was like how can a 24-bit/96khz master be awful, its hi-res and I can stream it! Get a good DAC, good speakers and good amp during this phase.
3. Settledown Phase. Realize, hey there is terrible hi-res files out there and a well mastered CD sounds better. Good DSD album? Sounds great at converted CD quality but luckily WavPack DSD retains the original for future format converting. Goodbye Multi-gig 24-bit/192khz albums and hello 700MB FLAC max quality-mastered CDs. Rip CDs via overkill methods and create a rip log.

I can give some tips when searching for lossless replacements for lossy formats (Streaming and local).

1. If your bent on trying to get the best version of the album on CD, look for it when it first released on CD. Rarely later CD releases feature better mastering.
2. If your just into streaming, find the original album (at CD quality not Hi-res) not from a compilation album and/or a high-res album. Rarely high-res albums will be mastered better (Ex: Green Days albums).
3. Avoid 20th Century Masters albums and other garbage compilations.

Finally, the once-for-all audio test. A test deciding if you can hear a terrible master regardless if its in a lossy or lossless form.
The song is "Dude Looks Like A Lady" from the specific album "20th Century Masters: The Millennium Collection: The Best Of Aerosmith".

 

[solderdude]

EDIT: You don't need to reply and tell me you cannot "convert" and MP3 into FLAC and get back the lost audio. I am aware of that. I said "convert" when I should have said "replace". As in replace by downloading.

So I have been building my MP3 library since I got my first PC in 1996. I started out by ripping all of my CDs to 160k MP3, then at some point I reripped all of my CDs using Exact Audio Copy and stored it in lossless .APE because .APE had a higher compression then FLAC.

Eventually smart phones became a thing and drives became bigger so I switched my .APE to FLAC because FLAC requires less CPU to decode and on mobile that means better battery life.

I have other random MP3s floating around, some still in 128k I got from various online sites. I also have some random .OGG files back from the mid 2000s when people said .OGG was going to replace MP3.

Has anyone taken the time to replace every last .MP3/.OGG you have to FLAC? How did you do this exactly?

Only the ones that I really like to listen to more often. Besides I don't think I can hear the difference between 320VB and FLAC.
I only used 192kb MP3 in the early days when memory on DAPs was expensive. Those were only about 50CD's I ripped at that time and re-ripped them in 320.
The 'audiophile' albums I did replace with FLAC... to ease my mind only, not because I have the illusion I can hear a (valuable) difference.

 

[Mnyb]

Using a lossless format is also about backup and archiving your stuff , rather than any extraordinary differences in sound quality. Gives me piece of mind if I break one of the discs .

 

[Svperstar]

You can automate a bit of the process with a really good Lidarr setup.

Thats cool I wasn't aware Lidarr existed. I've thought that if it were possible to search by album name could replace all my MP3s with FLAC with a PowerShell script or something that would find/replace everything using some service for lossless audio.

 

[Philbo King]

If you want to convert existing audio files to FLAC (since APE is lossless), Reaper has a batch processor that will read almost any audio format and write back any format (such as FLAC).

REAPER | Audio Production Without Limits

However, I'm not positive it can read .APE files without an addon. You might have to use an old Reaper version. https://forums.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=126341

 

[pablolie]

When I first ripped my entire CD collection (over 4 k of them), I right away decided to do everything jazz and classical as a FLAC. The vast majority of popular music (R&B etc) I went for MP3 at 320kCBR or 256k+VBR. To this day I haven't had to revisit that decision, other than a very few cases - for the vast majority of recorded music, a high quality lossy recording is all you need for SQ... but I fully understand if some just want the lossless for archiving quality purposes.

 

[Philbo King]

When I first ripped my entire CD collection (over 4 k of them), I right away decided to do everything jazz and classical as a FLAC. The vast majority of popular music (R&B etc) I went for MP3 at 320kCBR or 256k+VBR. To this day I haven't had to revisit that decision, other than a very few cases - for the vast majority of recorded music, a high quality lossy recording is all you need for SQ... but I fully understand if some just want the lossless for archiving quality purposes.

I experienced annoyance when my music library had greatly varying levels from album to album, so I decided to use Reapers batch converter to convert all the files to the same -14 LUFS-I level. (TLDR: I got tired of constantly tweaking playback volume in the car)

It worked great.

My library is all MP3 320K or VBR files, but I didn't notice any perceptible degradation from recompressing to MP3 after the level change.

Now Red Hot Chili Peppers plays back at the same level as Duke Ellingtion and Andres Segovia.

 

[pablolie]

I experienced annoyance when my music library had greatly varying levels from album to album, so I decided to use Reapers batch converter to convert all the files to the same -14 LUFS-I level. (TLDR: I got tired of constantly tweaking playback volume in the car)

It worked great.

My library is all MP3 320K or VBR files, but I didn't notice any perceptible degradation from recompressing to MP3 after the level change.

Now Red Hot Chili Peppers plays back at the same level as Duke Ellingtion and Andres Segovia.

Can't you do level matching with tags instead of reconverting at different volume levels?

Certainly volume matching is an annoyance in digital collections, but we only notice it because it's so easy to mix playlists together.

 

[Philbo King]

Can't you do level matching with tags instead of reconverting at different volume levels?

Certainly volume matching is an annoyance in digital collections, but we only notice it because it's so easy to mix playlists together.

Yes, I tried that first. It worked, sometimes. But it only works with players that utilize the replay tag, which are surprisingly scarce. The USB stick reader in my car doesn't.

 

[ThatM1key]

The USB stick reader in my car doesn't.

I wish I had a USB jack on my old car stereo. Im sick of MP3 CDs

 

[Zathras]

By the time hard drives and SD cards had become large enough to make lossless music practical I had amassed a pretty large collection of MP3s (of varying quality). At some point I just decided to bite the bullet and re-rip all of my CDs to FLAC using EAC. I did a little at a time, and over the course of about a year replaced everything with FLAC files. Here are the tools I use:

EAC - for ripping
Mp3tag - for tagging (it does FLAC, MP3, and other file types)
Metaflac - for adding Replay Gain (comes with the FLAC tools)
albumartexchange.com - for artwork
mixramp - to add mixramp tags - mixramp tags allow any MPD based player (Moode, Volumio) to do intelligent cross-fading.

I'm a software developer, so I wrote a couple scripts to scan the music files and apply replay gain, mixramp, and other tags automatically. This made things a bit easier.

 

[Philbo King]

By the time hard drives and SD cards had become large enough to make lossless music practical I had amassed a pretty large collection of MP3s (of varying quality). At some point I just decided to bite the bullet and re-rip all of my CDs to FLAC using EAC. I did a little at a time, and over the course of about a year replaced everything with FLAC files. Here are the tools I use:

EAC - for ripping
Mp3tag - for tagging (it does FLAC, MP3, and other file types)
Metaflac - for adding Replay Gain (comes with the FLAC tools)
albumartexchange.com - for artwork
mixramp - to add mixramp tags - mixramp tags allow any MPD based player (Moode, Volumio) to do intelligent cross-fading.

I'm a software developer, so I wrote a couple scripts to scan the music files and apply replay gain, mixramp, and other tags automatically. This made things a bit easier.

EAC can be tweaked to add (MP3) tags, but the syntax is a bit obscure. I don't know if it'll do it for FLAC.

 

[Zathras]

EAC can be tweaked to add (MP3) tags, but the syntax is a bit obscure. I don't know if it'll do it for FLAC.

Yeah, it can add tags to FLAC files, but you need to set up the command line flags for it under "External Compression". I usually end up touching up the tags manually on everything I rip.