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[KDPearson]

I am preparing to rip my CD collection to FLAC using Media Server.  I’m new to FLAC encoding and Media Server.    Before I start this process I want to make sure I have the rip options set correctly.  I don’t want to find out I’ve made a mistake and have to start over.  I have taken the time to review the forum and wiki to see what I can learn.

Let me also say that my primary goals are music quality and long run usage.  Saving disk space is not important, disk space is cheap.  I will be listening mostly on my home theater system and playing music from my computer through my DAC.  I chose FLAC because I thought it would be an encoding scheme supported for many years and that the metadata would transport between computers as I upgrade over the years.

Here are the encoding settings I’ve chosen:
Copy Mode=Secure
Read Speed=Max
Analyze Audio during ripping=check
Encode concurrently with ripping=check
Max rip processes=1
Quality Settings=0
Verify Encoding=x
Add 4k padding block=x
Add seek table (if possible)=x
Use Ogg as transport layer (*.ogg)=blank

I assume “check” and “x” both mean yes.  I’m confused why some places in Media Server use check marks and some use x marks.

Should I change “Quality Settings” to 8?  I’m not sure how the scale works.  I assumed most compressed meant lowest quality, but I might be wrong.  I read somewhere that it had to do with time spent encoding not the quality of encoding.  Some guidance would be helpful here.

Should I be setting anything else to adjust bitrates or any other quality settings?

Thanks.  Kent

[Listener]

I am preparing to rip my CD collection to FLAC using Media Server.  I’m new to FLAC encoding and Media Server.    Before I start this process I want to make sure I have the rip options set correctly.  I don’t want to find out I’ve made a mistake and have to start over.  I have taken the time to review the forum and wiki to see what I can learn.

Before you plunge in to rip your entire collection, rip a few CDs (10 at least) and try browsing and playing music from those CDs in MC.  That experience will help you make decisions that fit your needs.

Let me also say that my primary goals are music quality and long run usage.  Saving disk space is not important, disk space is cheap. ...

I chose FLAC because I thought it would be an encoding scheme supported for many years and that the metadata would transport between computers as I upgrade over the years.

Here are the encoding settings I’ve chosen:

Flac is a good choice.

Think a bit more before you act on the disk space rhetoric.  I've used MC for about 6 years.  Life is simpler when your music files fit on a single drive. Life is much simpler when your music files and other files fit on a single backup drive.  My ~3000 CD collection ripped as Flac files with a quality setting of 5 or 6 (some of each) still fits in a 1.2 TB partition on my personal PC and that is very handy.  My dedicated MusicPC had a 2 TB drive for music files and MC library files.  I may never fill that 2 TB drive with files from ripped CDs.  However, if I started buying high res. downloads, that disk space would be filled quickly.

Keep in mind a couple of rough numbers: 3 CDs => 1 GByte of disk space (for Flac files with quality=5 or 6.) WAV or AIFF or Flac without compression takes roughly twice as much space.

I think that Quality=5 or 6 is a more sensible choice than 0.  Otherwise, your settings look OK.

Should I change “Quality Settings” to 8?  I’m not sure how the scale works.  I assumed most compressed meant lowest quality, but I might be wrong.  I read somewhere that it had to do with time spent encoding not the quality of encoding.  Some guidance would be helpful here.

Flac is a lossless format; the audio stream is the same whatever the quality setting was when the file was encoded.  The quality setting just determines how much effort the encoding process puts into getting maximum compression.

The default is 5 or 6. That is fine; higher settings don't produce much decrease in file size.  (0=no compression.  You should not choose that setting unless you really know why.)

Should I be setting anything else to adjust bitrates or any other quality settings?

Some additional settings to look at:   in Tools/Options/File Location/Audio

The top setting defines the base path
The next setting defines a rule for the folder name where files are stored.
The last setting defines a a rule for constructing the file name based on tag values.

You should figure out where you want to store your files and how MC should name them. Even if you use the default settings, it is important to know where MC will place your files and how it will name them.

Some time ago, I created a slideshow to explain the MC ripping process step by step when someone on this forum was having a problem that was difficult to resolve.

http://naturelover.smugmug.com/Other/JRiver-MC-15-process-for/14155242_FR9fhG#!i=1044373019&k=Q3VLb

---
Plan to start making backups of your music files as soon as you have a significant amount of time invested in ripping CDs. (RAID is not backup.)

Bill

[glynor]

I think you basically have a good plan, except you're over-thinking it.

Enable Secure Ripping (Options -> CD, DVD, & BD -> CD Ripping -> Copy Mode), and rip to FLAC (Options -> Encoding -> Encoder).  If you are ultra-paranoid (which isn't really necessary in Secure Rip mode, but whatever), you can also enable the Verify Encoding checkbox in the FLAC Encoder settings dialog.

Leave everything else at the defaults.  No need to overthink it.  And, yes, as Listener mentioned above, the Quality setting in FLAC does NOT correspond to quality of the audio.  This is "quality" of the compression algorithm, and corresponds to a tradeoff between encoding (and decoding) "difficulty" and resulting file size.  Just like how you can turn the compression "strength" up or down when you make a ZIP file.  Changing this for ZIP compression doesn't make the stuff inside any better or worse, it just makes it take longer to compress/expand and makes the resulting ZIP smaller or larger.

The file size differences you can achieve by playing with the quality slider in FLAC are very minimal, but the encoding/decoding requirements can be somewhat severe as you go up the scale.  The default setting of 6 is a very good balance.  Just leave it alone.  Setting it to 0 is silly, as you might as well just rip to AIFF or something uncompressed then.

Lossless is lossless is lossless.  Just like a ZIP file.

[KDPearson]

Thank you for you both for your responses.  I guess I did need to have the lossless is lossless beat into me and stop worrying about quality.

While I'm not concerned about space because I know my entire collection will fit on the current hard disk.  A couple of years ago I ripped the entire collection using Windows Media Player to WAV files and the entire collection fit with ease.  But when I started shopping for my first DAC I read about bit perfect copying and I didn't set anything to verify the copy.  But more importantly I learned that WAV files don't copy metadata very well.  If I put a bunch of effort into metadata I want it to stick as I upgrade computers.  Thus I've decided to rip again to FLAC.  It seems like it should be supported 10-15 years from now and the metadata will be as permenant as any computer data is.

Bill, thanks for the advice on naming, location and rules.  I've already given it some thought so that everything is standardized and well organized.  The only decision I haven't made yet is whether to stick with the genre that Media Center downloads with the album information or to edit the genre to fit with how I organize my music.  I find that Rock, New Age, Classical are often too broad a catagory.  Also I found that the downloaded metadata is somewhat inconsistent in genre, sometimes rock sometimes progressive rock for music by the same group.

Again thanks for helping a newbie to the software.

Kent

[Listener]

The only decision I haven't made yet is whether to stick with the genre that Media Center downloads with the album information or to edit the genre to fit with how I organize my music.  I find that Rock, New Age, Classical are often too broad a catagory.  Also I found that the downloaded metadata is somewhat inconsistent in genre, sometimes rock sometimes progressive rock for music by the same group.

You should choose the contents of the Genre tag to fit your use of MC.  A little experimentation with a small set of files may clarify things for you.

I created separate views for each Genre as the following screenshot of a Classical music view illustrates.  I use a user defined Sub_genre field as a category to select files within a view.



It is possible to create views that include more than one Genre as well.

Your choices for Genre values can be changed quickly in MC later.

Bill

[glynor]

You should choose the contents of the Genre tag to fit your use of MC.

Agreed.

The auto-downloaded Genres (or ones embedded in the tags already if you purchase music online) can be handy as a starting place, I suppose.  I never use them though, as I want them organized how I want them organized.

For music, I find Genre is the most important tag to get things into the categories I want, and make my browsing efficient in a large collection.

I almost always just rip them to whatever it finds and then fix them afterwards in MC, though.  Tagging through MC (especially if you are picking from a pre-defined list, like an established set of Genres), is faster and easier than typing it into the ripping tagging dialog.

Sometimes I change the pre-filled tag to "New" or something similar so that they are easily found and don't "pollute" my other views.  There are lots of other ways to do this too...  Just decide on what works best for you.

I guess I did need to have the lossless is lossless beat into me and stop worrying about quality.

It's okay.  It is confusing (and they should have never called that setting in FLAC "quality" in the first place, compression strength would have been a much better term).

But more, it is just very difficult to pivot from the world of analog signal quality and lossy digital compression as it has "historically" applied to digital audio, to have a full understanding of the technologies today.  And, of course, there are unscrupulous businesses out there actively preying upon this confusion, and making it worse in the process.

The best way to think of FLAC (and APE and other similar lossless audio compression mechanisms) is as a "specialized ZIP format for audio files".  Which is, frankly, exactly what they are.  So long as they can be verified to be reliably lossless, and they have the file format features you want (tagging and whatnot), most of the rest is academic.  And, many of those differences were driven by conditions in much earlier times technologically.  Some things (like that quality setting in FLAC and ZIP) mattered a heck of a lot more when you were trying to cram as much data as possible onto a $899 20MB hard drive or a set of 3.5" floppies, but were also limited by your 66MHz CPU's decoding power.

PS.  The first hard drive I ever owned myself (not my "parent's" or "family" system), was I think a 20MB drive (it might have been 24 or 30 or something).  I didn't pay that much for it though, because I was poor, so I had to wait and scrape and save for that bad boy.

[Listener]

The auto-downloaded Genres (or ones embedded in the tags already if you purchase music online) can be handy as a starting place, I suppose. I never use them I never use them though, as I want them organized how I want them organized.

For music, I find Genre is the most important tag to get things into the categories I want, and make my browsing efficient in a large collection.

I almost always just rip them to whatever it finds and then fix them afterwards in MC, though.  Tagging through MC (especially if you are picking from a pre-defined list, like an established set of Genres), is faster and easier than typing it into the ripping tagging dialog.

Sometimes I change the pre-filled tag to "New" or something similar so that they are easily found and don't "pollute" my other views.  There are lots of other ways to do this too...  Just decide on what works best for you.

My choices for tag values are different from those in the JR tag database (or any of the ones dBpopweramp uses.)  My submissions would corrupt the database.  I cancel the submission dialog and use the regular tag window to enter or edit tag information.

I think the tag entry dialog for submission to the database is a weak spot in MC.  It makes the process more complicated and lacks the power of MC's regular tag editing features.

Bill