I took strettonbull´s advice and bought a Sata 1tb hard disk. Installed and formatted it. Have set folders as per tour etc. So everything I download from now goes direct into their appropriate folders.

I want to get my 2,000 cdr RS collection onto that hard disc also. To play them I rip to Flac and play with Foobar 2000. But, each song ends up in a separate folder. Taking forever to put them all into a new folder and onto the disc.
Making it all a bit messy. Any suggestions please.

Keep any magnetic material away from the HD and you'll be fine. Data cd's or dvd's (more capacity but can't be played on home/car systems) are what I prefer.

What proggy are you using to rip the cds? All the ones I've seen automatically put all the files you rip into a designated folder, 1cd>1 folder of your choice. Did a quick google & the flac homepage has some info on ripping, might be useful

[flac.sourceforge.net]

Did a google with 'cd rip freeware' (that last word is very important!) & there's tons of stuff, I personally use freerip, didn't notice any that will rip straight to flac tho.

BTW, Winamp, the free version, is my choice of playback, & I notice the pay version will rip straight to flac thus saving an extra step of converting from wav to flac.

Thanks. I use freerip. What I don´t understand is this. I put a cd burnt as Flac in the cd drive. I open Computer-New Hard Drive. Then I drag the whole cd to the new hd. But it won´t play. WMP says it´s cda. Is the dragging process incorrect?

I have also due to space issues transferred my cdrs to ext. hard drives. For accurate results you should use EAC (exact audio copy) in secure mode. If trading cdr EAC is essential. Most traders will not trade cdr material unless you have used EAC.

It also gives the best extraction results so if not trading, I recommend you use it. Firstly extract your material to a folder you have created, for instance I use the convention;

FOLDER (name i.e date xxxx.xx.xx - venue (title - label) ) > Disc 1 or Disc 2.

Save the extraction log file to the above as evidence. Then use Traders Little Helper (TLH) to convert wav to flac, save the fingerprint file ffp in each sub folder. Then delete wav files. Copy the folder to ext hard drive(s).

PS if you need the instructions on how you should set up EAC I can email them to you.

Thanks. Yes to the e-mail. I appreciate the help.

see your inbox

Hi

As breadfan has pointed out, you should use EAC in secure mode. You will get best quality.

You can download the Flac frontend and configure EAC to use it when you rip the CDs.

EAC->Conpression options (enter path to Flac frontend catalogue)

That will save you the manual step of converting to FLAC and deleteing the wav files.

Link to flac frontend: [flac.sourceforge.net]

jagger50
very wise advices these to employ EAC, Flacfrontend and TLH!,
EAC need to be configured w/some safe settings for safe rips, and for Flac, compression level 8 is the maximun compression , (and there is no loss of qlty).

Another advice for the Hard Disc is to employ NTFS for the file system, don't use FAT, old and unreliable file system).

and always keep two copies of your collection or personal files, in different media, examples: 2 Hard discs, One HD and one Cd or Dvd, or Two CD or DVD, etc..

Good point about the NTFS, if you use the old FAT32 file system it will limit you to max 2GB long files, which it's a problem when you want to store iso files from DVDs, susally bigger tha 2 Gbytes.

Thank you all. Nice to know people are here to help. As we approach the Stones retirement, it will be nice to assure our RS collection is insured by back up. Also thinking about getting my vinyl collection on HD. I suppose that´s not too difficult. The output jack of the cassette player to PC. While the record player plays. Is there a better way? Rock n Roll is where it´s at. Rock on brothers.

if you are transferring cassettes, use a line in to line out cable (headphone socket to pc) using any number of applications available on the web.

Make sure the heads on the cassette deck are properly aligned and tight, the cassette tape runs smoothly, beware of degradation especially c120s, the tape may split, depending on age and last played.

Vinyl transfers you can get USB turntables now on offer for £50 for xmas, which if you have alot to transfer may be worth looking at.

Quote
axl79
Good point about the NTFS, if you use the old FAT32 file system it will limit you to max 2GB long files, which it's a problem when you want to store iso files from DVDs, susally bigger tha 2 Gbytes.

Yes axl, you are right, but I was meaning about safety (integrity of data, no loss) in NTFS, all this features below are NOT present on Fat (taken from
[technet.microsoft.com]

NTFS Change Journal

As files, folders, and other NTFS objects are added, deleted, and modified, NTFS enters change journal records in streams, one for each volume on the computer.

The total size of all the records currently in the journal varies, but there is a configurable maximum size. The change journal can exceed the maximum size until the size reaches an outer threshold, at which point a portion of the oldest records are deleted until the change journal is restored to its maximum size. The maximum size of the change journal is configurable but cannot be reduced, only increased.

The change journal conveys significant scalability benefits to applications that might otherwise need to scan an entire volume for changes. File system indexing, replication managers, virus scanners, and incremental backup applications can benefit from using the change journal.

The change journal is much more efficient than time stamps or file notifications for determining changes in a particular namespace. Applications that must rescan an entire volume to determine changes can now scan once and subsequently refer to the change journal. The I/O cost depends on how many files have changed, not on how many files exist on the volume.

The APIs are fully documented and can be leveraged by independent software vendors (ISVs). Microsoft uses the change journal in Windows Server 2003 components such as the Indexing Service and File Replication Service. ISVs can use this feature to enhance the scalability and robustness of a range of products including backup, antivirus, and auditing tools.

NTFS File System Recoverability

NTFS is a recoverable file system that guarantees the consistency of the volume by using standard transaction logging and recovery techniques. In the event of a system failure, NTFS runs a recovery procedure that accesses information stored in a transaction log file. The NTFS recovery procedure guarantees that the volume is restored to a consistent state. Transaction logging requires very little overhead.
Recovering NTFS File Structures

NTFS views each operation that modifies a file on a volume as a transaction and manages each one as an integral unit. NTFS might also break a single complex operation into multiple transactions. After a transaction is started, it is either completed, or if an event occurs that causes the operation to fail, it is rolled back, and the NTFS volume returns to its state before the transaction began. Events that can cause an operation to fail include bad sectors, transient low-memory conditions, and disconnected devices.

To ensure that a transaction can either be completed or rolled back, NTFS performs the following steps for each transaction:
Records the metadata operations of a transaction in a log file cached in memory.
Records the actual metadata operations in memory.
Marks the transaction in the cached log file as committed.
Flushes the log file to disk.
Flushes the actual metadata operations to disk.

Steps 4 and 5 occur in a lazy fashion after the transaction is completed, meaning that the flush operations are not tied to the transaction itself. Instead, NTFS modifies the log and metadata quickly in memory, and then flushes later at a convenient time to boost performance.

NTFS guarantees that the log records containing the metadata operations of the transaction are written to disk before the metadata that is modified in the transaction is written to disk. After NTFS updates the cache, NTFS commits the transaction by recording in the cached log file that the transaction is complete. After the cached log file is flushed to disk, all committed transactions are guaranteed to be completed, even if the system fails before the changes are written to disk.

Note
Applications can specify the FILE_FLAG_WRITE_THROUGH Win32 flag to instruct the system to write through any intermediate cache and go directly to disk. The system can still cache write operations, but cannot lazily flush them.

If a system failure occurs, NTFS has enough information in the log to complete or abort any partial NTFS transaction. During recovery operations, NTFS redoes each committed transaction found in the log file. Then NTFS locates in the log file the transactions that were not committed at the time of the system failure and undoes each metadata operation recorded in the log file. Because NTFS flushes the log to disk before any metadata changes are written to disk, NTFS has complete information available about any metadata changes that need to be rolled back during recovery.

Note
NTFS uses transaction logging and recovery to guarantee that the volume structure is not corrupted. For this reason, all file system data is accessible after a system failure. NTFS guarantees user data only if the program used to create the data uses the FILE_FLAG_WRITE_THROUGH Win32 flag. If the program does not use this flag, user data can be lost due to a system failure. If a system failure does occur, NTFS shows either the previous data, the new data, or zeros. Users do not see random data on the volume as the result of a crash.

This thread becomes more and more interesting. Thanks guys.

Getting on well with the backup task. Just one question. Sometimes EAC gives me a sync or read error. So the corresponding file remains in wave. Is this because of a dirty disc, faulty burning issue or what? I always clean the disc. Thank you.

Quote
jagger50
..., faulty burning issue ....

CD-R's (burned discs) should not be ripped if you want a good result,
only Silver CDs (the factory originals ones) can be ripped fine,
if you googl about ripping cd-r's you will find a lot of info..

IMHO the solutions to your problem can be: use another drive to rip, ( DVD drives are better than old CD drives, burners are better than readers only, etc..), or repeat the track rip till no errors are found in the EAC log..
cheers!

Cheers Pancho. A pattern seems to be emerging. The extractions with errors nearly always start round tracK 9. The latter part of the CDR. Seems weird.