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Suggested workflow single-file CD archival?
Authored by: acet on Oct 21, '05 11:29:51AM

This hint is so closely related and also judging by some of the comments I've seen so far, I thought I'd ask something I've been grappling with for a while.

Does anybody have any suggestions on a simple workflow for lossless CD archival? I've looked at a number of potential solutions and it seems that FLAC is a good candidate with its .cue sheet support. However I've yet to find anything so far that's stiched everything together in an easy-to-use and efficient workflow suitable for permanently archiving my hundreds of CD's. I've hoped that abcde would have this support but from so far as I can tell, it's not quite there yet.

To be clear, the problem I'm facing is that my music listening habits these days are 100% digital. When I buy a CD, it gets immediately ripped to .mp3 and then tossed in a box in the attic to collect dust for years. Despite the fact that I never play my CD's, they still seem to somehow take damage and I know that in 10 years some of them will simply be unreadable. Since it's only the data and not the plastic that it's imprinted upon that I care about, I'd like to once and for all find a way to make a perfect backup of the CD that I can protect with established data-archival habits and do away with the bulk and the bit rot of the physical media.

FLAC looks great for this... it sounds like you can theoretically make a single file compressed representation of an audio CD and then later use that to re-create a perfect copy of the original, with all of the index markers and TOC contents. But everything I've seen so far suggests I'd have to spend weeks scripting together some sort of custom workflow to encode and label my entire collection.

There has to be a better way... has anybody found it yet?



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Suggested workflow single-file CD archival?
Authored by: hamarkus on Oct 21, '05 01:27:31PM

To repeat myself, what is wrong - for archival purposes - with a zip file?



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Suggested workflow single-file CD archival?
Authored by: grahams on Oct 21, '05 01:55:09PM

There is nothing wrong with it, the only real "problem" is that you get a lousy compression ratio. FLAC (and Apple Lossless) give you about a 50% reduction in file size while being lossless (you can regenerate a bit for bit replica of the source WAVE file from the FLAC file).

ZIP, on the other hand, while it is good at compressing other types of data (text, etc), it doesn't do so well at Audio files. Do a side-by-side comparison of ZIP and FLAC, and you'll see that you only get a few percent reduction in file size with ZIP while, again, you usually get about a 50% reduction with FLAC. FLAC is able to accomplish this because it is a compression algorithm tuned for working with audio data. Just as ZIP (a general purpose compression algo) is bad at audio (and other file types) compression, FLAC wouldn't do a good job of compressing a text file (if you could manage to shoehorn the tools to try in the first place).

ZIP's compression ratio (for audio files) is so minimal it doesn't even really make sense to ZIP the files at all, your space gains are so low you might as well leave them uncompressed and playable on demand.



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Suggested workflow single-file CD archival?
Authored by: acet on Oct 21, '05 03:36:10PM

To echo the previous responders comments, a ZIP file doesn't compress audio data nearly as well as FLAC. ZIP is a general purpose compression algorithm, while FLAC and others are specifically tooled to take advantage of the typical patterns in audio, resulting in higher compression ratios at the expense of being limited to a specific type of data.

Also, this still doesn't address the issue of capturing the meta info contained in a CD, like the table of contents and precise track layout.



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Suggested workflow single-file CD archival?
Authored by: JohnBigBoots on Oct 21, '05 02:19:43PM
I use cdparanoia and cdrdao (from DarwinPorts or Fink) to duplicate my audio CD's. It doesn't offer any compression, but it does make a nearly identical copy.

script cdrdao_read

#!/bin/bash
echo Insert your disk now...
while (( 1 )); do drutil status | egrep -q 'Type: No Media Inserted' && sleep 1 || break; done
device=$(ioreg -c IOCDMedia | egrep 'disk[[:digit:]]+' | cut -d" -f4)
disktool -u "${device}" && \
cdparanoia -fz 1- "$@.aiff" && \
cdrdao read-toc --device IODVDServices/1 --driver generic-mmc --with-cddb --cddb-servers freedb.freedb.org --cddb-directory "${HOME}/.cddb" --datafile "$@.aiff" "$@.toc"
drutil tray eject


Script cdrdao_write

#!/bin/bash
echo Insert your disk now...
while (( 1 )); do drutil status | egrep -q 'Type: No Media Inserted' && sleep 1 || break; done
device=$(ioreg -c IOCDMedia | egrep 'disk[[:digit:]]+' | cut -d" -f4)
disktool -u "${device}" && \
cdrdao write --device IODVDServices/1 --eject "$@"
drutil tray eject

Note: You may need to create ${HOME}/.cddb if it doesn't exist. Only tested on Tiger OS X 10.4.x

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Suggested workflow single-file CD archival?
Authored by: JohnBigBoots on Oct 21, '05 02:22:58PM

Crap, the "&&" should be "&& <backslash symbol here>". The backslash got stripped out of the html. Sorry



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Suggested workflow single-file CD archival?
Authored by: JohnBigBoots on Oct 21, '05 03:02:02PM

Crappy, crap. I should have given basic instructions for use. At a termnal prompt type "bash ./cdradao_read MyCDName" (without the quotes) to read a CD.

Then type "./cdrdao_write MyCDName.toc" (w/o quotes) to write to a blank CD-R.

Important! In "System Preferences->CD's & DVD's", set "When you insert a Music CD" and "When you insert a blank CD" to "Ignore" in order to prevent other applications, like iTunes, from taking control of the optical drive.

Sorry for the bad instructions. Enjoy, eh?



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Suggested workflow single-file CD archival?
Authored by: doneitner on Oct 21, '05 07:16:19PM

Unfortunately for my needs (desires) I have not found a native MacOS X option for archiving my audio CDs to FLAC. All the tools are available, but they're all separate. What I've used is a program on Windows called CDEX. It does the CDDB lookup (and allows me to edit the song titles, etc. if necessary), it does the ripping and (with flac.exe installed as an external encoder, which CDEX supports directly) it does the encoding. What I'm left with is a folder of /artist_name/album_name/ with each track listed in order, in FLAC format and having the ID3 tags (or whatever tag format FLAC uses) filled in with the relevant information.

I would LOVE to have such an all-in-one solution on the Mac. The only thing that comes close is iTunes but iTunes doesn't support FLAC in any way shape or form that I can find. I specifically chose not to use Apple Lossless because, honestly, I can't say that in 10 years I'll be using a system that Apple supports and FLAC, being open source, if necessary I could compile it for whatever system I use and be able to convert my audio into some other useful format then.



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