Digital Audio

After acquiring a Cowon D2 personal media player, I decided it was time to revisit how I handle my digital audio. A long time ago, I converted my entire music collection to MP3s mostly using Grip (and the widely used lame MP3 encoder). Most recently, I've been using Banshee to play music on my desktop. For a long time (until I lost the device on a bus in SouthBend last October), I used a 512MB Creative Muvo for portable music, which worked great, although the small file size and lack of playlists was an issue. {nid N35}

Archival {nid N36}

I've decided to re-rip all of my music into FLAC for archival purposes. I'm using Exact Audio Copy (EAC), which is a Windows app, for ripping. Configuration guides: {nid N37}

• Exact Audio Copy Guide {nid N38}
• Setting EAC compression options {nid N39}

I attempted to use MAREO to compress both FLAC and MP3 at the same time from EAC, but I couldn't get it working properly, and quit out of frustration. I can easily batch convert from Linux. For Windows transcoding, the best tool I've found is MediaCoder. {nid N3A}

MP3 {nid N3B}

In addition to archiving in FLAC, I'm also converting to MP3, mainly for my D2. The D2 plays FLAC, but I only have 12GB of space there, not enough for my entire music collection. Additionally, the D2 (and other players, both portable and computer-based) support a lot of MP3 metadata goodies. {nid N3C}

I'm downloading cover art from Amazon.com and saving it as cover.jpg in each album directory. {nid N3D}

The D2 also supports lyrics using LDB Manager, which is clunky and doesn't have extensive data. I've managed to mark some of my MP3s, but I haven't gotten my D2 to recognize the lyrics yet. I read a recommendation somewhere for MiniLyrics for lyrics management, although I would still need to use LDB to actually tag the MP3s. {nid N3E}