Flac files, amarok et al

[joneall]

I have decided to look into lossless audio files, at least for archival, and FLAC seems to be the way to go. (Other opinions?)

I'm running Karmic with the default Amarok 2.2.0. Amarok plays the flac files, but it does not want to allow me to edit the tags.

Also, I created a merged file with "shntool join *flac", then soundconvertered the resulting file from wav to flac. Now, if I add the file to the playlist, amarok lists it several times.

Is use of flac files so traumatic for everyone?

[rfakhrai]

Re: Flac files, amarok et al

FLAC is a great format. But historically I've had some trouble encoding it correctly. I have not experienced your problems in Amarok; FLAC files have always been smooth.

Do you have all the necessary FLAC codecs and packages installed on your machine? If I'm not mistaken, if you run the FLAC encoder from the terminal, the tags should be controlled through that.

Are you ripping CDs and encoding in FLAC? If so, KAudioCreator is adpet at QDDB-retrieval and proper tagging.

As for your merged file, problem, I'm no help. I don't know what you're talking about.

[joneall]

Re: Flac files, amarok et al

FLAC is a great format. But historically I've had some trouble encoding it correctly. I have not experienced your problems in Amarok; FLAC files have always been smooth.

Do you have all the necessary FLAC codecs and packages installed on your machine? If I'm not mistaken, if you run the FLAC encoder from the terminal, the tags should be controlled through that.

I ran flac, just like that. It printed some stuff without complaints. Does that mean it is ok?

$ flac
================================================== ============
flac - Command-line FLAC encoder/decoder version 1.2.1 ...
This is the short help; for all options use 'flac --help'; for even more
instructions use 'flac --explain'

To encode:
flac [-#] [INPUTFILE [...]]

-# is -0 (fastest compression) to -8 (highest compression); -5 is the default

To decode:
flac -d [INPUTFILE [...]]

To test:
flac -t [INPUTFILE [...]]

Are you ripping CDs and encoding in FLAC? If so, KAudioCreator is adpet at QDDB-retrieval and proper tagging.

I too loved Kaudiocreator. But it is apparently not available any more with this version of Kubuntu and KDE. Too bad. So I have to use K3b.

As for your merged file, problem, I'm no help. I don't know what you're talking about.

Well, operas are often separated into tracks for different arias. I want to concatenate them to get just one file and I want to do it in a way which avoids having a hiccup where the point of concatenation is. In principle, shntool does that, but gives the problem I mentioned -- at least, with amarok. Kaffeine, smplayer and others don't play it at all. Vlc plays everything, but lacks amarok's great cataloguing and playlists.

Thanks anyway for your suggestions.

[rfakhrai]

Re: Flac files, amarok et al

I understand what you're doing with the operas; I did the same thing with my catalog of classical works. For that project, I always used something graphical such as Audacity. You can import the various wav files and make sure they line up perfectly with no glitch. Then, you can export the overall file as a wav and convert that to flac. I don't see why Amarok would have a problem with that.

I've heard some good things about a tag-manager called ExFalso. It's available in the repositories. I believe I'm wrong about the flac program controlling the tags.

Hope this is some help.

[joneall]

Re: Flac files, amarok et al

I understand what you're doing with the operas; I did the same thing with my catalog of classical works. For that project, I always used something graphical such as Audacity. You can import the various wav files and make sure they line up perfectly with no glitch. Then, you can export the overall file as a wav and convert that to flac. I don't see why Amarok would have a problem with that.

Guess I'll have to try that. I did that with my classical mp3 files and it got pretty boring before I had finished, so I was hoping to avoid it with flac files.

I'll look into ExFalso. Many thanks.

[cantodea]

Re: Flac files, amarok et al

The best ripper for Linux is Rubyripper, its similar to EAC (Exact Audio Copy).

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index....tle=Rubyripper
http://code.google.com/p/rubyripper/

[joneall]

Re: Flac files, amarok et al

I am trying to install rubyripper, but it keeps telling me:

$ rrip_gui
ruby-gettext is not found. Translations are disabled!
The ruby-gtk2 library could not be found. Is it installed?

I can not find ruby-gtk2 with "apt-cache search". Apparently it is not in the Karmic release set. What to do? What translations?

Thanks in advance.

[rfakhrai]

Re: Flac files, amarok et al

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index....tion_on_Ubuntu seems to have all of the necessary dependencies explained. Try installing all of those packages including ruby-gnome2, gettext, and libgettext-ruby.

Should work!