When the people fear their government, there is tyranny.. when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
 
Thomas Jefferson
 
Good comes only when people do it.
 
Erich Kastner

Archiving CD Audio - Preamble

How do you archive a CD collection as lossless FLAC audio files on  DVD (or external USB HDD) and have the ability to burn a CD from them as  required?

Outline of the Task...

Ripping a CD to one large 'CD Image' file makes sense for achieving  purposes as it is easier to deal with one file (one album) and a CUE  sheet holding the track information, rather than a collection of tracks.  If one wanted a particular track it could be extracted from the album  length file using the cue sheet. If one wanted an exact copy of the CD  one just loaded the CUE and burnt a CD.

Why is the cue file important?

The cue file contains Artist, Album and Track information. More  importantly it holds the pre-gap timings - that is - the length of the  silence between each track. With this information an exact copy of the  original disc can be made.

What are Meta-Tags?

Embedded within each music file are 'Meta Tags' which contain Artist,  Track and and Album information and well as technical details about the  encoder and the quality of the encoding. Album cover artwork can also  be embedded into the music file (though I prefer to add separate files  for the artwork and booklet).

A good Meta-Tag editor for MAC OSX is called Tag. For more  information about Tag see...

http://sbooth.org/Tag/

For Windows MP3tag is a user-friendly and versatile tool for re-tagging  music files of all main types.

http://www.mp3tag.de/en/index.html

How do I use FLAC+CUE files on a MAC?

There is NO application for the MAC OS I know of, that can directly  burn an audio CD from a FLAC file using a CUE file to supply the  necessary track information.

You make use of the CUE indirectly...

The CUE file is used to split the one large album length FLAC 'CD  Image' into individual track length FLACs. During the the splitting  process the 'Pre-gap' time can be added to the end of each track. You  then set the inter-track gaps in the burning program to 0, load the  tracks into your CD burning  program and start the burning process. You  end up with a copy of the original CD when the audio CD is burnt.

Note:
Depending on the burning software the individual track files may need to  be converted from FLAC to the WAV format before an Audio CD can be  burnt.

'track' centric or 'album' centric?

For most music styles 'track' centric is OK, but it does not work very well for Classical music. Here it well and truly sucks. With classical music, single tracks can result in extremely long file names. Not only this, the 'flow' of the piece may be affected on play back, as the silence between the tracks (the pre-gaps) are no longer as the  conductor and/or producer intended.

On the other hand, having single tracks from the outset means that it  is a little easier to make a CD from various artists, a 'best off' or the like.

Horses for courses I suppose!