EAC - FLAC help please

[Praxis]

Please help if you can:

I don't understand why I am having a hard time being successful with EAC and FLAC, but I am. So if someone could help me I would appreciate it.

I downloaded the latest EAC and FLAC, executed the program and configured it all according to instructions given.

I ripped a CD and the ripping process completed correctly with all the songs being compressed and saved with ".flac" endings to each of them as it showed in the EAC instructions.

My problem is this: After doing all this, I cannot open any of the music with either NERO or Windows Media Player in order to listen to or to burn a CD. Can someone please tell me what I am missing or if there is some other step that has to be done in order for me to access my ripped music.

I would really appreciate any help that you could give me here on this site. Thanks very much.

Praxis

 

[MDS]

FLAC is a lossless compression format. EAC ripped the audio tracks from the CD and invoked the FLAC encoder to encode the audio and reduce the file size. To play it you must decode it back to PCM.

Nero and WMP do not have a FLAC decoder and do not recognize the format - not many media players do. The FLAC package you downloaded should also include the decoder and you will have to use it to decode the FLAC files to PCM before you can play them or burn them to a CD.

 

[Praxis]

Thanks

Thanks so very much MDS, I really appreciate it. I'll have to see if this is the holy grail to my problem.

You said," To play it you must decode it back to PCM." Can you tell me what PCM means, and also, if I want to incorporate LAME into EAC and use it sometimes, would I have to do the same as you have suggested for FLAC, i.e. "To play it you must decode it back to PCM." ?

Thanks again MDS

Praxis

p.s. Can you tell me how to access the PCM tool?

 

[MDS]

Some background to understand all these formats and their relationship:

PCM is Pulse Code Modulation and is a raw audio format - a sequence of numbers that represent the analog signal at points in time. For example, a CD contains 16 bit / 44.1 kHz PCM which means there are 44,100 16 bit numbers for every second of audio (per channel). To 'play' those numbers they are converted to analog via a Digital to Analog Converter (DAC).

PCM is the underlying format for pretty much all of the compressed formats, whether they are lossy (MP3, AAC, WMA, etc) or lossless (FLAC, APE, WMA lossless, etc). When you ripped a CD, EAC or whatever tool you used read the bits off the CD and now has the PCM samples. If you save it as-is, you'd have a WAV file. A WAV file is uncompressed PCM, which is why the file is large.

Now, you can take the raw PCM and convert it to a smaller format to save disk space. LAME is an MP3 encoder so if you have EAC send the data to LAME to be encoded the result is an MP3 file. MP3 is a 'lossy' compression format - it reduces the file size by discarding data that its model believes you wouldn't be able to hear anyway. To play back MP3, the player must recognize it as MP3 and decode it back to PCM for playback. Nearly all media players nowadays recognize MP3 and many CD burning apps will let you add MP3 directly to its burn list because it will decode it to PCM before burning it to a CD.

FLAC is also a compression format but is 'lossless'. Think of it as being like WinZip - it reduces the size of the file but nothing is lost. When it is decoded you get back the original PCM. To play it or burn it to CD, it also must be decoded to PCM. There are very few media players or burning apps that recognize FLAC and can automatically do the converstion for you. So... you have to do it manually by running the FLAC decoder against every FLAC file you want to decode. The docs that came with FLAC should tell you the command line you need to run it to decode FLAC files.

Now as an aside, are you starting to think that using FLAC or any other lossless format that is not widely supported by available tools kind of a waste of time given that disk storage is growing larger each year at a cost of about 2 cents per gigabyte? I do and therefore just save the uncompressed WAVs on a large external drive.

 

[zeuiax]

Use mediamonkey to play flac files. If you need to burn .flac files into a cd then use burrrn. For more info http://flac.sourceforge.net/download.html

 

[Sensei Sid]

I use foobar2000 to play flac media (I just prefer the interface), and highly recomend it to anybody looking for a great multimedia player. Unfortunately no main stream media devices support it...yet...but there are a lot of heavy hitters getting behind it. Hopefully we'll see the end of mp3 soon as higher quality formats become more prominent.

 

[808htfan]

I'd also say that foobar2000 and burrrn are a couple of programs that'll do what you want. You could install foobar and associate it w/ .flac files (and mp3 or whatever else you want) to play your files. Burrrn will let you burn flac, wav, mp3, and a bunch of others directly to CD. All the decoders are included for you. You can pretty much just drag-n-drop, then burn.

http://www.foobar2000.org/

http://www.burrrn.net/ (the site seems down right now, though)

Good luck

 

[TLS Guy]

FLAC is a lossless compression format. EAC ripped the audio tracks from the CD and invoked the FLAC encoder to encode the audio and reduce the file size. To play it you must decode it back to PCM.

Nero and WMP do not have a FLAC decoder and do not recognize the format - not many media players do. The FLAC package you downloaded should also include the decoder and you will have to use it to decode the FLAC files to PCM before you can play them or burn them to a CD.

Winamp will play Flac files. Winamp is also useful for coding and decoding FLAC files via FLAC front end.

This will show you what is possible.

 

[OttoMatic]

Winamp will play Flac files. Winamp is also useful for coding and decoding FLAC files via FLAC front end.

I have also found Winamp to be the right solution for FLAC playback. I tried the others and just liked the interface and organization abilities of Winamp the most.

Good luck.

 

[jwenthold99]

I was able to download the codecs that allow WMP to decode and play FLAC.
I am currently in the process of ripping all my cd's to flac, and using my ps3 and tversity to access and play back the files..... so far it works and sounds great!

http://flac.sourceforge.net/

 

[bandphan]

I was able to download the codecs that allow WMP to decode and play FLAC.
I am currently in the process of ripping all my cd's to flac, and using my ps3 and tversity to access and play back the files..... so far it works and sounds great!

http://flac.sourceforge.net/

yes you can get it to play, but imo wmp sucks arese

 

[jwenthold99]

yes you can get it to play, but imo wmp sucks arese

Oh, I agree... I was just saying it can be done. Tversity streaming through the PS3 though works very nicely, especially for me because I can now keep CD's in storage away from my 1 year old

 

[808htfan]

...http://www.burrrn.net/ (the site seems down right now, though)

Good luck

Burrrn's site is still down, quite a while. If you like, I could send you the installer. Only about 2 megs...