Ripping to FLAC - help required

[BigRich]

Sorry, this is my first post, so obviously this may well appear to be beginners stuff to many of you - but I've had a good look around, searched threads, looked at the FAQs etc before wasting anyones time!

I am just about to start ripping my collection for the first time and have decided to rip my entire collection boring to FLAC (seems to be a concensus). I only intend to rip my CDs once, so accuracy and error correction (I own a fair few well-used and possibly scratched CDs) is my main focus.

I therefore decided upon EAC (Exact Audio Copy) to rip my CDs, mainly due to the Secure Mode, and will then use a different program to transcode to MP3 for my ipod. I've set EAC up and ripped my first CD but it's not picking up the artist/cd name (I set it up to point at freedb, as I think that's the only option?). Looking at the forum on the freedb website it appears that the freedb database may be down, but is there anything else that might be causing this or that I should be doing?

If not, can someone advise as to whether I should carry on ripping using EAC if freedb isn't taging my collection? What I'm concerned about is that EAC is just going to set up a load of folders of FLACs all titled as 'Unknown Artist/Unknown Album' that are then going to be completely unusable (or would a seperate tagging prgoramme be able to make sense of all these 'unlabelled' folders?


Also, whilst I've said above about the importance of quality etc, I would be prepared to sacrifice the odd glitchy song for convenience if one of the all-in-one solutions like MediaMonkey/dbpoweramp etc is likely to rip in good enough quality - any thoughts?

 

[Steven]

I take it you have allowed EAC through your firewall(s)? freedb servers could well be down. Did you set up tagging in EAC options?

 

[amcluesent]

http://www2.firehose.us:81/~jiggafellz/eac/index.html

In EAC set the option to automatically lookup CD info, or Alt+G after the disc is scanned by EAC.

 

[Warpaint]

If you continue to have problems I can suggest another program which so far has ripped every CD I've tried and got album art & tags spot on.

http://www.ripfactory.com/rsmicro.html

As far as quality is concerned it seems first class. (I have only compared it to Apple lossless so far but I can't reliably tell the difference unless I know which one I'm listening to)

Setting the program up is a little convoluted ( you need to register at the site to get a password for the database lookup) but it all worked first time and it seems relatively simple to use.

 

[BigRich]

D'oh, sorry, it was my damn firewall, I checked again, having thought I'd disabled it....all working ok now.

Would still welcome comments on the possibility of using an 'all-in-one' solution, though.

Also, whilst I'm starting out, if I were to use a tagging program to fill in any album artwork gaps at a later date, such as (mp3tag) will it check all of my files and automatically overwrite incorrect tag that EAC (via freedb) might have got wrong, or would it prompt me where it finds inconsistency?