Question: Re-rip CDs while keeping old metadata

ruthi

Hi,

I have a collection of approx 200 CDs that I have over the years ripped to mp3 files. The mp3 quality varies quite a bit - some are still 128kbps, some are 256 and up.

I've decided I would like to re-rip the CDs to a lossless format which raises 2 problems:

Which lossles format: I'm tempted by flac, tried wma (but my squeezeserver doesn't understand) and no doubt there are othes. I have an HTC Hero and an iPod as well as J-River media player that might want to read the files.

How to retain as much metadata as possible. The majority of time I've spent on the ripping has been making the metadata consistent and complete, and I really don't want to lose it. However, I don't know any way to keep it...

Any ideas? Unless there's a need to change I will probably use the j-river program to do the re-ripping.

Ruth

t0nee1

I prefer open source, so the obvious for me is flac..From the flac file(s) you can convert to whatever lossy or lossless format of your choice..I don't use J-River, though I did install jukebox on my lappy, just to try it out...WMA lossless is slower to decode as opposed to flac..So it's your call since their both lossless..If you don't want to go through the trouble of decoding and converting from flac to say, another lossless format like Apple's ALAC (for ipod) rip straight to ALAC with foobar2k or dBpoweramp..
BTW, with dBPA(Trialware) you can convert to two formats at the same time..

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olyteddy

WinAmp uses both CDDB and GraceNote for **** data so may do the best job of making the tags. It can do FLAC or WMA.

ruthi

Thanks... but I was hoping there was some way of treating my existing collection as a metadata DB, or some program that has an explicit "re-rip" option that takes the existing files + the CD and makes new files.

Ruth

t0nee1

Why on earth would you want to use the "existing files"?..After all you stated in your 1st post that, "The mp3 quality varies quite a bit - some are still 128kbps, some are 256 and up."..

Just rip to a lossless format with the apps suggested and tag...You can then transcode/convert to mp3 with tags intact...
If you want to manually edit the metadata of the flacs or mp3s, try mp3tag or similar..And edit using the info from the existing file tags...If that's your goal of course..

__________________
Never Argue With The Ignorant Because They Will Simply Pull You Down To Their Level And Beat You With Experience..

"I'm entitled to my opinion, and my opinion is that you're not allowed to have an opinion. - George Carlin

ruthi

You're right, I want to replace the audio data - the music - with newly-ripped data. However, I have spent many hours getting the metadata - names, song titles, dates, classification and more - as I want and I really don't want to lose that or have to redo it. Sadly while CDDB et al are useful, for the discs I have they frequently either don't work at all or return inaccurate information.

Hence wanting to combine the existing files with new CD data.

Ruth

AllanDeGroot

If you rename all your old files to a slightly different naming scheme, but one that'll "interleave" with the new files in the same directory/folder (hmmm... change the file name to whatever it is going to be for the new file but with a -2 appended to the track name before the file extension)

and you look at the files with say Tagscanner...
you can lock most of the fields (artist, album genre)
and greatly reduce your work in tagging the new files.

The track number and track title are going to be problematic

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PlasmaShock

You can use Mp3tag to mass copy and paste tags. Copy the tags from the old files using Mp3tag (select the files, right click > copy tag. Do not click "copy") then change the directory to your new files. Select the corresponding tracks, and then right click > paste tags. I think you can also click "paste" too. This will copy every tag (ID3 for example) including album art and embedd them into the new FLAC files (now converted to Vorbis comments).