"Tags" refer to data stored embedded within the file and can include a variety of different types of information: artist, track #, year, genre and even more "customized" data such as comments, musicbrainz identifiers and so on. While you can use the filename to provide you with a certain amount of information, this is limited by the need to keep filenames to a manageable length and there is no standard way of formatting the data (eg. artist-title.wav or title-artist.wav). SlimServer (and the newer SqueezeCenter) will try pretty hard to guess data from filenames if there are no tags, but you are better off making life easier for everyone and using tags. Of course, wav files do not support tags, which pushes you in the direction of another file-format. The attraction of FLAC and other *lossless* formats is that you can do this with *no loss of quality*. It's like a wav file only better because it is smaller (typically around 50-60% of the original filesize). The only drawback is that not all players support FLAC (and other formats). MP3 is probably the only universally supported format, but it is lossy, which is why I (and many other SB users) opt for FLAC. If worst comes to worst, it's easy enough (if a little slow) to do a batch conversion of your FLAC files back to WAV (you recover the original in its full glory) or to MP3 for an ipod or other player (I maintain an MP3 version of my FLAC library for exactly this purpose).
Hope that clarifies things. As for error correction, WAV itself has no error correction, but EAC works very hard to deal with read errors from the CDs. As this is part of the extraction process not the encoding process, WAV and FLAC benefit equally from EAC's error correction prowess. -- smc2911 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ smc2911's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4388 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=42977 _______________________________________________ ripping mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/ripping
