The obvious upside is neatness for neatness' sake: one cd == one file on disc, and that file can include all album and track metadata, album art, linernotes (masquerading as lyrics) etc. Want to burn an exact replica of the original CD? Just drag and drop the flaced album file onto Burrrrn. It's that simple.
SlimServer's/SqueezeCenter's support for this format is pretty flawless, at this point. The only PROBLEM that I'm experiencing with keeping 99.999% of my library (>37k tracks) in this format is that squeezecenter still has trouble with pathnames that include diacritic characters on utf8 filesystems. And I don't know if that problem is limited to just this format or not. But other than that, it's no-problemo. The three LIMITATIONS that I experience having committed to this format are: 1). It's a little more work, but I've gotten my tool chain to the point where almost all tasks beyond the initial careful entry of metadata in the ripping program and scanning of the coverart are completely automated. 2). Squeezecenter transcodes the whole-album flac server-side (using flac) and sends the tracks one-at-a-time to the client player. With the stock setup of squeezecenter, this loads your server with two additional processes. If you are sure your flacs don't contain any spurious IDV2 tags (which don't belong in flac files anyway) then you can customize the convert.conf file and reduce this to one extra process. The only real down-side of this is that INTRA-track FF and RW doesn't work...INTER-track FF & RW works just fine. Personally, I haven't missed this feature and I imagine that eventually this limitation will be removed in a future SC enhancement. 3). Transcoding from whole-album flacs to trac-per-file mp3s for my iPod involves more work. It's on my to-do list to write a utility to automate this too. I've already written the c code to extract and parse the cuesheet for another utility. It's just a matter now of finding the time to adapt the code to this purpose. All in all, I've had NO regrets about picking this format for my library. Since every album is stored losslessly, switching to tomorrow's new, improved and better format will be a piece of cake, when the time comes. All that said, this format isn't for everyone. It's a minority format, so support for it will always depend on us cranks who use it remaining vocal and, frankly, occasionally having to ratchet up our voices into the squeakey-wheel tessatura. But for me, whose library is 99% classical, and whose chief concerns are: absolute audio fidelity to the source material, absolutely accurate metadata (including very finicky genre classifications) and appreciation of the convenience of "everything-in-one-file" containerization, this format has proved to be ideal. -- gharris999 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ gharris999's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=115 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=43503 _______________________________________________ ripping mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/ripping
