Using EAC Instead Of WMP To Rip Music

[TelstarBoy]

Hi, like several other posters I've read on this site, I'm a complete forum newbie so bear with me, please!

 

I've been running a network of 3 Roku media streamers (wirelessly) from my home built server (amazing what you can do for £100 and a few bits and bobs from previous builds!) running XP Home SP3 and WMP 11 for about 6 months. Apart from a few occasional problems with signal strength, the whole setup seems to run pretty well.

 

One of the Roku units is connected to my living-room hi-fi through a Musical Fidelity DAC so I tend to listen more critically to this set up than the others. I've recently come across EAC and used this successfully to rip CDs to WAV files - so far so good.

 

The problem starts when I try to import these EAC derived files into the WMP library. WMP finds the files easily enough but records the artist / album name / track name info as "unknown". This is how the tracks appear on the Roku screen - not very useful! Where does EAC store the metadata / library info about these files and how do I get this into WMP?

 

I thought I could be "clever" by backing up the WMP sourced files for a particular album, and then manually copying the EAC sourced files to the original directory created by WMP. Not as "clever" as WMP, it seems :-(. WMP tracked down the original files in their new back-up location (without me asking it to rebuild the library :-~) and still didn't recognise any of the EAC filenames in the original directory.

 

Since the network infrastructure seems to work well, I don't really want to change the server software, just replace old files originally ripped with WMP with new files ripped with EAC. Does anyone out there have any clues?

 

Thanks - looking forward to hearing from you!

 

[ldolse]

WAV files don't support tags - that's why WMP isn't showing you anything. Can you use EAC to convert to a format which does support tags like AIFF or FLAC?

 

[Al]

you can make media player "see" the tracks by right clicking on a track (you can hold down control and select nemerous tracks at a time) and selecting "find album info". From then on, media player should show them correctly.

 

However, they are still not tagged as such, as the previous poster mentioned. This means that should you ever have a problem and need to get WMP to repopulate itself, it may well lose the info, and, indeed, the info would be lost if you ever moved the music to some other device.

 

This in mind (and the fact that the process i described above is time consuming and less than perfect), id reccommend finding a format you're happy with that can embed tags permanently in the file, so they'll be there forever. This is also time consuming, of course, but could save a lot of hassle in the long run.

 

[TelstarBoy]

Thanks, Idolse. Yes, after further research, I also discovered that WAV files don't support tags but FLAC files do so started looking into this option. Apparently, the Roku units don't support FLAC directly so need something like SlimServer on the music server - I guess this transcodes FLAC to WAV.

 

Am I right in thinking that SlimServer will replace the Windows Media Connect component which, as I understand it, does all the UPnP trickery for WMP? If so, are there any pitfalls to look out for when trying to install SlimServer? Does WMP let you do this without a fuss or even at all, knowing how proprietary / bundled up Microsoft can be about its apps?

 

The other thing is, is it fairly easy to import the FLAC codec into EAC? I can't see this in the list of codecs supported by the default version of EAC or am I missing something?

 

Thanks, guys.

 

TelstarBoy