lossy and lossless files in harmony in a music library: How?

[c_j_bolt]

Hello all,

I found this forum absolutely brilliant for searching for advice a few months ago when I was in the process of setting up Firefly on a NSLU2 NAS for use with my Roku Soundbridge, particularly when trying to get the disc to spin down etc.

At that time my music collection consisted of about 10,000 mp3 files in 192kBps encoding, organised by artistalbum. One of the reasons I set up a dedicated server was to provide backup of my library after I lost some downloaded albums following a hard disk failure, so the library directory structure is set to mimic how I like to have my music set in Windows Media Player 11 (which I use at work and on my desktop PC at home) so I can drag and drop to do a bulk backup, as and when I need to, normally just copying new albums as I rip them.

A friend of mine was talking to me about flac lossless, and I have now decided, seeing as hard disk space is cheap, to go lossless and rerip my CDs. However, this poses me a problem, how can I structure my files without getting double copies of everything when browsing the Firefly library using the Roku.

I have searched on this forum, and nobody seems to have come up with any clever ways of doing this – so I may have to right a script in Python that walks the directory structure and removes or renames *.mp3 where there is a corresponding *.flac (as I downloaded some of the records I can’t rerip them – so need to preserve both file types in the library)

Before I do this I just wondered if any of you could think of an elegant solution that would allow me to retain 1:1 compatability with my windows PC – for ease of backup on my windows PC I will want to keep mp3’s always for use with my 512mb(!) flash player.

Thanks for any comments in advance

[rpedde]

@c_j_bolt wrote:

Before I do this I just wondered if any of you could think of an elegant solution that would allow me to retain 1:1 compatability with my windows PC – for ease of backup on my windows PC I will want to keep mp3’s always for use with my 512mb(!) flash player.

I don’t have an elegant solution, but here’s perhaps some items that might help:

With mp3 files with “MCDI” tags, you can generate a CDDB id. I think iTunes embeds a CDDB id in the comment field as well. So perhaps if you are ripping to flac, you can embed cddb id in the flac comment or something so you can compare cddb ids later. Then you might be able to identify duplicate cds.

That’s assuming your ripper/encoder filled in the mcdi tag before.

– Ron

[c_j_bolt]

Thanks for your thoughts, Ron.

I don’t think I was clear enough though (unless i missunderstood your advice). I’m happy with the MP3 files and Flacs coexisting in the same directory, I just don’t want to see the files twice in my soundbridge when I browse the firefly library after scanning.

I think the simplest solution maybe the creation of the python script I was considering, so that when it scans the music directories, firefly only sees either a Flac OR an Mp3 file, never both.

[rpedde]

@c_j_bolt wrote:

I think the simplest solution maybe the creation of the python script I was considering, so that when it scans the music directories, firefly only sees either a Flac OR an Mp3 file, never both.

I think you are right. But matching CDDB ids might help determine what flac corresponded to what mp3, in the case that they were named differently or incorrectly.

But it might not be worth that effort. Might be easiest just to get the 95% by file name, and then hand-tuning from there.

— Ron

[Anonymous]

@c_j_bolt wrote:

I don’t think I was clear enough though (unless i missunderstood your advice). I’m happy with the MP3 files and Flacs coexisting in the same directory, I just don’t want to see the files twice in my soundbridge when I browse the firefly library after scanning.

I had a similar requirement. Here’s what I did. I setup a Music folder with 2 subfolders: one named “FLAC” & the other called “MP3”. I use Exact Audio Copy (EAC) with the REACT2 add-in (check out hydrogenaudio.org; EAC & REACT are widely used there). It’s easy to configure REACT to automatically and accurately rip your CD’s to both FLAC and MP3 in one pass. All of your metadata will be identical. I then setup 2 instances of my media server (currently use Twonky but plan to add FireFly on an NSLU2 for the iTunes clients in my home). One streams the FLAC library which i use mostly on my high-end home stereo; the other streams MP3s to the 3 soundbridges I have which conserves bandwidth and processing loads (transcoding). The MP3 library is also used with iTunes to keep me in music in my car and at work. The soundbridge now sees 2 servers giving listeners the option of streaming the highest quality possible, or the MP3s.

[stretch]

I removed the .mp3 file extension from Firefly’s file type list. It happily ignores mp3’s and only streams the flac copies to the SB.

The mp3’s get copied to a 2GB flash disk and used in the car (car stereo has a usb port in the front and plays mp3’s). i obviously can’t fit the entire library onto the flash disk so i change the content every few weeks.

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