So now the little beast is up and running (silently), I'm starting the lengthy process of ripping a few hundred CDs to .flac format, oh, and picking a music player. I say a few hundred, but I don't really know how many. It may be 1000 or more. I always assumed that the software choices would be easy, after all there are dozens of rippers capable of churning out FLAC and dozens of media players to choose from. Not so.
The first thing I found is that Windows 10/Explorer/WMP etc. aren't really compatible with FLAC. Yep, you can make WMP play FLAC with the appropriate codec and then Windows and Explorer will recognise them as music files. Problem is that Windows doesn't handle the metadata tags in FLAC properly. It's a bug that's been there for years and MS have no obvious interest in fixing it. Most obvious symptom is that all things Windows will truncate the displayed track/song title to 26 characters. Nor can you correct this by editing in Explorer via the properties dialog as you can with most basic metadata. What you can do is royally screw the existing metadata. Top tip: if you try to correct this with another tag editor then Windows is quite likely to deny that the file has any metadata at all. It's all there. If you use WMP as a ripper then it rips just fine and even downloads and inserts metadata just fine (some of the genre decisions are a bit weird but MS isn't alone in that). Well, I say 'just fine' but that's if you know to turn off autoplay and autorip. Otherwise it has a habit of missing all info for the track it started to play. Oh, and sometimes it ignores your decision not to autoplay and autplays anyway, unless you manually add a registry DWORD just for CDs. Oh, and WMP totally relies on metadata as a player, so that's a bit sad for FLAC. WMP will take a squint at the library it happily ripped, and organise it for you. Only it will miss a few tracks from an album. It will give you odd un-named albums from unknown artists (made up of the missing tracks). And it will sometimes decided not to play a track, but the next one instead. So, all in all, best to stay clear of WMP as a ripper and player if you're interested in using FLAC.
I know that many will say that's an obvious decision even without experimenting. But then there's the fun I've had since with some other highly regarded software...
never trust a man in a blue trench coat, never drive a car when you're dead |
