I'm going to digitize my CD collection, and have decided to record them all in the FLAC format. I have two questions though:

1) What's the best program to convert my collection to FLAC files?
2) Is there something out there that will also determine song info somehow for individual songs? Thinking in terms of my custom burned CDs of random songs that don't match a "real" album out there. I'd rather not have to manually populate data on each song after I record them if there's something out there that will do it for me.

Thanks!

Sound Juicer is rather good. I don't know if it is best but it does the job well for all except the more obscure discs. Though the fault there with the track titles and other metadata would fall on Music Brainz which is what Sound Juicer queries. For the really home made discs you'll have to enter the metadata manually.

Sound Juicer can be set to save as FLAC. There are also other settings you might want to check as well.

1 members found this post helpful.

for me abcde is the ultimate solution to cd ripping.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks for the suggestions.

As far as to the specific issue of populating the titles and other metadata for randomly burned songs that it rips from a custom CD, are there any suggestions on additional software to use after ripping that might populate the data on them?

SoundJuicer pulls in its data from MusicBrainz but there are other databases.

https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Other_Databases

But probably if your tracks are not listed in one they are not listed in the other. If they are from published discs, then you could add them to MusicBrainz. It's not too many extra steps to do so and it helps other people out later. It might even be you if you end up having to re-rip again at some future date.

MusicBrainz has been around so long that it is rather well populated, at least for popular discs or discs that were once popular. If you have a lot of material before it becomes popular or will always be fringe regardless then you'll have to do a lot of typing.

Might be a choice depending on your WM too for ease.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CDRipping have some good choices and notes.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks for all the suggestions. I'll leave this open in case anyone else has some other suggestions also.

Trying Sound Juicer now. First started with a custom mix which it burned as Unknown Artist Unknown Title, then I tried a store bought CD next, which oddly it didn't recognize, then it wanted to overwrite the first CDs files. Is there a setting I'm missing where in this scenario it would rip this second CD as Unknown Artist Unknown Title 2 or something, so it makes another one by default and doesn't overwrite? I found Picard and that did find all but one of the tracks on my custom mix, so that was pretty cool, although it didn't update the file names unfortunately.

some cds can have copy protection, i think.

about the naming - surely this is something in the preferences, and it definitely shouldn't clobber by default. maybe soundjuicer is crap?

anyhow, there's so much cd ripping software out there, i'd just try a few until you find one that caters to your needs.

i used to use asunder, but really abcde is the best (see post #3). set it up properly once, then rip your whole collection...

Yeah, maybe I need to check out abcde then. This soundjuicer not being smart enough to add a number or something to keep each different CD unique is a pain.