newbie question - gapless HDWAV

[Fully Functional]

ok, what am i doing wrong here. I am getting massive gaps with standard CD rips (wav) and my 96/24 vinyl rips. This is through VLC which is usually gapless. I'd love to switch into the otherwise great Wiim app but it doesn't read Riff tags :/

 

[simbun]

ok, what am i doing wrong here. I am getting massive gaps with standard CD rips (wav) and my 96/24 vinyl rips. This is through VLC which is usually gapless. I'd love to switch into the otherwise great Wiim app but it doesn't read Riff tags :/

I'm sure VLC isn't gapless when used as a UPnP controller, but I'll double check later.

MusicBee is a better choice than VLC and has a beta UPnP plugin that's already quite stable.

I'm assuming you have a good reason to store them as WAV with RIFF so I won't suggest converting them to a better format.

EDIT: Out of interest what do you use to write RIFF tags?

 

[Fully Functional]

well this is open to debate and i'm wedded to wav simply because the thought of converting everything to 'something better' and sorting out the tagging is daunting... i have held off from FLAC as it never felt as immediate to me but if someone wants to tell me i should swap then i guess now is the time?
What is 'best' for recording vinyl in audacity and ripping cd's in EAC or converting all the hundreds of wav albums to what?

I'll check out Music Bee, perhaps i just got stuck in the mid 2010's and need to get up to speed

Mp3tag seems to do riff for me, again, open to suggestion and don't seem to be able to cajole it do swap to something better / modern

 

[Mr Ee]

You should swap.
Now is the time.

I'm sure you can find a bulk wav to flac converter, i.e. point it at the top folder and let it create flacs in another folder with the same folder structure.
Can't recall what I used years ago to bulk convert flac to mp3, back when micro sd storage was smaller / more expensive.

 

[simbun]

well this is open to debate and i'm wedded to wav simply because the thought of converting everything to 'something better' and sorting out the tagging is daunting... i have held off from FLAC as it never felt as immediate to me but if someone wants to tell me i should swap then i guess now is the time?

Even using ID3 in WAV is a better option, but if you're going to change then it might as well be to a more supported format like FLAC (lossless just like WAV).
Given the limited set of tags supported in WAV, conversion should be straightforward. I use foobar2000 but it's not particularly user friendly so let's see if there are any other suggestions. If not I'll put a few notes together later.

 

[Burnside]

Dbpoweramp batch converter?

 

[Fully Functional]

(it's probably because my first couple of cheap music players didn't do flac and now storage is dirt cheap so i don't need compression but, ok now is the time)

i'm running some test files in different formats now

 

[AlanB]

i recently converted my music library (approx 12,500 songs over several hundred albums) from ALAC to FLAC using Foobar 2000.

It took several days, because Foobar doesn't support batch conversion, so will only convert the tracks imported into it from each album.

Basically I opened two windows in file explorer (one for the ALAC source and one for the FLAC destination and Foobar.

I copied the ALAC files (including Artist and album folders into the FLAC destination, thern deleted the ALAC files in each album folder to just leave the artist and album folders.

Then artist by artist, album by album, I copied the ALAC files from each album into the Foobar window, selected "all", "convert" "FLAC" and then selected the destination folder.

Other than being very time consuming, it worked very well.

 

[simbun]

It took several days, because Foobar doesn't support batch conversion, so will only convert the tracks imported into it from each album.

Foobar will process any amount of files in the active playlist.
I recently re-encoded my collection using the latest FLAC encoder; whilst it probably could have been done in one pass I did it in batches of ~10000.

 

[AlanB]

Foobar will process any amount of files in the active playlist.
I recently re-encoded my collection using the latest FLAC encoder; whilst it probably could have been done in one pass I did it in batches of ~10000.

Could you load the artist and album folders as well as the music files in to Foobar?

When I tried that it didn't allow me to select "convert". That said I have only just got Foobar 2000 and am still learning about its capabilities.

 

[simbun]

Could you load the artist and album folders as well as the music files in to Foobar?

You can only load audio files into foobar, but you can configure the target folder structure.

The easiest approach would have been to convert the files in place, so you'd end up with ALAC and FLAC in each album directory (because foobar can't be configured to delete the source). Destination settings would be:

Output path: Source track folder
Convert each track to an individual file: %filename%

Once the conversion was finished you'd then just delete all the ALAC.


If you don't have the disk space to store both formats temporarily, in your Destination settings you can build the target structure:

Output path: D:\FLACConversion\
Output style and file name formatting: %album artist%\%album%\%discnumber%.%tracknumber% - %title%

Or you can simply replicate your source folder structure using titleformatting:

Output style and file name formatting: $directory(%path%,2)\$directory(%path%,1)\%filename%

You are able to copy other non-audio files across with this approach ("Copy other files to the destination folder"), but they must reside alongside the audio files and you can't use wildcards i.e. folder.jpg not *.cue.

If this presents a problem (maybe you have artist.jpg in the artist folder) you could always create the target folders first:

robocopy "source" "target" /E /XF *.alac