I'm looking for the best way (or any way) to rip my CD's in EAC, and encode them as m4a (aac) using iTunes for windows, all the while keeping the artist/album/track/song/etc info.
I tried ripping them directly from iTunes, but with the error detecting/correcting checkbox on, it only rips at .1x - .2x, whereas with EAC, I rip at up to 35x (plextor with C2 enabled). If I click that checkbox off, iTunes rips at about 20x, but it misses a lot of errors (some of my cd's are pretty scratched up) and that's unacceptable to me.
EAC can put the ID3 tags I need into a WAV file, but iTunes doesn't recognize them in WAV files, only mp3 files. It does, however, recognize them in aif files.
Does anyone know if its possible somehow to get EAC to write AIF files with the correct artist information in them? Then I could simply convert the AIF files as normal using iTunes.
I don't know iTunes for Windows - If there is no commanline encoder included there's no easy way ...
Some alternatives: Use another AAC encoder; There are free ones available at http://rarewares.hydrogenaudio.org; there's also a commandline encoder that can use NeroAAC .dll. Maybe you can convert .AAC to .m4a somehow ...
Another way: Rip to .wav with EAC secure mode and create a virtual (audio) CD from the .wav files, using e.g. Nero Image Drive. Now rip from the virtual CD without error dectecting/correcting. Needs a lot of HDD space but should work.
1. Set iTunes to encode to lowest quality waves for speed / size
2. Import CD w/o error correction
3. Set EAC to use same file naming pattern for waves as iTunes
4. Rip CD with EAC (to wave)
5. Copy EAC waves (big) over iTunes waves (small)
6. Set iTunes to encode to AAC
7. Convert waves to AAC in iTunes
8. Delete waves (optional)
Actually, I found a decent way to do this (and keep iTunes CDDB info intact) without having to drag out my CD's. For each album (assuming its complete):
1) Create a cue and wav file (wav file being all 0's) for the album, using each songs length.
2) Mount the cue/wav as a virtual CD image.
3) Run iTunes. It'll look up the CD in the CDDB database.
4) Quit iTunes.
5) Mount a new cue with the same wav file, but with the first track having 1 second.
6) Rerun iTunes. If the total length of the CD is identical to what it 'saw' the last time, it'll assume its the same CD, even though the first track is only 1 second.
7) Convert the first track to AAC.
8) Quit iTunes.
You can actually do this all in batches of 20, depending on which virtual CDROM program you use. This gets you a whole bunch of 1 second long iTunes aac's with CDDB lookup info stored in each. Now simply copy the CDDB info from the single 1 second track for each album into all the real MP4's for that album, changing the track # appropriately, and renaming as m4a.
When this is done, you can simply import all of the m4a's into iTunes. It'll look at first like you have the same song for all the songs in each album, but if you use iTunes 'Get Tracks Name' menu item on all of them, they'll magically fill in correctly. :)
I successfully converted about 500 albums this way. (Writing a little app to do the cue/wav creating, as well as inserting the cddb info at the end.) It did take a while, but not NEARLY as much time as re-encoding, or any other ideas, and it resulted in (almost) identical m4a's to actual iTunes encoded tracks. (And they work in the iPod too! :)
Oops. That answered a whole different question. What I did for my original problem is, use EAC to create a wav/cue file (or do 20 albums at once), and then mount them on virtual cdrom drives. Run iTunes, and import them all (without error checking :) and you're good to go! (Real) error free importing into iTunes and you still have some good speed.
Probably should have commented on what problem I did solve before. I wanted to convert 500 albums of NeroAAC encoded songs (MP4's) into iTunes/iPod compatable format (M4A) without having to re-encode or re-rip the original CD's.
