Good Riding Week

With a total of 109 miles this week, it should be easy to hit 3500 in the next day or so and it's pretty clear that 3600 miles is a good possibility for 2008.

I've spent quite a bit of time lately converting my CD rips (WAV) to FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec). Track by track, album by album, I'm converting my Sonos network files to FLAC (from the current ogg/mp3 formats). Since my experience is that the FLAC files take only about 60-70% as much space as the (also lossless) WAV versions, I plan to use them as my CD backups.

The conversion process is fairly easy and, depending on one's plans, it might work well to use a handy setup like AutoFlac. For me, I had already ripped the WAV's to a hard drive using EAC so the issue was converting WAV's to FLAC and I've found that FooBar2000 does an exceptional job at this. I use a straightforward program called Tag & Rename to update the file tags (it works for ogg, mp3, etc., as well) and then update my online (Sonos NAS hard drive) files. Although I did take the step of backing up all my MP3/OGG files on a separate drive since it's really nice to have those for "carrying your music" type devices. Incidentally, FooBar2000 also converts FLAC files to OGG and to MP3 (I used Oggenc and LAME as the encoders for these). Since it will also convert FLAC to WAV, it's fairly easy to recreate CD's if necessary, from the FLAC backups. To do this, generally speaking, however, I recommend generating cue files during the CD ripping process (EAC has this functionality). It's not essential but it's an easy way to ensure that you can produce and exact duplicate of a CD (not critical for me).

Later ...