The big FLAC project

I made a mistake a few years ago. I've since learned that I can hear better than I thought. Thus begins the once-and-for-all CD archiving project. All my physical CDs will be see the light of a laser one last time, and then be put away forever, replaced by album-image FLACs with embedded cuesheets. These archive FLACs will then serve as source files for other audio formats (MP3 high quality, MP3 small size, audio CD ISOs, and so on).

Step one: following Alex Wetmore's lead, find a bulk CD ripper cheap on eBay.

Step two: Get Alex's stuff working. (Yes, it really does work.) What I learned during this step: (1) turn off the Removable Storage service in XP, (2) don't try updating any software from Alex's zip archive; just treat it as a turnkey system; (3) turn off the Windows Update service unless you want to lose 10 hours to an automatic update restart; (4) set your computer's power settings to always-on; and (5) understand that to kick off the whole process, you need to first mount the Slot 0 disc, then launch REACT, then press alt-F5 to start the ripping.

Step three: wait a long time. Excluding the Windows Update incident, I'm seeing about 12 minutes per disc, start to finish. Thus about two ideal days for a 200-CD batch.

Future post-processing steps include adding album art, MusicBrainz tags, replay gain info, and embedded CUE and Vorbis data. I'll update this entry as I get there.