Anyone know WMA?

I'm not too familiar with FLAC, other than its lossless. I thought--without investigation--that there are some issues with the tags being standardized. I've also never used WMP or Meedio. The problems you may be having may be due to the nonstandard tags.

I highly recommend EAC as a ripper. In secure mode, there is nothing I'm aware of that will provide better rips. There are FLAC encoders that can be configured with EAC to generate FLAC rips instead of WAV or MP3. Takes a bit of time to get it set up, but once you do, it will automatically create a nice clean library as well--all my rips are stored automatically in /artist/album/trackno_song.m4a format. If audio is your principal concern, take the time to learn how to set up EAC. It really isn't that hard.

As far as playback, if you are committed to Meedio, your options appear somewhat limited. I just looked at their manual, and they don't claim to support FLAC as a format, just MP3, WMA, Ogg Vorbis, APE, and AIFF files. Of those, MP3 and Ogg Vorbis are lossy compression schemes. AIFF is like WAV in that it doesn't support tags except under some kludgy nonstandard implementation. That leaves you with APE or WMA. APE (Monkey's Audio) is supposed to be good, but I don't think the decoders are broadly available other than on a PC platform. As an archival format, it leaves me nervous. WMA will ultimately succeed just because its MSoft. But, you have to make sure that you specify lossless encoding rather than lossy encoding since it will do both.

I noticed there is a Meedio foobar2000 plugin. If you are committed to Meedio, you might think about that, since foobar is a well respected player. The note on the plug in says something about mp3 playback, but foobar does FLAC natively.

Good luck.

Well then why don't you reccomend using Foobar as I am. You can tag the file with the FreeDB plugin after ripping to WAV format. You can rip with EAC or the foobar program. Kernel streaming with bit perfect output is no problem using Foobar. One does not have to use the ASIO plug in for bit perfect output with Foobar. Lots to choose from with Foobar for all your additional needs. It takes a bit of a learning curve, but once you understand the program it is very simple to use. Hard drive space is cheap today and I find no reason not to have the capacity to rip in whatever lossless format one chooses. If the rip is lossless it does not matter if you are a MAC fan or PC. All that I have posted is free on the net for your use from programmers like myself and others.

Sounded like Josep was committed to Meedio for whatever reason, otherwise I probably would recommend foobar, even though I actually find foobar's UI kind of a pain. The only other downside is that using foobar/WAV still leaves you with the problem that WAV doesn't natively support standardized tagging. That said, if you rip with EAC into a defined directory format, masstagger is great at recovering album/artist/track number information from the directory structure itself.

Well, I have been going back and forth and still haven't found the option that suits me best.
Actually, if I rip using EAC I do get the album/artist/track in each file but the problem is that EAC saves it in whatever folder you designated.

With WMA it was way easier because you would rip the CD and it would organize for you albums, artists, etc. So it would be easy for you to look for a particular CD, even if you don't remember the name of the album, etc. With EAC and with Foobar, to my understanding, you have to create the folders to keep them organized.

Basically, I am just looking for a way to easily rip my CDs lossless and then a way to play them that allows me to keep them organized (just like WMA). I don't really prefer Meedio. The only thing with Meedio is that it allows you to use the TV as your interface.

Edelsiva, do you recommend using Apple Lossless with PC? Does it allow you to organize your rips just as I described?

Thanks, and sorry with all these questions.

I'm a little confused, not sure whether you are talking about tagging or libraries...

EAC, as with most other rippers, use internet databases to look up song information--track, titles, genre, track number, album. If you look under "EAC Options" and click on the filename tab, you can specify a format for how EAC saves the ripped file. For example, I use:

%A\%C\%N-%T

This tells EAC to create and artist (%A) directory, unless one exists, a subdirectory for the album title (%C) and song names of the format Track Number (%N)-Track Name (%T).

If the format for the files you use supports tags, EAC will also write that information into tags in the file. What that means is that, no matter where you copy the file or move it, if the file is read by a program that understands the tags, it will know the album/artist/etc. information. If you use WMA, I believe those use standard tags. But, you would need some plug-in for EAC to write WMA Lossless. Its not good enough to, for example, write WAV files and use a standalone WMA conversion program unless that standalone program can recover tag information from the directory path of the file, because there are no tags written into WAV files.

The reason I use Apple Lossless (ALAC) is because it is a lossless format that is compatible with my range of devices, including my squeezeboxes and iPod, and supports tags. So, when EAC writes the files, the information gets embedded in the file itself.

Most media players recognize standard tags. iTunes, for example, will read the tags from a file and make a copy of those tags in something called a library file. The library file is what iTunes uses to quickly index your list of songs by artist, or genre, or title, or whatever. Its also what the program uses to display all of that information. But, if I import a WAV into iTunes, it has no tags, so iTunes can't write the tags to the library file for display. There are ways of shortcutting the retagging of files--in the Mac environment, there are premade AppleScripts that allow you to generate tag information from the directory structure. Alas, AppleScripts don't work in the PC environment. However, you can write/find some Javascripts that will do the same thing.

Foobar works the same way, except that the "library" is called the "database." So, Foobar will read and create database entries for common standardized tags. This, obviously, doesn't work for WAV files. But, foobar comes standard with a plug-in called "masstagger," which is very powerful. You can use masstagger, for example, to recover tag information from the directory structure.

So, its really the library or database in a player that allows you to easily index things and find albums. But, the library/database is computer-specific. So, if I have a common library of WAV songs on a server used by more than one computers running foobar, I have to use masstagger at each computer. If the library of songs is mp3, ALAC, WMA, or someother format that supports file tags in a conventional way, on the other hand, each computer will automatically read and use the tag information associated with the files.

Hope this isn't too incoherent--I'm sitting at home with a vicious head cold, so my explanations may be a bit rambling.

Good luck!