I’m a collector of bootlegs from a number of bands and while I’m an audiophile purist to the core, I still like to have the shows in MP3 format for use on my MP3 player. Sure, the quality is compromised, but 60GB is a limited amount of space and my player doesn’t know what to do with .flac files. I thought I’d share the tools I use and have had great success with over the years:
FLAC > WAV conversion
I use the official FLAC tools to convert from FLAC > Wav. For users of Vista x64/7 x64, use this post to help if you run into the MSCOMCTL.OCX problem.
WAV > MP3 conversion
I use CDex to convert from WAV > MP3. It’s an open-source freeware tool I found years ago; I don’t remember exactly how I came across, but it is amazing. And you can easily use it to rip CDs thanks to its support for CDDB. I’ve even been able to use CDDB to get tracklistings for bootlegs I’ve downloaded and burned. It’s a very helpful and powerful tool.
Tagging MP3s
Finally, in order to tag all the MP3s I’m creating via the above-mentioned software, I use Tag & Rename. It’s $30, but it honestly was the best $30 I’ve ever spent. You can do mass-tagging with the push of a button, you can get tags from filenames, you can do pretty much anything to a large group of MP3s in a very small amount of time. It’s made being a bootleg collector so enjoyable and easy I honestly don’t know what I’d do without it.
Tags: audio, FLAC, MP3, ripping CDs, tagging mp3s, WAV
