Sonos and Exact Audio Copy

Forum|Forum|10 years ago
October 4, 2016
5 replies
1293 views

Newbie here. Looking for some answers, opinions and guidance please.
My intention is to rip my music CDs to a Music Only hard drive. This will become my music library to use with Sonos. I am wanting to use the FLAC format. After some research I would like to use EAC. I have downloaded the latest version and used this guide to set it up. https://web.archive.org/web/20141003171404/http://blowfish.be/eac/ I have tested it by downloading 2 different CD 2-3 times. I think I have got it. I will be naming each file folder using this format: Artist-Album. Inside each folder will be the the music tracks labeled Track# - name.flac. The folder hierarchy will be really flat but I think it will work best for searches and for EAC. After I ripped the 2 CD I checked them out with the Sonos app and there was no album art or any of the other information-tags showing. In the Artist - Album folders there were the music tracks and 3 other files. The album art as a JPEG. A log file and a m3u file. What is a m3u file?
The guide I used and EAC talk about a CUE file. What is it and is it necessary?

Thank you for any and all help.

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Craig L

Sonos Staff

Hi Frackin, and thanks for posting!
Looking into EAC a bit closer, it seems that the free version of this software does not come with any metadata tagging features, which is why you are missing the artist name/album name for these tracks. There are other programs which can do this, such as Windows Media Player and Media Monkey, both of which are freely available. As an example I will include a link which has info on how you would use Windows Media Player to add metadata to your music:
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-pictures/how-do-i-change-windows-media-player-music/5968a384-6867-e011-8dfc-68b599b31bf5?auth=1
In regards to the filetypes you mentioned, typically an m3u file is used for playlists, though it sounds like EAC may have generated one based on the default track order of the imported CD. A CUE file is not something that Sonos would be able to read, but is used by some media players to describe how the tracks on a CD are laid out, in this case you should not need this file. Hope this information helps, any questions please let me know!

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B

BoredofBalham

Prodigy II

Media Monkey is an excellent rip and management tool.
When designing your music folders bear in mind that Sonos has character limits on tags and will not index tracks which fall foul of this. The filename, which is the complete path of the file, can easily break the limit.

Sonos limits the amount of characters allotted for each field of the metadata. This is due to memory allocations for the 65,000 track limit.

Field name
Max Characters
Artists
76
Album
92
Track
100
Genre
22
File name
100

ratty

EAC (V0.99 prebeta) always used to incorporate metadata. It obtained it from freedb (if I recall). This then populated the command line for the compressor which post-processed the ripped WAV file into the target format.

L

Loubat

Contributor I

EAC is a breeze once you get it set up properly.

http://filesharingtalk.com/threads/435208-Installing-configuring-and-ripping-with-Exact-Audio-Copy-%28EAC%29

T

The LHC

DbPoweramp doesn't require any setting up, much easier.

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