Advantages of MinimStreamer

[simoncn]

(23-04-2014 15:49)gnomus Wrote:  Simon

Thanks again for your time on this. You have, of course, gone way past what little I know about all of this. I have no idea what a 'seek table' is, and, even though you have given me a command, I have no idea where I am supposed to put that command. Is that something I do at the time of ripping, or if I choose to batch convert?

I am also a little paranoid about doing anything that might lose the considerable amount of work that I have done so far. I think that I will carry on ripping everything as I have been doing (I'm about half-way through). I then intend to back everything up to another location. That might be the best time to consider converting everything to compressed FLAC (and adding 'seek tables').

The seek table is an internal index within a FLAC file that gives the byte offsets for various time points in the audio. If it is present, any software that needs to seek to a given time point (e.g., 123 seconds) can get to the desired file position (e.g., 12345678 bytes) much more quickly.

Unfortunately, dBpoweramp doesn't include a seek table when ripping and doesn't have the capability to add a seek table when batch converting.

The metaflac command is one of the official FLAC tools. See this page for details of where to download these tools.

Adding a seek table doesn't change anything else in the FLAC file and won't cause any compatibility problems with other software. Similarly, using FLAC compression doesn't change the audio data within the file and won't cause any compatibility problems with other software.

Quote:I am off to hear some Linn streamers tomorrow - that might well change everything again.

I'm sure you'll be impressed with the Linn sound quality. I am!