- Drag and drop WAVE files from Windows Explorer into the FLAC frontend file list or press the "Add files" button and put files on the list with the "Open" dialog.
- Select the compression level you want to use. 0 is fastest but worst compression, 8 is slowest but best compression. 5 is default and recommended.
- Select an output directory (optional).
- Press 'Encode'
- Note that all that FLAC frontend does is create and launch a batch file (go.bat). This is done on the moment you press the 'Encode' button. So after that you can safely close FLAC frontend.
Replaygain:
There are two kinds of replaygain: radiogain and albumgain. Both values are always stored in the file. In your player you can choose which one you want to use. Important is that if you encode an album and want to keep the volume differences, the mechanism that calculates the albumgain must know the gain of all album tracks. Therefore all files must be on one command line. To do this check "Treat input files as one album". (BTW. the lenght of a command line is limited to about 2000 characters. So if you have an album with a lot of tracks with very long names it's possible that it won't work. Solution: shorter filenames).
Align on sector boundaries:
Align encoding of multiple CD format WAVE files on sector boundaries. This option is only allowed when encoding WAVE files, all of which have a 44.1kHz sample rate and 2 channels. With this option enabled, the encoder will align the resulting .flac streams so that their lengths are even multiples of a CD sector (1/75th of a second, or 588 samples). It does this by carrying over any partial sector at the end of each WAVE file to the next stream. The last stream will be padded to alignment with zeroes. This option will have no effect if the files are already aligned (as is the normally the case with WAVE files ripped from a CD).
WARNING: The ordering of files is important! Make sure that the files are in the right order on the list. Best way to achieve this is to number your files ("01 - title1.flac" "02 - title2.flac" etc.).
Cuesheet:
Import the given cuesheet file and store it in a CUESHEET metadata block. This option may only be used when encoding a single file. If the cuesheet is in the same directory as the input file, you can just type in the filename of the cuesheet (without the directory name).
Tag configuration:
FLAC tags are derived from the filename of the encoded file. Auto detection of filename schemes will work fine in most cases. If it doesn't work for you, you can enter your own (custom) filename scheme. Note that it should be the filename scheme of the *encoded* files! The scheme is constructed using the following parameters (these parameters can also be found in the tooltip of the textbox where they must be entered):
T = title
A = artist
L = album
Y = year
C = comment
N = track number
G = genre
X = disregard
Example:
The encoded files are named like this:
C:\Music\U2 - All That You Can't Leave Behind\01 - Beautiful Day.flac
The scheme is: A - L\N - T
If some tag items cannot be found in the filename then enter it in the applicable field.
Decoding / decompressing:
- Drag and drop FLAC files from Windows Explorer into the FLAC frontend file list or press the "Add files" button and put files on the list with the "Open" dialog.
- Select 'Delete input files' if you wish.
- Select an output directory (optional).
- Press 'Decode'
Test the integrity of FLAC files:
- Drag and drop FLAC files from Windows Explorer into the FLAC frontend file list or press the "Add files" button and put files on the list with the "Open" dialog.
- Press 'Test'
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FLAC website: http://flac.sourceforge.net/
Tag website: http://www.saunalahti.fi/cse/
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Special thanks to Case who made the win2dos program for me. This program translates Windows Latin characters to DOS ASCII characters. Filenames with accented characters and umlauts in them now also get encoded!
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Visit the FLAC frontend homepage at: http://home.wanadoo.nl/~w.speek/speek.htm
Send comments to speek@myrealbox.com
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Change log:
1.7
* Support for new features in FLAC 1.1.0: replaygain and cuesheets.
1.6
* Tag support.
1.5.1
* Minor bugs fixed.
1.5
* Normal and advanced interface. The frontend is now easier to use if you just want to use basic options.
* The batchfile is now named go.bat (to prevent problems if someone would want to do "flac" at the DOS prompt). If you are upgrading, you can delete flac.bat (and also help.bat if it's there).
1.4
* Fixed a small GUI bug.
1.3:
* Removed the "Decode" button. Select the "-d" option to decode. If the files on the list are FLAC files, the output files will be wave files.
* The window height is now also resizable.
* Maximize.
* Help button.
1.2:
* Changed the way presets are handled.
* For decoding you should now also select options (in previous versions de options were discarded when decoding). For normal decoding -d will be OK.
1.1:
* Added lines between the text output of different files in the DOS window.