Advice please!

[Rossi46]

Hi everyone - Newbie here so apologies in advance if asking a silly question!
I should start off by saying this is a new process for me (ripping cd's) and I have no experience with storage, SD cards and music files etc..

I decided to use dbpoweramp to rip my cd's to FLAC. I understood this to be a high quality 'lossless' format that would ensure music could be saved onto an SD card with no loss in sound reproduction. I wanted to use an SD card in the head unit of my car. Having just tried to play the card in my h/u, there is a 'no music' message coming up. I have another card someone else 'formatted' (??) in WAV and it plays fine. So, the upshot is that it looks like I need to re-save everything from FLAC to WAV.

Can anyone please tell me if there is a quick and easy way of doing this, ensuring it is a method where there is no loss in quality?

Many thanks

[Spoon]

Re: Advice please!

Use Batch Converter, select all the files (root folder) >> Convert and choose Wave as the encoding method, click Convert To.

[Rossi46]

Re: Advice please!

OK, I'll take a look.
This option will retain an uncompressed version of my FLAC files with zero loss in quality?

Many thanks

[Rossi46]

Re: Advice please!

..I just started to run things and after the first couple of albums I got a 'Core Convertor' window pop up. It reads 'error reading db command file'

Any ideas what this means / what I need to do please ?

[Spoon]

Re: Advice please!

Your flac files are untouched, no quality is lost.

The error message, you likely have security software which is sandboxing each program, so our converter cannot function correctly.

[Rossi46]

Re: Advice please!

Your flac files are untouched, no quality is lost.

The error message, you likely have security software which is sandboxing each program, so our converter cannot function correctly.

Thanks for your reply

- OK, great.
- I have no Kaspersky/Norton/Mcafee type security, only whatever the pc has installed from new. Would the converter still be affected on that basis?
Just wondering why only some FLAC files are having issues and not all.
The ripping process went fine too

Thanks

[Spoon]

Re: Advice please!

Only some files fail to convert? is it repeatable?

[Rossi46]

Re: Advice please!

Only some files fail to convert? is it repeatable?

It's only some files, yes.
I initiated the 'batch convert' you mentioned previously and in addition to the failed files I referred to yesterday, I probably had another 5-10% fail when I looked this morning (I left the programme running overnight). The number of failed messages seemed to clog up the rest of the conversion tool as it wouldn't continue the process until I'd deleted all the pop ups

[Spoon]

Re: Advice please!

Check that your drives have enough free space, the issue is dBpoweramp the music converter writes a temporary file which contains details of the conversion, for core converter to convert, something is stopping this basic communication method from working on your machine, so there is something fundamentally wrong on your system as we never see this error reported.

[Rossi46]

Re: Advice please!

Check that your drives have enough free space, the issue is dBpoweramp the music converter writes a temporary file which contains details of the conversion, for core converter to convert, something is stopping this basic communication method from working on your machine, so there is something fundamentally wrong on your system as we never see this error reported.

Thanks again for your help. I had a feeling I'd be out of my depth before I knew it!
So, I think you might be onto something re. the free space. Again, apologies if my terminology is wrong/simplistic..

1. When I go to 'this PC' and see the 'C' drive, there is a red line suggesting space is low.
2. Upon trying to see what music I can delete to free up some space, I have a problem: When I look in the batch convertor, short of going through every single track to see if the conversion was successful (from FLAC to WAV), there is no way of telling 'en mass' what I can/can't get rid of. Ideally, I would just want to remove (almost) everything that remains in FLAC and leave the successful WAV-converted files. I say almost because;
3. Assuming the music list I can see in the batch convertor is a duplicate of the music saved on my PC, I can see (on the batch convertor) that some albums have all tracks listed twice (x1 FLAC and x1 WAV), some albums whilst still having a copy for each have only got '1kb' next to a number of the tracks in WAV (so I assume this means the conversion was only partially successful), other albums are still all in FLAC.
4. When I look to remove music stored in 'my PC', it doesn't say what format it's saved in, nor the size of the file. Consequently I cannot confidently remove albums incase they still need converting.

Honestly lost as to what to do next

[garym]

Re: Advice please!

Thanks again for your help. I had a feeling I'd be out of my depth before I knew it!
So, I think you might be onto something re. the free space. Again, apologies if my terminology is wrong/simplistic..

1. When I go to 'this PC' and see the 'C' drive, there is a red line suggesting space is low.
2. Upon trying to see what music I can delete to free up some space, I have a problem: When I look in the batch convertor, short of going through every single track to see if the conversion was successful (from FLAC to WAV), there is no way of telling 'en mass' what I can/can't get rid of. Ideally, I would just want to remove (almost) everything that remains in FLAC and leave the successful WAV-converted files. I say almost because;
3. Assuming the music list I can see in the batch convertor is a duplicate of the music saved on my PC, I can see (on the batch convertor) that some albums have all tracks listed twice (x1 FLAC and x1 WAV), some albums whilst still having a copy for each have only got '1kb' next to a number of the tracks in WAV (so I assume this means the conversion was only partially successful), other albums are still all in FLAC.
4. When I look to remove music stored in 'my PC', it doesn't say what format it's saved in, nor the size of the file. Consequently I cannot confidently remove albums incase they still need converting.

Honestly lost as to what to do next

Purchase a 1 or 2 TB USB drive and back up all your music files before you do anything else. You need a backup drive when done in any case.

[mville]

Re: Advice please!

1. When I go to 'this PC' and see the 'C' drive, there is a red line suggesting space is low.

Right click on the C: drive and select Properties from the menu. What are Capacity, Used Space and Free Space reporting?

[Rossi46]

Re: Advice please!

Yeah, good idea garym. I'll take a look and see what's about

[Rossi46]

Re: Advice please!

Right click on the C: drive and select Properties from the menu. What are Capacity, Used Space and Free Space reporting?

Thanks for your post:
Capacity=221gb
Used= 217gb
Free= 3.24gb

[mville]

Re: Advice please!

You do indeed have little space left on the C: drive and this is a potential problem with OS perfromance. If you have ripped your CDs to this drive, I agree with garym. Backup AND move your library to other drive(s).