Single-disc FLACs versus individual tracks
 

I've noticed the last few weeks that all the lossless rips I've been grabbing are single disc. Is this a new trend, or a preferred way of distribution? (I've been unpacking them to individual tracks after getting them; I hope that isn't breaking some kind of commandment)

I'm about to rip something myself, and I'm not aware of any lossless rips, so if this is the way to distro on Megaupload, let me know. I've never really done it that way, so I'm not familiar yet with what I'd need to change in EAC to just output the entire disc as one file.

Ripping a CD to a single lossless file is merely a preference. I am not 100% sure why people choose to rip it this way, but I'm guessing it's to make the burning-to-CD process easier, rather than loading each and every individual track in a burning program and making sure everything is correct before making a 1:1 copy onto a CD-R.

If you wanted a backup copy to simply listen to on your PC, this ripping method is not the best, obviously because you can't jump to a specific track unless you knew where exactly on the disc the track started at. It's also redundant in ripping for lossless archive purposes, because ripping in lossless properly requires a .log and a .cue at the minimum. The .cue file, used to assist in burning the file(s) to a CD, ends up being exactly the same whichever way you rip it (though the logfiles would be different).

I would personally never rip a CD as a single file unless you were intending to burn it immediately afterwards and then delete it from your PC altogether.

That's not quite right Basil. Most lossless codecs have the feature to embed the cuesheet into the metadata. If the player supports this feature (and that's where the problem currently is) you can just load the file and the player automatically (internally) splits the file.

foobar2000 does this e.g. and I also have the feature ready on my portable player, though only when using the Rockbox firmware. AFAIK also a lot of other player softwares support embedded CUEs.

EDIT: Again HydrogenAudio has some nice comparison (http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index....ess_comparison).
Note that the cuesheet embedding support for FLAC is limited, but e.g. WavPack (also an open format) seems to fully support CUEs.

Being a Winamp user, I treat single-track FLAC rips with extreme prejudice. I cut it up into itty-bitty tracks with the help of Medieval CUE Splitter.

I do the same with single-track TTA and APE rips, except that I transcode them to FLAC just because I like FLAC for no good reason!

1. Drag .cue into foobar
2. SUCCESS!

Right, I had forgotten about cue/file splitting. I can't remember the last time I did that let alone toying around with foobar (I don't even have it installed anymore; no need for it for what I do, really).