Re rip at higher quality but retain all tags?

Support
1

Hi
I now rip FLAC but have 100's of older CD's that I ripped as MP3/Lossy. Is it possible to re rip those CD's as FLAC, overwrite the MP3 files, but copy / retain all the tags & artwork associated with the original MP3 files?
Thanks
Chris

2

Yes. Rip the CD to FLAC and don't worry about how good the tags are. Then open the mp3 ripped files in mp3tag. Then add the new FLAC tags to the listing in mp3tag (in the same album/track order). Then select the mp3 files, select "copy tags", then select the FLAC files and select "paste tags". Then your new FLAC files will have the same tags as the old mp3 tags.

3

Exactly this. However if your mp3 files have Replaygain tags, you will need to run these through a converter again. It is highly unlikely they will be accurate going from lossy mp3 to lossless FLAC.

4

I am not sure that if the replaygain fields are stored in APE tags and these tags are not read by MP3tag that the data from these tags will bei copied to the target files.
If the replaygain fields are part of the original ID3V2 tags then the data in these fields should be updated as @MotleyG said.

5

I do the same when I replace an existing mp3 version with a flac version.
The fastest/easiest way for me is:

  1. open mp3 album in mp3tag
  2. sort by filename or track number, whichever ensures that the order is correct
  3. CTRL + A to select all tracks
  4. CTRL + C to copy the existing tags
  5. drag the flac album into mp3tag (don't close it in-between)
  6. ensure that the flac album is also sorted correctly and the same way as the mp3 album was
  7. CTRL + A to select all tracks
  8. CTRL + V to overwrite the tags with the ones of the mp3s

With my approach you only have 1 version of the album open in mp3tag at any time, allowing the usage of CTRL + A.
Seems like a lot of steps but usually only takes a couple of seconds to do (for me at least).

I used to handle the ReplayGain issue by reconverting the flac files while applying RG in dbpoweramp.
These days I'd just run rsgain easy . in the directory of the flac files to (re)create the tags.

6

Note that you don't need to reconvert the FLAC files in order to apply RG. In dbpoweramp you can simply "convert to" and select [ReplayGain] and this will simply add RG tags without reconverting the FLAC audio.

7

I was made aware of that a couple of days ago but thanks anyways.
I just prefer the simplicity of rsgain. Once I'm done with tagging a bunch of music I run
rsgain easy -m 16 . in the root of the WIP folder.

Rsgain will then recursively go through all subfolders and calculate the replay gain for 16 folders at the same time (if there are at least 16 subfolders, otherwise for as many subfolders as there are).
Never set the -m value higher than your cpu thread count. Also unless your music is on an m2 SSD it might actually hurt the overall speed to use that many threads at the same time.

8

For others reading this note that dbpoweramp and foobar2000 will also go though all your folders recursively to create RG tags, by album. So you can point at your top folder, run the program, and come back the next morning to find you have added RG tags to thousands of albums.

9

Thanks to everyone who has replied to my question - really helpful and has saved me hours !