Revision as of 09:20, 27 January 2005

Nemo's Audio Archive Manager

I've been to 'Nam man. It was hell. You're never the same after an experience like that

NAAM is a method of ripping and archiving CD's. (and DVD-A, SACD, etc?)

It consists of three layers.

1. Physical Layer. The CD.
2. Archive Layer. Lossless rip (FLAC) of the CD, plus cached TOC.
3. Portable Layer. ogg/mp3/etc. These are the files you'd actually USE to play.

Physical Layer

Not much to see here. It's a CD. Folks. Shiny.

Archive Layer

The plan is to rip the CD to a SINGLE flac archive. This ensures no possible seek errors causing overlap or missed audio frames when ending the rip of one track, and the start of the next. Yes, call me paranoid. (Actually, call me paranoid once you find out I also plan to store the final cdparanoia output, so any ripping errors can be quickly noticed).

Along with the audio data would be stored the original CD's TOC (as a CUE sheet?), and any digital data that might be on a multi-session disc (as a simple directory of files). Scans of CD booklet artwork would also be stored here in the archive layer.

Portable Layer

Does this need a better name?

Anyway, from the archive layer, you have all the information you need to create usable oggs, or mp3s, or whatever. From the stored TOC, a freedb lookup can be performed (in practice, this would be done and cached with the archive layer), the flac transcoded to a lossy format of choice, cut into individual tracks (In the case of ogg, this could be done after encoding. For mp3, it may have to be done before encoding), and stored away from the archive layer. Note also that the archive layer may have both an original TOC (needed for lookups to freedb), and an edited TOC (used for track cutting). This is because sometimes the track boundaries on CD's are poorly timed (example: live CD's where tracks start at the end of the previous track, but at the beginning of the applause for the previous track!)

NAAM is named in accordance with NINS