I KNOW I am going to feel silly when someone tells me what I am missing, but I seem to be experiencing a mental block on this, so...

I am using EAC to extract from CD and generate structured folders with the music files. However, I have set EAC to retain the .WAV files alongside the .MP3 files, so that any future re-encode doesn't require re-ripping the actual CDs.

The M3U files are in there too, but I have set emplode to ignore them.

My problem: When I select the top level directory for the music files in Windows Explorer, and drop it onto emplode, BOTH the MP3 and WAV versions of the files end up in emplode.

How can I drop a folder structure on emplode, but only have the MP3 files acted upon?

How have others who retain the original CD WAV files arranged things to work smoothly with emplode?

Thanks in advance.

Rename the WAV files to something other than WAV?

Keep two separate tree structures, one for the WAVs and one for the MP3s?

Only select and drag the MP3s onto Emplode?

Currently, there is no logic in emplode to do filtering among the files you drag onto it. If you drag a folder full of WAV files onto emplode, it's gonna synch them. Same as a folder full of MP3s or MP2s or WMAs.

I've never heard of anyone else deliberately keeping the WAVs and the MP3s together next to each other like that.

(Of course, here I am working on a set of audio mixes of some friend's music, and I'm doing exactly that-- keeping the WAVs and MP3s together in the same folder. But I'm not trying to drag the whole folder onto emplode...)

Rename the WAV files to something other than WAV?

Yes, I could do that. But I would have to remember to re-do it every time I rip another few CDs...

Keep two separate tree structures, one for the WAVs and one for the MP3s?

How would I configure EAC to build two parallel trees? And maintaining such a things seems like trouble.

Only select and drag the MP3s onto Emplode?

THAT is exactly what I want to do. How does one do such a thing with a folder structure?

I've never heard of anyone else deliberately keeping the WAVs and the MP3s together next to each other like that.

Not that I am using it, but isn't that why lossless storage methods like FLAC (sp?) are around - to avoid re-ripping physical CDs when/as lossy compression technology moves forward?

THAT is exactly what I want to do. How does one do such a thing with a folder structure?

- Open the folder containing the files in Windows Explorer.

- Select View/Arrange Icons/By type.

- Click on the first MP3 file.

- Hold down the Shift key.

- Click on the last MP3 file while holding down the Shift key.

- While still holding down the Shift key, drag the selected group of MP3 files onto Emplode.

Click on the last MP3 file while holding down the Shift key.

But I need to accomplish this for a whole tree of folders within folders in one shot, not just one folder's worth at a time.

Your suggestion would just copy the MP3 files from that one folder - correct?

Unless you're ready to (a) write your own custom script to interface with Emptool under linux, or (b) beg Mike for this filtering feature in Jemplode (don't think it's in there but heck it might be I dunno), then you're pretty much stuck with one-folder-at-a-time. It's either that or rename all the WAV files. I'm sure there's a way to do that rename in a pretty simple way. Perhaps as part of your EAC script, or from a DOS command, or something.

Wouldn't it be easy enough to write something that could call the old DOS XCOPY command to copy the WAVs to another folder, and then delete the original WAVs afterwards? Or am I dreaming?

Edit: The idea being that he could move the WAVs elsewhere after he's done encoding, and thus wouldn't have to worry about what finds its way into emplode along with the MP3s.

could this be done using the windows "search for files and folders" tool? open the search pane, tell it to look for *.mp3 (or whatever you want to find), and tell it to start in the root of your MP3 folder hierarchy. then drag'n'drop the result list into emplode.

i haven't tried this, but it seems like it should work.

good luck,
--dan.

Almost certainly, this won't import the relative paths.

Instead of picking up *.mp3, search for *.wav, then move all the wav files to a temporary directory.

Synch with emplode as normal.

Select 'undo move' from file manager to restore the wav's to their respective original positions.

Not sure if the undo process will work if you have many GB of wav's to move though

If only you had an operating system that could actually use all of the features of its native filesystem. (I was going to say ``if only you had a filesystem that supported transparent links'', but NTFS has that feature, it's just that Windows is too stupid to know how to use it.)

It's either that or rename all the WAV files.

I found a Windows bulk rename utility that allows me to rename all the .wav files in the tree to .wax.
When I drop the tree onto emplode, it doesn't import the .wax files, so the result is what I needed.

I suggest that emplode be able to ignore .wav files, similar to the way .m3u files can be ignored. This would have made my problem vanish, without having to mess with the file extensions.

Of course, changing to .wax means that some things in Windows no longer realize these are playable files. Changing the files back to .wav means I run the risk of forgetting, and dropping the tree, with wav files present, onto emplode, which would be bad.

And I need to remember to run the bulk rename every time I rip some more CDs, before I drop the tree onto emplode. The likelihood of human error means that one day I WILL end up with wav files in emplode.

Question: How DO other folks who retain their "original" CD files handle them?

Well, you could convert them to flac, which would still be playable, given some plugins, but would be ignored by emplode. Of course, that would take quite a bit of CPU time.