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CD ripping, if you were to start anew.......

Somafunk

pfm Member
Apologies if this has been covered many times before but I had search earlier over the previous 6 months of threads (yeah...wet horrible day in Galloway and I had a Xmas bottle of whisky that demanded attention) and I didn’t see anything that covered my query.

CD ripping, if you were to start anew with your collection how would you future proof the format and storage, how would you ensure you got the most accurate rip of your CD collections?.

Having just recently thrown myself into the streaming club with a purchase of a Cambridge Audio CXNv2 along with a tidal hifi/roon subscription I have to say, “should’ve done it sooner”. Then there’s the issue of my CD collection (1500 ish) that I ripped to hd/ITunes many years ago and when playing through the CXNv2/roon I see that a surprising amount are 320kbps or less...............hmmmm?, Back in the early 2000’s I used an iriver h340 for mp3s (and its predecessor which I can’t remember?) and I guess I wasn’t that fussed at the time to ensure I made decent copies as the convenience of 1000’s of songs outweighed the need to carry around hifi quality.

If I was to start again with the entire ripping process what would be the best option?, bear in mind due to secondary progressive ms I have time to spare and spend most of the day sat on my arse in front of my iMac listening to music/buggering about anyway so the horror of ripping 10-20 cds a day doesn’t fill me with dread and foreboding.

The cds are sat in boxes in the attic so I could get my bro to bring a box down every so often, I work through them then flog them on for beer money, I’m doing nowt much else with my time so it’d be an interesting way to discover my collection and trigger memories of past exploits (dunno if that’s an entirely sensible idea).

Cheers,
 
Already use tidal hifi/roon and very happy with it but I was after what cd ripper/format/storage with associated metadata best solutions.
 
Attach the $79 Apple SuperDrive via USB, use it to mount CDs on your iMac and rip using iTunes (with error checking turned on) to Apple Lossless (ALAC) files. Boring but easy process, and if you add Audirvana to play the ALAC files the sound is glorious. That’s my routine anyway, couldn’t be happier with it.
 
Why would anyone rip their CDs when we have Spotify and the like anyway? I just don't get it.

A lockdown-induced activity, perhaps?

Ripping DVDs the next thing? :D
 
I would use a Nimbie CD/DVD/Blu ray duplicator along with dbpoweramp (batch loader), load 100 CDs at a time and let it run. Afterwards double-check the metadata and update/fix with mp3tag. If you have enough CDs, DVDs and Blu rays it works out quite cheap. I did 6000 CDs, just under 1000 DVDs and a couple of hundred Blu rays. Including fixing the metadata on the CDs it took about a month.
 
Dbpoweramp is excellent ripping software. Fast, accurate, good metadata retrieval. Rip to FLAC or ALAC. Both are lossless, ALAC is arguably more useful if you use iTunes or an iPhone, otherwise use FLAC, level 5 is the best compromise betweem ripping time and storage space. Ignore the voodoo merchants that tell you different compression levels sound different, or WAV sounds different from FLAC, they are the hifi equivalent of Q Anon conspiracy theorists. Qobuz is an incredible source for streamed music, like having unlimited access to the biggest cd shop in the world for 42p a day. Both have free trials. I ripped all my CDs years ago, I doubt I’ve listened to a quarter of them, and since I got into Qobuz I listen to even fewer, so if you take both trials you may well find you can’t be bothered ripping.
 
I would do what I already do.

Rip to WAV or DSD according to original disc format using the same software I already have - dbpoweramp (CD), DVDAE (DVD and B**Y), makemkv (to create B**Y Iso files for DVDAE) and the Sonore software with the appropriate universal player for S**D

Storage is cheap enough these days not to bother with compressed files.

And, of course, backup the lot.
 
Streaming is unfriendly to the environment and to the artists.
Just can’t believe that me buying a cd from Amazon, that has to be made from plastic, shipped hundreds of miles, wrapped in cardboard, delivered to me in a polluting van driven through a crowded city, played twice, then sat on a shelf is better for the environment than me downloading the same music. Nor is it the case that streaming an album 20 times means it is sent 20 times - Qobuz has a local cache which it maintains automatically. And artists seem to be making stupefying quantities of money selling the rights to their music as streaming has made it far more valuable. The issue of up and coming artists not getting a fair slice is to do with the greed of established artists and the way globalization concentrates money in the hands of the few that make it to the top. A new distribution medium always upsets those invested in the earlier one. TV was supposed to kill the movies, then video was supposed to kill TV, now streaming is the enemy. But Netflix is giving exposure and work to far more creative people than terrestrial TV.
 
I did exactly this about three months ago - having sold all my hifi equipment ten years previously (whole other story), I got back in at the end of last year and started by ripping all my CDs again.

I used a 2.9 GHz Quad-Core Intel i7 Macbook Pro with the Apple DVD ROM drive attached and DB Poweramp to rip 500 albums at Level 9 Lossless Uncompressed FLAC (I am not intending to covert the music for use on any Apple OS) and have them now stored on a 1TB SanDisk SSD drive. The process took approximately two minutes per album, which was surprising as the last time I did this in 2006 it took about 12 to rip to AAC. Good old Moore's Law. I now use Roon as the interface with the music stored on the (now internal) SSD of my music server and Qobuz to play new music via streaming. Anything that I end up really like I then buy and download. Since I have the premier membership, the cheapest was to buy music is to buy the High Res copies when they are available (so higher than 16/44) because these tend to be cheaper than the 16/44 versions which are not discounted either through standard or premier membership.

Obviously as I was working from home at the time I just sat at my laptop with a stack of CDs on the desk, swapping them to and fro while carrying on with work. I think I completed the task in about ten days. I also ended up removing about 80 albums from the collection thinking it would save time and tidy things up. My thought process was that 500+ albums stored in a digital directory would be too much information to navigate but it's remarkable how easy Roon makes it to do this.With 1500 you might want to think about doing that just to save a bit of time and storage space but on reflection, with my collection I would now just rip everything. I now have 520 albums and this takes up about 288GB of space.

When faced with a large bookshelf of largely anonymous jewel case spines, finding what you want to listent to next among 500+ albums is not easy whereas within Roon, that collection feels positively small! With your considerably larger collection, the biggest win is having it stored digitally and accessed via Roon - I am sure you will rediscover your music and gain a huge amount of enjoyment from it again as a result. Ansd this for me is the most compelling reason to switch to computer based music storage and transport; it changes the way you listen to some degree, it gives you much greater access and encourages you to explore. And if you also have a Quobuz or Tidal subscription, then the oddessy is even more compelling; once you finish listening to your selected album, Roon via Qobuz, then starts playing streamed tracks based on the previous selection, i.e. music not in your library. I've lately discovered so much really great music this way, it's truly a joy!
 
These days storage space is cheap and fast, esp you use SSD drives.

I ripped all my CDs to .AIFF Apple version of .WAV), so full fat, using iTunes. I’d do so again. I can produce any flavour I like from the .AIFF files if I want smaller copies elsewhere.

I have them all on a NAS with a second NAS as a backup which I bring up to date once a month or so.
 
Just can’t believe that me buying a cd from Amazon, that has to be made from plastic, shipped hundreds of miles, wrapped in cardboard, delivered to me in a polluting van driven through a crowded city, played twice, then sat on a shelf is better for the environment than me downloading the same music. Nor is it the case that streaming an album 20 times means it is sent 20 times - Qobuz has a local cache which it maintains automatically. And artists seem to be making stupefying quantities of money selling the rights to their music as streaming has made it far more valuable. The issue of up and coming artists not getting a fair slice is to do with the greed of established artists and the way globalization concentrates money in the hands of the few that make it to the top. A new distribution medium always upsets those invested in the earlier one. TV was supposed to kill the movies, then video was supposed to kill TV, now streaming is the enemy. But Netflix is giving exposure and work to far more creative people than terrestrial TV.

Most audiophiles are over 50, they have large to massive CD collections, already made, already delivered.

Covid has killed concerts so no revenue for artists (or cinemas). Covid has imposed lockdown so massive revenue to internet providers and streaming platforms.
You may wish to ignore that data centres consume unsurmountable amounts of energy.
 
Another vote for DBPoweramp and also JRiver. I am not a computer techie but the process was very easy to understand and use in FLAC ripping a very large collection to a dedicated laptop. This was backed up onto a portable drive which came in very handy in making the transfer when I bit the bullet and bought a Naim Core. Having bought the Naim unit I now rip any purchased CDs direct to that.

I also use Tidal as a virtual shop. If the price of new vinyl was lower, I would just purchase that but with the charity shops selling CDs for 50p well..............
 


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