Burning CD's to Hard Drive

Discussion in 'Audio Hardware' started by Ken Clark, Feb 15, 2017.

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  1. Ken Clark

    Ken Clark Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Chicago Suburbs
    My 20 year old Adcom CDP is dying and as I was about to pull the trigger on another player I thought maybe I'd just start ripping my CD's to my computer to play through my Arcam rDAC. I have several already in iTunes as Apple Lossless files. Not knowing all the nuts & bolts of file types, is this the way to go or should I do something different, other than iTunes? My current computer is a MacPro but it's aging and will be replaced in the next year or two, likely with another Mac of some sort.

    Really looking for options before I embark on copying 250-300 CD's one by one, only to end up wishing I had done it another way. Short term playing and long term storage being the main considerations.
     
  2. Bathory

    Bathory 30 yr Single Malt, not just for breakfast anymore

    Location:
    usa
    it took me YEARS to get %80 of all my css into a hard drive. BUT, I messed up when i was doing it , and did a majority at AAC files not knowing the lossless was better, but for what i use them for, its ok. as when i play music, its either recorded from LP cd's, or manufactured, or russian boot cd's in a cd player.

    keep files at Lossless, they are larger, but if you r going to use a dac or whatever, you want the better sound quality of lossless.
    i have thousand of cd's, and no way in hell I'm going to re-rip all of them, not after all the BS i had to go through doing so, and the double folder in iTunes, which doubled my library, and the 30 hours on the phone with customer support, etc etc,

    do it right the first time to avoid what i went through, i enjoyed doing it when it was in its infancy for me, case of beer each time i started ripping them to my hard drive, one after the other, until i would pass out, sometimes i would be up for 20 hours doing it. it lost its charm after a while.

    lossless all the way for future use, quality of sound
     
  3. skimminstones

    skimminstones Forum Resident

    Location:
    Kent, UK
    if youre adamant youll only ever be an apple user then copy them to ALAC, otherwise copy them to FLAC
     
  4. Bingo Bongo

    Bingo Bongo Music gives me Eargasms

    Location:
    Ottawa, Canada
    Stick with Mac! :righton:
     
  5. Ken Clark

    Ken Clark Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Chicago Suburbs
    definitely want the highest quality and plan to stick with Apple for the foreseeable future, so ALAC it will be. I figure I'd be better off upgrading my DAC at some point than buying a CDP. I listen to Spotify streamed though the DAC much of the time, then vinyl and CD in roughly equal measures.
     
  6. MrRom92

    MrRom92 Forum Supermodel

    Location:
    Long Island, NY
    If you're using ALAC then you'll want to create multiple backups. ALAC is prone to data corruption and does not have the safeguards against this in place like FLAC does.


    You'll want to rip with EAC or XLD and then compress to ALAC.


    When (or if) Apple ever opens up support for FLAC in their ecosystem I'd suggest converting everything over then and start compressing to FLAC after ripping.
     
    shaboo and The FRiNgE like this.
  7. Sevoflurane

    Sevoflurane Forum Resident

    Buy dBPoweramp. Read Spoon's ripping guide: Spoon's Audio Guide: CD Ripping

    Rip using AccurateRip; on a Mac Apple Lossless is arguably the best choice. If using iTunes as a player, uncheck the option that allows iTunes to manage your music library or you will go insane when iTunes changes your artwork and metadata. Finally: Back. Everything. Up. Several. Times. Ripping a CD collection is monumentally dull, and having to start all over because of a hard drive failure may result in an acute psychiatric decompensation.

    I agree with MrRom's comments about data corruption. I ripped all of my CDs to ALAC and FLAC and I have found that odd ALAC tracks do get corrupted to the extent that I have to either re rip the CD or make a new copy of the corrupted track from the FLAC backup.
     
    shaboo likes this.
  8. Ken Clark

    Ken Clark Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Chicago Suburbs
    Lots of acronyms I need to learn.
     
    Ham Sandwich likes this.
  9. Sevoflurane

    Sevoflurane Forum Resident

    Sorry; ALAC= Apple Lossless, FLAC= Free Lossless Audio Codec. FLAC is more robust but isn't supported by iTunes (though there are other apps that can work alongside iTunes to make it work with FLAC) whereas ALAC works happily with iTunes as standard.
     
  10. Arnold_Layne

    Arnold_Layne Forum Resident

    Location:
    Waldorf, MD USA
    Use dbpoweramp to rip the cd's and you can save to both FLAC and ALAC at the same time :)

    350CD's should not take long. If you rip 10 cd's a day, you'd be done in 5 weeks.
     
    c-eling likes this.
  11. Cherrycherry

    Cherrycherry Forum Resident

    Location:
    Le Froidtown
    • CD? Compact Disc.
    • Mac? Macintosh
    • BS? Bull$4!t
    • EAC? Exact Audio Copy
    looks like the others were explained, above.;)
     
  12. Henry Love

    Henry Love Senior Member

    Location:
    Chicagoland
    JRiver will let you rip to flac.Like itunes but much better.They have a windows and mac version but the windows version is better.
    You could run bootcamp on your mac to use the windows version.I'm not in the apple world so I can't fill you in on the details but JRiver rocks.
     
  13. timind

    timind phorum rezident

    I went through the process with a Mac Mini a few years ago and wish I'd been smart enough to ask these questions before I started. After a couple restarts, I ended up ripping to AIFF using XLD for accurate rips.

    My suggestion is to get an external hard drive, at least 1TB for your purpose. You can download XLD for free.

    Now that my cds are ripped, I rarely listen to them. It's so much more convenient to use the mini and I believe it sounds every bit as good, if not better, than the cd through the transport. My cd player has dac inputs so all music is played through the same dac.
     
  14. Jack Flannery

    Jack Flannery Forum Resident

    Location:
    Houston, TX
    I use XLD. It works great but sometimes the metadata gets screwed up. So I use this program called Tag Editor, which allows editing of metadata in a spreadsheet-like display. This is very cool. One problem is my digital library has iTunes downloads, HDTracks downloads, and ripped cd's. I wanted an easy way to distinguish these in Audirvana so I add a "- CD" or "- HD" to the end of the album title. I am lazy so here is the cool part. Instead of copying and pasting, I copy the album title, paste in excel, add "- CD" to the end of the album title as a calculation field and then paste the result back into Tag Editor. Keeping metadata straight can be a real hassle but T.E. is really useful.
     
  15. Ken Clark

    Ken Clark Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Chicago Suburbs
    I like the idea of being able to tell the original format, CD etc.
     
  16. beercanchicken

    beercanchicken Legendary Stickman

    Location:
    Chicago

    I ripped all of mine in Apple Lossless and have them stored off my computer on an external HD. If you have an Apple Lossless file, you can always reformat to another lossless like FLAC, easily (slightly time consuming). But I'd definitely rip at a lossless codec nowadays because storage is so cheap now.

    *Apple lossless tags everything too. Sometimes you'll have to add artwork, sometimes you won't. Still havent figured that out...
     
  17. Sevoflurane

    Sevoflurane Forum Resident

    XLD is a decent ripper for the Mac and is free, but if getting your metadata (i.e. track, artist info) and artwork right dBPoweramp is better as it uses multiple sources for data and has a better hit rate than iTunes or XLD at getting your cover art right.
     
  18. RZangpo2

    RZangpo2 Forum Know-It-All

    Location:
    New York
    That's true, but I still find I often have to edit the metadata by hand.
     
  19. Sevoflurane

    Sevoflurane Forum Resident

    Agree. I have yet to find a ripper that correctly identifies different masterings of recordings.
     
  20. ubiknik

    ubiknik Forum Resident

    Location:
    Chicago, IL USA
    Where does one get a drive that will survive 350+ rips these days?
     
  21. Apesbrain

    Apesbrain Forum Resident

    Location:
    East Coast, USA
    Ok, this is not a real problem. I've ripped hundreds of CDs in both my laptop and my desktop with no issue.
     
  22. Arnold_Layne

    Arnold_Layne Forum Resident

    Location:
    Waldorf, MD USA
    I've ripped over a thousand cd's + 100's of BD's and DVD's on a LG BH14NS40 BDR drive. Still works fine.
     
  23. Arnold_Layne

    Arnold_Layne Forum Resident

    Location:
    Waldorf, MD USA
    I do the same, indicate mastering or release if I have more than one digital version of an album.
     
  24. Apesbrain

    Apesbrain Forum Resident

    Location:
    East Coast, USA
    Ripping to Apple Lossless with iTunes is fine if that is what you are used to doing. There are other rippers, such as the aforementioned XLD, that have advantages over iTunes when it comes to damaged CDs. If you are ripping your own well-maintained collection, then iTunes is an easy solution. There will be no difference in the final sound.
     
  25. Majestyk

    Majestyk Rush Resident

    Location:
    Vancouver
    I think the thread title needs to be altered to "Ripping CD's to Hard Drive"
     
    brianplowe and noahjld like this.
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