What's your strategy in ripping your CDs into your digital library?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding. "AAC was developed with the cooperation and contributions of companies including AT&T Bell Laboratories, Fraunhofer IIS, Dolby Laboratories, Sony Corporation and Nokia. It was officially declared an international standard by the Moving Picture Experts Group in April 1997. It is specified both as Part 7 of the MPEG-2 standard, and Subpart 4 in Part 3 of the MPEG-4 standard"

Also, under that link you posted:

http://www.vialicensing.com/licensing/aac-licensors.aspx. No Apple. MS and several others, including Fraunhofer.

http://www.vialicensing.com/licensing/aac-licensees.aspx. Apple is a licensee. In other words, they pay to use the format.

 

All CD's to 320 mp3 for convenience. I used to play drums and know how a Paiste 2002 cymbal should sound, so I sometimes notice grainy sounding cymbals @ 320kbps. Last time I listened to ELO's "Out of the Blue" I had to put on my UK JET vinyl anyway to make it sound right.

 

I mostly rip to AAC since I do most of my listening on my iPods and I'm trying to save space on them. I still use MP3 for certain songs/themes/playlists on my players. For certain albums and songs, I'll rip them as WAV files and keep them archived.

 

I rip to lossless using a program that verifies the accuracy of the rip. Otherwise you may neve know there are problems till you play them back. The latest version of MediaMonkey does accurate rips. I've used EAC and DbPowerAmp. I would strongly advise agenst relying on your original CDs as a backup. Do you REALLY want to go through all that again? Hard drive space is fairly cheap so get all the bits off the CD the first time and BACKUP. Cloud backup would be nice but it would take forever to upload my 1 TB+ collection. Google music transcodes everything you upload to lossy.

 

AAC when I get around to it. Just have a laptop. How much music at 256 AAC fits on a data disc. Thinking of using that for back up

 

I rip in FLAC and then I organise my library using personal guidelines and arbitrary rules that I defined through the years and that suit me fine.
Then I re-encode all my directories again, but this time in high-quality Mp3, for my Ipod.
So I have two major directories: one in Flac (for home listening and for Pono), and the other in Mp3 (for my Ipod when I go away for a long time).

My main rule of thumb: to recreate on my server the original discography of the artists. By "original" I mean the records as they were first presented to the world in the home-country of the artist.
So for the Beatles I use the UK discography (including UK mixes, UK release dates and artworks), and for Zappa I refer to the US discography and artworks.*

*In cases where there are songs on records not originally published in the home-country but elesewhere in the world, I use the foreign record. Those "issues" are solved by making an arbitrary subjective decision that I find correct. (Ex: The Beatles 'Komm gib mir deine hand' 7'' from Germany. Although the songs are available in the Uk on compilations and in the US on albums, the most logical "original" place for them is the German 7'' published on March 1964. ) In some cases there are no absolute rule to make a decision so common sense is in order. Most of the time the main rule applies without difficulties.


A. How I do it

-One folder by Artist. (A generic name is chosen. Ex: Wings, P. McCartney or any other variants are all under "Paul McCartney". Same with "Zappa" or "Mothers". It's all under "Frank Zappa".)
-and then one folder by Item (Album or single, or Ep, or digital download, etc....): YYYY MM DD - Name of the album (or single, or Ep, or digital download, etc....). Ex: 1966 08 05 - Revolver (mono) and 1966 08 05 - Revolver (stereo)

Rules for deciding to use an item or not:
-I only represent singles, EPs, Compilations, and digital download when they include non-album tracks, or non-album mixes.
-If an album has been remixed thru the years, I use both mixes. (each at the appropriate publishing dates).
-If an album has been remastered thru the years without being remixed, I use the remaster that I find to be the best to my ears, and it stays at the original date. (Ex: my "2009 remasters" of the Beatles mono and stereo mixes are the one I'm using for the albums in the Beatles folder. The Genesis, King Crimson and Yes albums are represented twice.).

-The syntax for the naming of the files themselves is as following: Song#. Song name.flac (Ex: 01. Drive my car.flac)
I use "sentence casing" (an arbitrary choice that suits me), and I use the spelling from the original record (not the cds, not the reissues). Ex: Hello, goodbye and not Hello goodbye. Give me some truth and not Gimme some truth. Bobby Brown and not Bobby Brown goes down.

-I carefully edit the tags accordingly.
-In "Artist" I put the generic name chosen. In "Album Artist" I put the specific name (Ex: Zappa/Beefheart, Mothers of Invention, Paul McCartney & Wings, Wings, Paul & Linda McCartney, etc...)

-I embed into the file a picture of the original artwork as it was in the first issue of the mother-country of the artist !
Examples:
and not
and not




B. Why I do it


-This way of doing things allows me to recreate on the server the original discography of the artist, as if I was a fan who had bought chronologically all the records at the time and space when they appeared in the world.
-This creates a basic discography to work from. Because then, by the use of playlists, I can imagine every possible listening scenario I want to have: like adding the non-album tracks at the end of the albums (just like bonus tracks), or create compilations of singles (just like Past Masters), without altering the original discography which I can return to whenever I want.

This really brings you the best of both worlds: you are saving the History of releases for an artist, and you have the flexibility of making variations and compilations.

 

I checked my copy of EAC and I didn't see an option to rip directly to FLAC although I can rip directly to other codecs. Since I wanted to save the files as FLAC, ripping to WAV and then using MediaMonkey to convert the resulting file (which is automatically loaded into MediaMonkey) was a simple solution for me.

 

Fair enough

 

Does anybody else remember recording freshly opened vinyl to a cassette first play thru back in the day? I feel the same way now when I rip a freshly opened CD to FLAC, it just FEELS right!

 

EAC does not come with the FLAC encoder, but you can easily add it. Here's how: http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=EAC_and_FLAC

 

Ah yes, the golden days of making a "perfect" back up to C90!

I even sold CDs about 15 years ago based on my foolish assumption that I had a perfect backup on a C90 (I've bought nearly all of them back since)

 

I rip all my CDs to individual lossless tracks using dbpoweramp on both Windows and OS X.

Only tracks verified with AccurateRip are included (or if it's some obscure disc with no AR info, I at least look for a good secure disc rip report). If it's a bad rip, I delete everything.

I only include cuesheets if the disc in question has pre-emphasis... or if the disc has some unusual index times where you need the cuesheet in order to be able to validate the tracks.

After that I transcode lossless albums to lossy 256kbps AAC m4a files to a separate directory.

The nice thing about lossless files is, you can keep creating/transcoding to whatever format/bitrate you want, as long as you keep the stuff backed up. It only costs hard drive space.

The nice thing about lossy files in this case is I can manage them a lot quicker than their lossless counterparts, and I can always delete and create from the original FLAC files again.

I rip all the CDs I own. CDs needing to be ripped are kept in a shoebox close to my computer.

How soon I rip them entirely depends on my mood- e.g. I didn't touch any discs for months after ripping nearly 2500 discs.

With large collections you really have to look at it as a long term goal- you're not gonna knock it all down in a weekend.

 

Exactly.
I use EAC to rip my cds directly in Flac. It works like a charm.

 

All CDs will be ripped to WAV. I have my own system to name the folders. I don't have any artist folder and some sub folders, but one folder for each CD I rip. Here is an example:

ABBA (1976) Arrival (1984 Polydor Germany, 821 319-2)

First comes the artist, the year of original release of the album and the album title. The brackets contain the year of the release of the CD (if it differs from the original release date of the album), the record company, the country and the catalogue number.
Sure, on my harddisc I have main folders (A, B, C, D.....Z) and put all thee stuff inside. My own way to name the folders allows me to copy some stuff without renaming the folders. The names of my folders include everything.
As I am able to play WAV on my mp3 player and my car stereo, there is no need to convert to mp3 anymore.

 

Hate that because my whole lossy collection that I have in iTunes is AAC. Just to get Google Play up and running I did a transcode of my entire music folder to MP3. I didn't go back to my Apple Lossless archive because there are tag changes I've made in iTunes since first ripping the CDs that I wanted to preserve. Now my laptop is currently making 320kbps MP3s from my ALACs and I'm just going to go letter by letter cleaning up the tags, deleting from Play and then uploading the better files. I wish there were an easy way to tell which tracks are matched and which aren't. Then I could just focus on the unmatched songs.

 

AIFF using iTunes on a Mac Mini

 

Got my collection backed up on my home laptop, my work PC and two separate portable drives

 

Thanks for the information.

 

I remember that well, although it usually took me at least two plays to get the recording right: Once to properly set the recording levels, and a second time to actually record the album. Plus, I had to calculate the playing time to see if it would fit on one side of a cassette tape (I usually used Type II C90 tapes). Made recording vinyl albums a bit of work, but it was worth it.

CD was an advance for me since my CD player had a feature that would locate the loudest portion of an album/set of programmed tracks and then repeatedly play a few seconds of the loudest portion so that I could set my recording level. Made making cassettes (for portable use) so easy, especially when it was a collection of tracks from different albums by different artists.

 

Rip each CD in FLAC and then use a batch converter to convert certain albums to AAC. Still haven't used the option in dbpoweramp where you can initially rip a disc in lossless and lossy at the same time.

 

I ripped a 2000 or so CD collection to ALAC and sold them a few years ago, including different versions of many titles. Two external drive backups for security. Now it's records for primary listening and the iPod for the patio and the car.

 

for those using iTunes as a media player you may want to read this: "iCloud Music Library was introduced with this week's iTunes 12.2 and Apple Music release, and it's turning out to be a big bag of hurt."

http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/arti...-library-a-disaster-for-your-music-collection

 

Rip everything to FLAC and store them on a Synology RAID set-up. Every evening, Synology backs up to Amazon S3.

Convert FLAC to 320 AAC for iTunes for syncing to an iPod Classic. This library is also stored on the Synology.

 

I have a few exceptions where I have not ripped every version of a recording. And if I determine that I have two copies with identical mastering (say from two box sets), I will not rip both.

 

I rip every CD to FLAC with Exact Audio Copy to my external drive, from which I usually make a lossy copy for mobile listening.