Easy way to rip CDs?

I should consider writing a brief guide on setting up dBpoweramp and ripping with dBpoweramp. Or look to see if I can find an existing guide that I think is suitable.

 

That is a great idea, especially if you send me a copy. Thanks for all of the advice. I see dBpoeramp in my future.

 

Spoon's set-up was a breeze, pretty much everything else can be found on his forum
http://dbpoweramp.com/cd-ripper-setup-guide.htm

 

This discussion is bring back fond memories of the epic Ripping CDs: Is AccurateRip really necessary, or just being anal? thread.

Lots of similar scary quotes in that earlier thread as well. I proudly voted "just being anal." Like the guy said, use iTunes. After ripping hundreds of CDs and listening to all of those files, I'm still waiting for the terrible reckoning that the belt-and-suspenders crowd tells me is awaiting me.

Making it a giant fail-safe science project only makes sense if you're getting rid of your CDs after ripping them.

 

Jam the cd in your drive and let iTunes rip it to Apple Lossless format with whatever artist/title automatically pulls up...THAT is the easiest way. It'll automatically spit the cd out when done so you can then jam in another.

 

That is true? If you keep the CD's tucked away, you have one perfect copy. But that's all you have, the whole idea is to have three perfect copies so if one goes bad or lost, stolen, damaged, no sweat. You've got other copies, one in another location. And with todays lossless downloads, redbook and Hi Rez. Makes sense to have it all together in one library in a media player such as JRiver, let alone JRiver remote which is hands down the greatest value to having JRiver.
So in light of having all these digital files from different sources, I have three copies, one in another location. No longer need to keep any hard copies. Adios hard media. No regrets 8 years later.

 

The OP asked if there is an easy way. The answer is no in terms of the physical monotony of ripping, but it's yes if there's no overriding agenda of redundant perfect copies. I do realize that lots of audiophiles experience profound satisfaction and peace of mind from getting it just right, NASA style. I say live dangerously!

 

I seem to recall a service where would chould ship them your CDs and they'd rip the lot for like $2 a disk and then ship them back?

Something like this? http://www.ripdigital.com/cd-ripping-service/cd-to-lossless-ripping-service.html

 

another vote for dbpoweramp

 

$2 a disc x 500 discs is $1000. dbpoweramp is $39. Let's do the math and see what's a better deal. I've ripped 500+ discs before and it took a couple weeks. Or you can purchase a Nimbie (still less than $1000) and load 100 CD's and let it rip on its own overnight. You could rip 500 CD"s in less than a week.

 

Same here. Hardly a NASA style science project; plop the disc in the tray, wait for the program to read the disc, click on Rip and you're done. After you repeat 3,000 times of course.

 

I laugh at how irritated I get every 500th rip when my brand new Hungarian fusion cd isn't in the Metadata and I have to manually enter it.

 

If those few hundred count to you, and don't find yourself craving for many more, then you don't need thousands like other posters do. You got what you need and like. You are selective, not a wimp.

 

It is a good guide. But is missing some things. Like some advice on naming conventions and how to ensure that compilation discs save their files in one folder rather than spread out amongst many folders. Displaying the Track Technical column so you can see if a disc has HDCD. And a few other little things.

 

You can also speed up the process by using two drives. DVD drives are about $15 these days. You can be ripping with one drive while changing the disc in the other drive.

 

It's not a trivial matter when you have a 11 CD box set of Bach organ music and discover that FreeDB and MusicBrainz and Discogs don't have the tracks. There is no way in the world that I'm going to type in over 218 tracks. Especially for Bach organ music where the titles can be long. Fortunately the CDs from the box set were in AMG (AllMusic Guide). dBpoweramp reads in data from AMG. I didn't need to type them in. You only need one experience like that to learn that dBpoweramp is well worth the cost. If you have classical CDs you'll find many experiences like that.

Last week I had to type in the track and artist and composer data for three CDs. These CDs weren't even in AMG. Weren't in FreeDB or MusicBrainz. Granted, they are classical music recordings on an independent label and I bought them through CD Baby. But these CDs have also been mentioned in Stereophile as demo tracks. They're not unknown. I'm certain that other audiophiles have ripped them. Unfortunately those other audiophiles were not generous enough to upload the metadata to FreeDB or MusicBrainz. Fortunately for the world I just did. Well, I uploaded the metadata to FreeDB. I haven't yet dug into the mess of what is the current MusicBrainz style guide to learn how to properly upload the metadata for those CDs. I will. Eventually. When I can make sense of the style guide. And feel like it. FreeDB isn't so obnoxious about style and is much easier to upload to and get approved.

Ripping classical music CDs is a whole different world than ripping rock and pop CDs.

 

It is the last sentence I worry about

 

Wow, that is a lot of Bach organ music. Lucky for me, I am not that big a fan of the organ. Mozart piano concertos, on the other hand, I think are sublime.

 

I still don't understand why there are so many options for FLAC encoder settings. I use the default setting of 5 and I can't quite figure out why I'd want a larger FLAC file by choosing one of the higher numbers. When I started out, I chose "Lossless Uncompressed", figuring I was getting a better rip. But the files were enormous and I couldn't hear a difference from the default setting so I stayed with that.

 

The reason may be processing power used to uncompress, less work load when converted to pcm
I use lossless uncompressed for my SBTouch

 

Another enthusiastic vote for dBPoweramp.

 

Amen. When I purchased this, none of the tracks were in any of the freedb services (not in AccurateRip either). I had to do the data entry for each of the 17 discs.

At least I gave back and submitted all of the tracks to FreeDB after each disc rip.

 

Good on you! If more people did just that the world of metadata would be a better place!

 

On modern CPUs, it's a lot less relevant, but higher settings basically make FLAC work harder to compress a bit more. The *output* will be identical always, but higher settings might shave 3-5% off the filesave in exchange for more CPU time encoding - but again on a modern PC you can generally encode faster than you RIP, anyway.

 

I've got 5 box sets of Bach's organ music.
I've actually listened to all of Bach's organ music at least once.

Classical music collections are like that. We collect what we like. And some of it ends up being less common or niche.

I've got about 750 classical CDs/albums. Not all of them are CDs. Some are downloads. Most of them are CD.

It's going to be a project to rip 400 classical CDs. dBpoweramp will make it as easy as it possibly can be. In good conditions figure about 5 minutes per disc to rip. That's assuming that the dBpoweramp PerfectMeta gets tags that don't need any manual editing. Discs that require any manual tag editing will take longer.

But there's lots of variables. You'll need a CD drive that is fast and works well with dBpoweramp. Some drives are very slow (like 20 minutes or more per disc). You need to find a drive that is fast and able to rip at good quality at that fast speed. You may need to try a couple of drives before you find one that works fast and good. The tagging quality will depend on how common and popular your particular classical CDs are.

Once you have a good CD drive and have dBpoweramp properly set up it becomes a process of:
Putting the disc in the tray
Letting dBpoweramp retrieve the metadata
Manually quickly review the metadata to see if it is correct and make changes if necessary
Manually check to see if the CD has HDCD or pre-emphasis
Hit the rip button
Wait
Eject
Repeat