Reasons NOT to rip all your CDs

Just for something different why shouldn’t you rip some or all of your CDs to a hard drive/phone?

• iTunes might delete your music. It’s happened before, will it happen again?

• Too many Beethovens. If you have multiple recordings of a piece (in my case the ‘Moonlight’ 14th sonata) trying to select the correct one out of the 23 you have when your phone doesn’t display the entire line telling you who performed the piece while you’re driving at 73mph on I90 past Amsterdam and soup I just got clocked by a state trooper and why does this have to happen to me?! F&$#!

•Not enough hard drive. If you like the classical ‘mega boxes’ (everything Mozart ever thought about on only 435 CDs! For $79!) it doesn’t take long to collect eleventeen petabytes of FLAC files. It’s not like you want to hear the fifth movement of unfinished symphony # 14 on random. I can put disc 123/435 if I ever want to hear the oddball piece

 

Well, it might be true that YOU shouldn't rip your CDs...

But in case you reconsider...

Be aware that with a few settings (or using an alternate, advanced ripping method), you can prevent any interference by iTunes.

Check some of the rip threads on this forum.

 

Or maybe don't use itunes? Maybe use a pad like an Android to navigate your music system? Works perfectly fine and lets me see my whole collection.

And put your music on a NAS drive so you don't have to have a PC running to listen to it. That's how the Bluesound Node 2 works.

 

iTunes has never deleted my music.
I don't mess with my iPhone when driving.
Multi-Tb drives are cheap.

So, no. I rip everything.

But I also keep the CDs, just in case.

 

Time is the main reason.
Why should I when I have the CDs and a high end player ?

 

Main reason: time! Life is short and I ripped ~4k CDs. For a while in EAC's secure mode even! If accurate rip is available: always rip in burst mode!

My main reason was saving the collection. But now that I have Spotify, I think I should not have worried so much. On the other hand, who knows how long those services are around.

 

I found a really simple solution for this. I don't use iTunes.

 

That's the main reason for me. Time, and it's a pain in the butt. I can just put a CD in a CD player without all the intervening steps. The only time I ever rip anything is to put in on a portable player if I'm taking an airplane flight (because I'm going to need something to block out the noise on the plane). Otherwise it's just doing a lot of extraneous filing, a grinding chore.

 

Cause you really like to have all your media on display, and you get a warm and fuzzy feeling looking at all those discs?

Because you have no interest in the care and feeding of computers?

Because you are sensitive to the feeling of your discs and you don't want to rip on them about their outdated technology?

Cheers
Mister Pig

 

There’s only one legitimate reason not to rip a CD, IMO… if there’s a better mastering available in Hi-Res

 

For those who have thousands of CDs, this is certainly worth a look.

The rapid way to rip a CD collection

 

To each his own, but I'd rather lose a couple of minutes ripping a CD when I buy it and never bothering with it again than taking time looking for it, taking off the shelf, into the CD player, taking it out, putting it back on the shelf again, and so on multiple times a day every day. Whatever minutes you lose to ripping I regain a thousand times !

 

People still use iTunes?? Despite it forever being a stinking pile of bloated crap??

 

Tens of millions of people

 

I put-off Ripping my CD collection for years because of the following reasons:

1) The incredible amount of time it takes,
2) Not being able to decide on the means playback (so many different software packages, and streamers are out there today, it can be daunting trying to decide upon right one)
3) The idea of using a PC for playback is not something that I was thrilled about
4) I was afraid that it would take forever to properly configure software packages like Jriver, Foobar, Roon, etc
5) I didn't want to spend months trying to read millions of posts just to make sure that I got it right.

But I finally got over my reasons for hesitating. And I've been ripping for the past 6 months. And I finally hit what I considered to be critical mass, having finally ripped around 700 of my CDs, so I copied them to the NAS which I purchased some time ago to use as my media server. And within a couple of hours I could easily view, search and access all of my ripped content on via any of the HEOS links which I have in the house .

I had never planned on using our HEOS links as the primary end-points for our media server. But so far I am pleased with just how well they are working in this (previously unintended) application.

 

the 1st and 3rd reason are not reasons at all. The 2nd one is not something ive ever had an issue with personally.

 

I use an iPhone, so yeah. Works fine for me.

 

iTunes can't delete my music, if it isn't installed.

 

Reasons NOT to start a thread about not ripping all your CDs when all you care about is iTunes and your smartphone:

Too many to count

 

I rip all my CDs to 4 different storage devices - because you never know!

As far as the time and the why should I rip when . . . because you don't have to pull them from the shelves and then put them away and your entire library is available at your fingertips and can be streamed into every room of your home if your home is so equipped. In cooler weather I do work in my garage and stream into there when I'm doing work and I stream to my patio when I'm working in my backyard.

 

Never ripped, never will.

 

Too late - I ripped them all years ago.

But thanks for the warning.

 

Make sure that includes off-site storage, whether that's in the cloud, at work or at somebody else's house. I like the thought that my house could burn down someday and I'd still be happily listening to any of the songs from my meticulously tagged music library in their original, glorious quality at the end of that day.

 

Why, though?

 

Never say never.