Seeking advice on approaching a large-scale CD ripping project

Much to my chagrin, I have a nagging voice - my own! - beginning to whisper that I should consider ripping my CDs to FLAC.

Every so often I google around trying to see what the latest assessments are on realistic service life estimates of CD. Reading this study by Library of Congress ( http://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rt/CDservicelife_rev.pdf ) I was struck by the conclusion that 10% of prerecorded CDs failed in a service life of less than 25 years. I have a number of CDs that exceed that age mark. Hence the nagging voice...

I would welcome thoughts or input on the following:

* I have thousands of CDs - have any of you approached a big conversion project and if so, what did you learn? Other than that it was a nightmare, ha ha ha

* I plan on ripping to FLAC - is there a latest/greatest/fastest program? I find older references to Exact Audio Copy, which I've used, as well as foobar2000, which I also have. For that matter, is there a better approach than just ripping via PC? I don't imagine there's much of an alternative but I thought I'd ask.

* Is there a fairly accurate capability for the FLACs to automatically be named correctly, or is that going to turn out to be a largely manual task (shudder)? If the latter, I may cook up some kind of identification code for each album and refer to the original booklet or case art if necessary.

Thanks in advance for any advice. I did try running a SHF search on "ripping" with "Search titles only" checked, but for some reason it included anything with "rip" included - hence a lot of obituaries, etc. So I apologize in advance if there's a discussion on this topic elsewhere... I did find the poll from earlier this year about how much people have ripped of their collection.

 

"thousands of CDs"

I don't envy you. For a PC, foobar is probably the way to go.

For me, the most time consuming part of ripping is getting the metadata right. For example, on compilations, it's extremely rare that the release years for the tracks are correct. It's usually just the release year for the compilation, which is wrong IMHO. And often, the track artist comes back as "various artists".

One piece of advice: Find a DVD-ROM drive (as opposed to a DVD or BD burner) to dedicate to the task. My experience is that DVD-ROM drives make better rippers and they last longer.

 

I can't help you with PC software suggestions.

With "thousands of CDs" I'd just rip them whenever your at the PC browsing SHTV or as the mood takes you. I ripped approx. 1,000 discs over the course of 18 months or so. The process veered between "Ooo, I forgot I had that!" to "How many more?!"

Having a second CD or DVD drive (I have no experience of using a *-ROM drive as I ripped most of my collection with a 2008 vintage iMac) is a good idea as you'll find a few discs that won't rip properly. I found it was usually the last track. I put those discs aside with a note of the "duff" track(s) and re-ripped those tracks with a standalone drive I subsequently borrowed.

 

Get some interns

 

This brings up a good point. I don't have first-hand experience with foobar, but having the ability to control the ripping speed can often make the difference between successful and unsuccessful rips.

 

I read that there is some program which allows for multiple simultaneous rips if you have a bank of CDRs connected to your PC. I'm thinking that it was called something like DB Poweramp?

FWIW: I have the same dilemma, and I plan to build a dedicated PC for the process with as many CDR drives as I can fit into the thing so that it won't take so darn long.

 

Not being a jerk here, but with "thousands" of Cds, why bother? why not just rip what you want to your IPOD or smartphone as needed?

 

Fair point, stereoguy. It is an onerous task at best.

I ripped them when it suited me rather than let the task consume me. In my case, I had several large boxes of CDs that were taking up more space than I liked. A friend had gone through a similar process using Case Logic CD folders. Once ripped, I could dispose of the jewel case, file the disc and booklet, and store the tray card in spare shoe boxes.

 

Are you PC or Mac?
What is your CD collection like? All rock? Jazz? Classical? Lots of versions of the same album in different masterings?

Bulk ripping gets more complicated when the CD collection is complicated by things like multiple versions of the same album or includes classical or jazz.

If you're a Windows person then dBpoweramp is going to be the best option. It has the best automatic tagging and can verify the rips are good using AccurateRip. dBpoweramp is commercial, not free. But well worth the money. $39 for a single PC license, $58 for a family pack for 2 to 5 computers. For a big ripping project the cost is well worth it given the time you'll save. There's also a Mac version of dBpoweramp in the works.

 

I'm just starting the same process. I've been using dbPoweramp. Since I'm not in a hurry I do a few every night when I get some free time. Don't forget to have a proper backup plan. dbPoweramp does a pretty good job with the metadata but it does make some mistakes. I double check everything before and after each rip to make sure it's correct.

 

7500 CDs ripped here. And I started with lossy before I figured out that was stupid, started over with lossless... So that was time wasted. Sounds like you already figured that out. My only other advice - back it up, including an off site backup. You only want to do this once per CD.

And yes - it is totally worth it. Put in the time once and whatever solution you decide on to play it, it will allow you to enjoy your collection in a whole new way.

I was a freelance IT consultant for several years a while back, I ripped a pile of CDs every night while working on whatever project I was on. That was ABCDE on Linux. Very handy but I'm sure there are great rippers on every OS at this point.

Go for it, you won't regret it.

 

If you're on a PC, dBpoweramp (and yes, that's the way it's spelled) is the only choice for bulk ripping IMO. It uses a database called AccurateRip, which consists of other people's rips of the same CD. If your rip is identical to the correct versions in the database, the ripping goes much faster and is practically guaranteed to be right. dBp also uses a wider variety of metadata/cover art sources than most other programs, so you're likely to get the metadata right to begin with. You can also easily customize the output folder/filename scheme. If you have a modern CPU with multiple cores, dBp will use up to four of them simultaneously, and the latest version is 64-bit.

I'm also a foobar2000 user, and I used to use EAC as my prime ripper. Both are free, but the combination of features and ease of use made dBpoweramp an easy purchase that I've never regretted.

 

Use EAC if you have Windows....it's free and will give you a bit perfect copy every time. Just make sure you have EAC check your optical drives to assertain which will read the most accurately.

 

As a rough estimate I think I've ripped about 15,000 CD's; my MediaMonkey library has around 250,000 tracks.

If you are using Windows and plan to rip thousands of CD's, you should -- really, must -- use dBpoweramp. You need confidence in your results to know whether your drive is working well or not. And you need to use multiple drives, as one drive might succeed where another fails; what's more, you might never finish unless you spend some time working a couple or more computers at a time. I don't remember how much dBpoweramp costs, but it's worth it.

The software you choose to organize your library and play your files is up to you. I think MediaMonkey is awesome if you have a large library of classical music.

One other tip, and it's counterintuitive: If you know you're going all the way, start with discs you care about less. The reason? Your idea of what constitutes proper metadata might evolve as you go.

 

Has anyone mentioned putting removable stickers on both spines of discs you have ripped, so you can tell at a glance what has been done?

 

Thanks for all the great suggestions! A couple of responses to various posts:

I am on PC.

I am familiar with dBpoweramp, and will look at that as my leading contender.

I do have a couple of old Windows machines around - I may look into setting one of them up solely for the task of this project.

I'll probably start with things that I have on CD-R - downloads of "unofficial" recordings and so on, as they have the shortest estimated lifespan. A lot of them I downloaded as FLAC, burned the disc, and dumped the FLAC - Of course, that was a decade or more ago before cheap TB drives were available and space was not as inexpensive as it is now.

Backups - I am on that train. I have my media drives attached to my main PC, backups of them in my office closet, and another set of backups locked in a cabinet at my work in down town Philadelphia. I've worked in IT for a long time, so I am nervous if something doesn't exist in at least three places.

I posted another thread about redoing my media/basement area, and several people had a similar suggestion to Quark above to free up a lot of space by disposing of the jewel cases. Pretty sure I'll be doing that in conjunction with this archiving project, though I may need to fast-forward the space saving aspect at a much quicker pace than all this ripping will take!

 

If your collection contains older CD's be on the lookout for pre-emphasis also. You can detect it with an old version of EAC or with the current version of XLD (generate a cue sheet and PRE flags will be there).

If you rip a CD with pre-emphasis, most rippers won't do anything special. You need to apply deemphasis to your flac after ripping. This can be done with xACT (don't know if that is mac only) or with a the sox command line tool.

There is a pre-emphasis list on the forum but it is by no means complete, new (old) titles are detected and reported there frequently.

 

I guarantee that the failure rate of a hard drive over 25 years will be higher than that of a CD. My first dedicated hard drive died and I didn't have a backup. Of course I was ripping as I bought Cd's so it was no issue as opposed to having to re-rip over a thousand cd's on the new hard drive which off and on took over a month. Now I back up everything to another hard drive and don't even turn the thing on unless I'm backing up. I'm thinking about getting one of those WD passports to provide an additional backup and be able to take my entire music collection with me while traveling.

 

First I've heard of this phenomenon - I'll investigate further, thanks!

 

Read Chris Connaker's Computer Audiophile CD Ripping Strategy & Methodology. Lots of good advice there. I don't agree with all of his suggestions, but I think much of it is in the right direction.

My advice in general:

1) choose an archival format that will last a long time, provide no compromises in sound quality, and gives you full access to all metadata. After flirting with AIFF and WAV in the early 2000s, I finally settled on Apple Lossless in 2004 and never looked back. Once Apple Lossless went open source in 2011, it's no longer a proprietary format and will play on Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux without any problem or compromise.

2) rely on the best possible tools for ripping from CD. I find dBPowerAmp, with its AccurateRip engine, to be the only thing that works reliably. Stay away from burst-rip-only software like iTunes. dBPowerAmp also has the benefit of giving up to 5 different Tagging sources, which is absolutely mandatory for accurate information. I find the tagging to be among the most difficult part of ripping -- not the rips themselves. Keep a log of all the ripping information, so you can tell at a glance if there were any particular errors with the CD.

3) don't overwhelm yourself with trying to rip too many CDs at a time. Set reasonable goals. I find I can easily do 50 in a few hours using multiple drives, and it's not too stressful. I generally try to rip on no more than three drives simultaneously, because it gets very taxing trying to keep an eye on correct spelling for Artist Names, Song Titles, and Album Titles. Be warned there's a lot of bad data out there on the net, and be prepared to correct it when you have to. Bear in mind that ripping accuracy is far more important than ripping speed.

4) get the best possible DVD-ROM drives. Stay away from cheap internal drives, particularly the bad 9mm thin drives provided with most modern laptops, which are slow and fragile in my experience. Go with full-size 5-1/4" drives in external enclosures. And know in advance that none of them are built to last anymore; be prepared to replace them every couple of years.

5) use a 3rd-party tagging program to manage ID3 Tags and to help rename files if necessary. I'm a huge fan of Soft Pointer's Tag & Rename, which I consider to be an indispensable tool to manage large audio file collections.

6) come up with a standardized method for organizing files, folders, and naming files. Often, the default naming, organizing, and sorting procedures with a lot of software is kludgy and non-intuitive. I approach the challenge of dealing with massive numbers of files as if they were just records on a wall: I have different drives associated with different kinds of music, and I keep them alphabetically sorted under Artist's last name, then Album Title. Various Artist CDs go on a different drive, all sorted under Album Title.

7) use a 3rd party site like Albums Art Exchange to get high quality cover artwork for the files, and manually embed the JPEG images into the files. Having an accompanying image that corresponds with the music is a nice background when you play the songs on a computer or on a server.

8) for portable listening, use a high-quality lossy codec like AAC to downres the files for portable devices. While I demand lossless for serious listening and archival storage, I have no problem with 320kbps AAC files for background music on iPods when I'm exercising, driving, or working in an office. You'll have to decide for yourself what the best compromises are between sound quality and file size, but I think Lossless is overkill (and is about triple the size of 320k files).

9) whatever you do, backup your files. Better experts than me have said, if you don't have at least three copies of your data, then you don't own your data. If possible, make at least 2 backups and keep one of them outside your house, like at a relative's house or at your office, in the event of flood or nuclear disaster.

 

Not an apt comparison. I'd say you can get 5-7 years of life out of a drive easily, and as long as you have a plan in place to migrate the data to new drives every so often, you'll be fine. Given that the cost of drives gets cut in half every few years, while the size doubles, you'll no doubt be able to buy a $50 drive to replace the $200 drive you're presently using. I'm in the process of shifting my collection to 4TB drives, and those are only about $175 right now. It wasn't that long ago when a 1TB drive was $1000.

 

The other factor with hard drives is that they need to have a current interface. SCSI or IDE - lotsa luck using them with a current system. Today's hard drives are SATA, but some other interface may be the standard in only a few years.

 

Correct. That's one of many reasons you have to replace drives every 5-7 years. But it's a lot easier to copy 4TB of data (the equivalent of at least 5000 CDs) in 10 hours than it would be to copy 5000 CDs to CD-Rs, which would take at least 2500 hours.

 

I used a Sony Viao "Digital Living System" with a 200 DVD changer to batch rip 200 at a time to WMA lossless using Windows Media Center. I then batch converted to FLAC ( I think I used Foobar or DBPowerAmp for the conversion). I have since converted to ALAC. I have run I into a rare issue here and there, but I just re-rip when that has happened. If you are super conscience about exact rips, I wouldn't go this route. However, it was worth it for me.

The Sony DLS units were buggy, but it did the job before it croaked. The other upside to the Sony was that it could rip vinyl to DSD format via analog inputs. I wish I still had the DLS just for that purpose.

 

Yeah, I had one of those Sony DVD-ROM multichangers as well, and they were incredibly unreliable. The big flaw was, if it got halfway through ripping one disc and hit a glitch, it'd just kick that disc out and go on to the next one, giving you no error message that it never completed the disc. Very bad flaw. I junked mine after one week of testing.

They have lots and lots of conversations about automated CD ripping on the dBPowerAmp forum, and they'll point you to reasonably-priced multidisc changers that can work to a point. My problem with unattended ripping is that you wind up with so many data errors -- particularly when you run into another CD with completely different track names -- you spend more time correcting the errors than you would just sitting there keeping an eye on things.