Seeking advice on approaching a large-scale CD ripping project

I appreciate all the suggestions; I'm about to undertake a major ripping project as well. I have about 1000 CD's which I will rip in FLAC. One minor question: does dBpoweramp also act as an organizer/player, or do you need something like MediaMonkey or JRiver?

I also have about 5,000 LPs which I will probably not live long enough to rip.

 

No. dBpoweramp is not a player/organizer. In addition to MediaMonkey or JRiver try Musicbee and XBMC.

 

I have around 1,600 CDs and ripped them all many years ago. I recall it went pretty quickly. I bought a Plextor DVD-rw and put it in an external USB drive enclosure. I installed EAC (using accurate rip) and let it configure the offset for my Plextor unit. There were some other recommended EAC settings and then it was off to the races. Ripping went pretty fast per disc and didn't bog down my PC at all.
The Plextor tray would open when the CD was completed so, I had a pretty smooth process from the start. Before turning in, I'd take all the *.wav files and load them into FLAC to convert to that format overnight.

I find I really don't listen to these files, but, I did this more as a backup archive in case something happened to my CDs.

 

This was the main reason I wrote an extensive article on my website (which is now gone) for exactly the combination that was needed. It used to get a lot of hits off of AVSforum and it was also linked to other forums, so it must have helped a few people. For me, it saved a ton of time and the results were great. Not saying it works for everyone, nor would I. People have their own experiences with tech, which is why some people love iTunes and some hate it (for example).

I should mention that I had previously ripped everything into 128k before I knew that it wasn't the "CD quality" everyone was touting at the time. I used Winamp to create a datafile to pull the metadata of the 128k collection into excel and compared it to my finished lossless product from rips via the CD changer. There were very few differences, with the exception of the Ella box I mentioned above and CDs I hadn't ripped to 128k. I have listened to the collection for several years and still haven't run across another issue.

All that being said, I am not sure if there is even a current version of this system that is made today. I got an email about a year ago from an AVS forum member that was looking for people to test a new version of Windows on it, but I never looked into whether it happened.

 

Anyone can become an editor on MusicBrainz. If something is misspelled, I fix it. The edit goes through in a week unless it is challenged.

If you mix sources, you will end up with disagreements as to how to spell some artists, etc. By sticking with one database (and helping maintain it), consistency (and some peer review) is assured.

You can create "collections" on MusicBrainz with all of your releases so if anyone edits one you get notified so you can "protect your turf" so to speak or at least be aware of what corrections/changes are being made.

 

File -> Save Cue Sheet As...

 

Sorry that I missed it.

I was hoping for a more efficient alternative to the PS3 for ripping SACDs. For CDs, I will probably buy a stacker that can run off dBPowerAmp but the SACDs are a pain. Less than 2000 to go now.

 

I've been ripping for three years now. Three years ago I would come across plenty of CDs in my collection that were not in the tagging data bases.

Many many modern classical CDs mainly imports, some of the rarer rock things, boots, etc. not tagged automatically. I set these discs aside and planned to return to them later when I was more in the mood for typing.

Now going back to those discs years later I find that they are (mostly) now all there, tags and accurate rip. So I am going over some skipped titles now and not having to do the typing at all.

I also prefer to grab good cover art before I start the ripping session. Another shout out for the Album Art Exchange.

During my ripping sessions I was using three computers with DSL router piping in the tagging data to each. I does go fast that way. But since I have the bulk of the ripping done now, I'm recently using just two computers. Each computer must have at least two drives, preferably three drives in each computer. Certain discs seem to rip best (bit perfect) with a particular drive, while others discs work well in another drive.

I find that the process is relaxing and a good diversion from life's stresses. I enjoy doing something and doing it right.

I'm closing in on 6TBs of flac files.

 

I have noted the same problem. If I start getting a lot of re-ripped frames, I'll abort the entire process and just try a different drive. If it's still balking, then I revert to Secure Rip and just listen to the problematic files. In general, there's no glitches or problems at all. Out of 12,000 CDs, I've only ripped about half of them so far, but every so often some time opens up and I'll spend a few days knocking another few hundred out. The tags are often a huge drag, but I agree: users have gone in and fixed them more in recent years.

What really drives me bonkers is when I get foreign characters in CD artist names, song titles, and so on, or rEVERSED lETTERING, misspellings, weird punct!uatio|n, and so on. Or worse, some idiot types in the artist name for song titles and song titles for the artist names. cRaZy.

 

Oh what about say a 4CD box set, and the song titles are the same (at least in one database) for two of more discs. So it all looks fine if you are really rippin' away, but if you look closely you have several discs in a box set that have the same songs listed. Some bozo went and typed them all in, but was on disc three and not disc two. This is easy enough to correct by selecting a different tagging database before rip if you notice it.

Another thing I am doing with live albums is dropping in the year of the concert recording rather than the year of release. If you get a "deluxe edition" of an album that features a 55 min. live disc as the bonus, I want the year to not be 2013, but rather 1978, so that if I was to search for 1978 Rock material, I can bring that show up correctly.

Another area I am now in is "stray tracks". In my years of needle dropping, I have sometimes dropped a track (from an album) to digital that really does not belong anywhere in particular. Maybe I have a Warner Brothers Records collection of hits from 1970. Everything there is in the server collection already except one or two tracks. Or one track from this vinyl LP might sound really good, much better than it's appearance on the Rhino Have a Nice Day series, or I have a rare mono mix, etc.. So I needle drop them, and save the track in a stray tracks folder. Now years later I am getting them ready for FLAC encodes. Burning them to CD-R, and ripping to FLAC with manual tags attached. It's a bit of work when it's 60 or 70 tracks. Lots of hand entering tag info. But it's fine, they sound really great. I'm a sucker for mid to late 60s killer tracks, especially those that charted just below the top 40. Some stray tracks have been burned to disc, but need to be ripped back to HDD folder and treated with mild ClickRepair (now that I use that sw), and burned back to disc for ripping. What a process................

 

Yes, you have to be very careful about that. dBPowerAmp's Ripper will either give you an error message or give you a ".1" suffix to differentiate different files with identical titles. I agree, what people titling the tracks should do is say "Song Title (Vers. 1)" or something like that so as to avoid filename conflicts. What kills me are certain illegal characters that people insist on putting in song titles, particularly / and \ and stuff like that. One convention I've had to adopt is using an ampersand for medleys, so you get (as one example) "We Will Rock You & We Are the Champions," because the slash isn't permitted. Technically, you could use it in the metadata displayed on the server, so it'd look OK to the user, but the file can't have that name or you cause a nuclear radiation leak.

Because there's already a Year field in the metadata, I'd prefer to just use that. If you had "Big Rock Group Live" as the name of the album, and they came out with a second live album 20 years later, you could conceivably change the folder name if you wanted to. But any music-playing app (iTunes, whatever) will easily let you set up playlists by year if that's what you want. I generally prefer to listen to stuff chronologically 99% of the time, myself.

Crap happens with one-of-a-kind tracks. You just have to name them manually. As annoying as that is, just tell yourself, "you only have to do this once." Once the file is named (and tagged), it's named forever.

 

Yes, there is a year field, and I am using it for year tag, but what I am saying is that for vintage archive releases, it is 99% of the time incorrect, and I change it to year of recording from year of release. It seldom has that correct year of recording but rather has the release year.

Like if there was a set that came out in 2010 called "Live at Record Plant Studios Los Angeles" I would change the year 2010 to 1974. It's another thing to remember that's all.

 

I always wonder how people are tagging the album name (and version)? On this forum especially people must have multiple versions of the same album. I've gone down the route of noting the reissue year, country of origin, label and catalogue number. For example ...
- Quadrophenia [1991 US MFSL UDCD 550]

I'll also try and distinguish other factors as well:
- Quadrophenia [2014 EU 96kHz 24bit Original Mix]
- Quadrophenia [2014 EU 96kHz 24bit Remix]

A bit too pedantic? I just find it too tricky to identify the different version when scrolling through my music library if I don't do this. Anyone else use this level of detail?

 

Mine are often lean like these below, if I need to add more detailed info I'll use the comments field in dBpower.

On the album title line I do it like this. I don't put year in the title line unless there are many reissues and it needs to be there. The Monkees and Elvis Costello are two situations where a year is helpful.

Band on the Run (DTS 5.1 Release)
Band on the Run (DCC)
Wired (SQ Quad LP)
Wired (MFSL)
The Beatles (UK white vinyl 24/96)
The Beatles (2009 Mono)
The Beatles (Japan Red Vinyl Mono)

 

EAC is wayyyyyy slow to bulk rip.

It's okay for doing a couple discs, but multiply the extra couple minutes per disc that EAC takes x 1000 or however many discs you have and you'll find many, many extra hours of work.

Use dBPowerAmp or even Itunes...

 

I just got though my backlog this evening. For the moment I'm fully ripped.
I haven't been able to say that in several years. Ah. Feels good. But likely won't last long.

I still need to do some tag fixing. The basic tagging needs are done. And the files are imported into JRiver Media Center. Still some work to do.

dBpoweramp was awesome. Couldn't have done it without it. Especially for the Bach organ box sets. AMG was the best data for those discs. Much better than the GD3/Sonata data. Much much better than FreeDB. MusicBrainz had nothing at all for those discs. AMG can be awesome.

 

Not too pedantic at all. You need to do something to differentiate multiple masterings and versions of the same album.

I use a similar naming system. Square brackets at the end of the album title. Put the label and any other inf in there that would be necessary to differentiate the release. Usually just the label is enough. Sometimes include the mastering year. Sometimes include additional info like country or catalog.

Come up with a system for naming and identifying album releases. Try to be consistent. Do what is necessary to work for your needs.
I could actually be more consistent in my naming conventions. But it works fine for my needs.

 

I went back and redid a few titles over the long weekend.

I had some nice Japanese import CDs that I ripped a while back. The artwork I had attached was just the art that came up automatically. Since I paid good money for these special CDs (no US issue), I went and scanned the CD cover cards in 600 dpi, and re-ripped with new better jpg art, and closer attention to tag details. These are few of my nicer CDs so it was worth a revisit.

At what point do I stop and consider that I have enough? 8Tbs of Flac and hi-rezzies?

 

I fully understand your anger, but what about those crazy countries using bizarre languages containing characters which are way beyond the very limited 7-bit US ASCII character set? Like for example “Amon Düül II” or worse?

Ripping software should to be able to separate file and folder names from artist names or song titles.

 

This touches on something I have run into.

For classical you have artist and album artist. One of them will reflect the folder name, one will not.

I would appreciate the artist being the composer, and album artist being the performer or conductor (or both) for that particular album. This is not how it works.

This is separate from the fields for more info I am told dbpoweramp has but I have not seen or used yet. In fact I don't really want more fields.

Anyway, it seems that I could end up with folders on hard drive that are named P. Boulez, and L. Bernstein rather than the folders belonging to Ravel, Bach, and Dvorak.

I must have those folders stating composer, and not conductor. Because I need to do a quick glance to see if I have a Mahler symphony, and which conductor is doing it. I can't look through all of the folders as I would if they were by conductor, nor can I bother with a folder search. I must be able to click open a composer folder and see right there what I have.

So it is a little backwards for classical IMO.

There is a reason that one field creates the folder name the other does not. But it is reversed from the way I would have set up dBpoweramp.

For rock this works out ok, but it is reversed from how I see my collection.
Album Artist: Frank Zappa
Artist: The Mothers of Invention

This leaves all of Zappa's works in the same folder even if the band is different. It is the way like it, and gives the tags correct band/artist tags.

In the classical section it's a bit odd, having album artist not the group or players but the real composer. I feel the real composer should be the "artist" plain and simple

 

I just finished reviewing this entire thread, making a bunch of notes to come up with a final game plan. So much great info - thanks!!!

Again, I am Windows PC-based - any suggestions on current external drives that would be recommended for such a ripping project?

Also, I will be going to dBpoweramp's site to give things a good look-over before starting anything, but a quick question or rather seeking validation of an assumption I've made: dBpoweramp will rip CDs directly into FLAC format, correct? I saw someone mention earlier having to convert his wav files to FLAC...

 

If I may, I would suggest you also make a very detailed plan on how you want to tag the files, because tagging works best when it is consistent. MP3Tag is my go-to tool for that.

A lot of that will depend on what kind of music you own. By the way, the composer is COMPOSER and the conductor is CONDUCTOR. There is a reason these fields exist. You can even make up your own tags if needed. For example, to my mind the field ALBUM is not really the best for handling classical music, so I have tagged the works, as well.

The possibilities are virtually endless and potentially mind-boggling.

 

Yes but again, you do not address Album Artist vs Artist fields in the Classical genre. Nobody else does either, so no biggie. Lol. That was the question I had. But nevermind.

The Album is important, as is any title of any work.

 

dBpoweramp can rip directly to FLAC. Or ALAC, WAV, AIFF, MP3, and other formats.

 

Excellent - thank you for the confirmation