Seeking advice on approaching a large-scale CD ripping project

Yea there was one time I checked out 100 discs, with the purpose of ripping and the librarian was like "How can you listen to all 100 in 21 days." I just pointed to one of their PC's, and then she was like "Ahh, gotcha."

 

My library used to have a six CD limit per card account. Glad they did away with that a while back.

 

I've been ripping my cd collection for over 3 years now, and I finally decided it's time to straighten out tags. Early on I did now know what I do now about tags. And even once I got a handle on it, I still made some tagging choices I've now decided were not optimal. Previously when tags were really bothersome I would just re-rip the CD rather than use a tag editor.

Recently I spent three long sessions going over titles on the drive. I came to the conclusion that for most tagging needs Tag and Rename was desirable, and other times the tagging engine in JRiver was prefered. In JRiver I could spot titles with unassigned fields very quickly. But I preferred using T&R for correcting those cases. For a spelling error - a quick right click and type was effective in JR. I had both Rolling Stones, Rolling Stones, The and I had The Rolling Stones as well in the library. This correction was fast and easy within JR.

The good news is that if you botch your tagging on lots of titles - fixing things is not as bad as it could be with these two programs. It's fast and easy and you can almost do them in bulk. I use a lot of control c - control v into fields and it goes pretty fast.

I'm amazed at how far all of this has come. The Rio hit, Apple took over, and then some other smart guys on the scene took it to home servers with audiophiles very much in mind. And we're now creating monster music databases with our collections that we had no idea would be possible when much of the music was originally amassed.

So after I finish up my tagging clean up. I'll go over cover art and fix that. I have DCC with standard covers, and the like. I need my DTS 5.1 releases with correct logo art as well. I may have to scan some of my own cd covers to fix some of those odd ones if I don't see them at the Album Art Exchange, etc.

 

My tips
1) always rip to FLAC
2) Use a Desktop
3) Avoid Blu Ray drives
4) Use EAC

then back up

 

Hello,

I thought I would post this here rather than open a completely new thread. My parents decided they are not going to take their CDs with them in the move down south. So I have about 300 CDs that I was planning on archiving this weekend. They in a Sony 300-disc changer. Does anybody know if there is a way I can hook this into my computer, and batch rip them through dBpoweramp without having to take any of them out of the changer?

Thanks.

 

You could use Audacity and do a laser drop. Of course everything will go through a digital to analog conversion and then through an analog to digital conversion. Not recommended.

 

No, because this is a CD player and not a CD/DVD-ROM player. Read this info on Batch Ripping from the dBPowerAmp people:

https://www.dbpoweramp.com/batch-ripper.htm

I tried it for a month or two and finally bailed on it because I ran into too many situations where the software found one CD that potentially had two or more sets of titles, artist names, and track names. You need some human intervention to make decisions on "metadata train wrecks" like this. Often, the problem is not just getting the data off the drives; it's making sure the songs, artists, and albums are correctly named and the files are put in the right places.

 

Ripping is fun I think. Especially fun when you can rip on three of four computers at once making major headway in a 4 or 5 hour evening.

I have enough variations, and unique titles that need to be specially tagged. Next to many rips in the title line I have (MFSL), (DCC), (Classic), (LP), (Quad LP), (WLP), (UK LP), and on and on. Sometimes (RM), or (expanded).

 

Hi there.
Been there, done that.
My way (after many attempts):
1. Rip by dBpoewramp CD Ripper using feedback for naming. Also it allows you to download and choose appropriate cober in appropriate size. And allows you to set it and organise it by artist, album, track number/name in many ways. PM me if you need more explanations.
2. If after ripping you do need some retouch in the saved info in the TAGs, Mp3TAG (excellent and easy to use software).
That's all. If you start using those software correctly set from the start, everything will be just put the CD and rip it.

Best regards,
Veny

 

Man that sounds tedious.

As an ex IT guy, I would give serious thought to a naming convention... Best to get it perfect before you start.

I think the main issue will be changing technology. Not that actual data but the hardware. What I mean is, for example at one point IDE drives ruled the roost, and you do not want to be hunting for old hardware to recover from a backup. So you would have to keep on top changing over the hard drive.

How much hard disk space do you anticipate needing??

Good luck man

 

Do 10 a day. Take your time do it right so that you don't get burned out. You will eventually get them all done.

 

I am using old Pent 4 computers and old IDE hard drives. In fact I went and bought old used 300g ATA hard drives for these old computers. Then I can rip away DVDs as well as CDs. Then it all gets transferred over to external USB drives from the player to access. Two of my four ripper computers have SCSI cards with SCSI CD-R drives in them in addition to the regular IDE ones. I actually use up to four different drives when certain discs give me problems.

Anyway, FLAC is not going anywhere, it's pretty much here to stay. If a smaller lossless format comes along -- we will be able to convert our files over to that with no loss of quality or metadata.

I am up to 6Tbs of music. I am willing to go to 8Tbs before I start to delete things to make room for DVD ISO files. I have music that I do not want to hear again. I can see that already.

 

How much of this is Hi Rez? I'm ripping CDs to FLAC and I have done about a 1000 so far and it's 338 GB right now. 6 TB would be a lot of CDs.

 

There are hi rez stuff in there, 24/96 needle drops. Downloads like the new Zeppelin, some DVD-A and SACDs too.. But yes, it's a lot of CDs there. I joke with my friends telling them I have more music than Amoeba has.

I have all genres. The idea is to have plenty I have not yet heard, so it stays new to me.

 

I'm going to get underway in the next few weeks. I appreciate all of the great advice and comments here I'm going to take a triage-like approach to this project.

My plan will be to start with my many "unofficial" live recording CDs, as they are the least likely to be obtainable again, although some I've downloaded as FLAC files in the years since buying them. Still, it won't be such a big deal to rip them and storage is relatively cheap, so... I'll then move on to recordings that are difficult to obtain now and perhaps unlikely to be released in another format in the future - for example, things like the Eno vocal/instrumental boxes, the Wendy Carlos box, and so on. Next I'd move on to favored older masterings that probably will not see the light of day in the future. We'll see how things are going once that's done - my lowest priority will be things like The Beatles stereo box, Led Zeppelin's studio albums or an album like Who's Next, as hi-res commercial downloads are now available.

I think this "focus on what I believe might possibly be hard to replace in the future" is the best approach, at least to have a manageable starting strategy.

 

I would start with the super rare ones of course. But after that, I would rip complete genres without skipping a single disc. Like Jazz or R&B, or Country. You may as well start from the beginning and get through it completely. I skipped around some doing things I most wanted to listen to. If I had it to do over again, I would start is differently. I'd be more inclusive, and get it done from beginning to end. But nothing wrong with all box sets to start with after boots. Btw, unofficial live and studio recordings are finally in the databases for the most part. Not all of them but many of the tracks and arttists are there. But you will need to gather up the front cover art for most of them before you begin. You will need to find a site that has those scans, and grab them before you stsrt the ripping so that you have them. Or make scans from the ones you can't find. Or forgo art on the boots, which I find personally unacceptable. For Beatlegs I even grabbed back cover art and in some cases booklet pages, as I will want to study that stuff in later year as I scroll the collection.

 

Hi there,

This thread has inspired me to rip my 2,500 CD collection to Lossless. I have taken the advice here and bought dBpoweramp along with the bundled Perfect Tunes ancillaries.

A few questions before I get started:

FLAC seems to be the most popular format. Why is this so, and if I use it what's the story on the 8 or so different levels of compression you can choose? Is this data compression? If so how can it be truly Lossless if its compressing stuff and offering various levels of it? I don't own any Apple devices so my other choice would be WMA Lossless. Any pros/cons to using this rather than FLAC?

What playback software is the best choice? Up until now I've simply been using Windows Media Player.

Thanks,

Mark

 

There are threads that answer each of your concerns. This thread I believe has some answers in it as well.

Flac is one of the most popular I think because it is lossless, and ideal for downloads.

All compression setting will de-compress to that same original lossless file. They used to be concerned that players might have a tougher time decompressing the higher compressed files. The speed of today's computers and player make it a moot point. 8 is a good small file, the smallest and sounds just as good as for playback JRiver Media Center at $50 is the deal of the decade. But is feature rich and can handle all video formats to a large home theater as well. Room to grow which is nice to know.

 

F
R
E
E

As In Free Lossless Audio Codec

https://xiph.org/flac/features.html

 

FLAC was designed from the get-go to be not owned by Apple, Microsift, or anyone out to hold the user hostage to a particular hardware or software.

It converts to other formats flawlessly. It can handle various resolutions.

It appears to not be going away.

 

FLAC is the best choice if you are in the Microsoft or Linux or Android universe. ALAC is the best choice if you took the blue pill and are in the cult of Apple. There are no other choices that should be considered. WMA Lossless is not well supported outside of a small subset of Microsoft devices. WMA Lossless is a dead end. Windows 10 is adding support for FLAC as part of the OS. Making FLAC an even better choice for Windows users.

The compression level with FLAC is just sets how much effort the encoder puts in to making the file smaller. The size difference with different compression levels is not much. The default compression level of 5 is perfectly good and fine. You can bump it up to a compression level of 6 or 7 to create slightly smaller files, but really not necessary.

For playback software I'd suggest looking at JRiver Media Center ($50), Foobar200o (free), MusicBee (free), or MediaMonkey (free or pay). Try them all. Pick the one that behaves and works most like you think a media player ought to work. They all work with FLAC. They all can do bitperfect playback and gapless playback. You'll be able to move your files from one player to another without losing tags. So try them all out and pick the one you like best. JRiver is my personal favorite.

 

Thanks Ham Sandwich. A great response that addressed my questions. I really appreciate your time and assistance.

 

There are plenty ways to play FLAC for those who "took the blue pill" and are in "the cult of Apple" using 3rd party software just like you have to do in Windows (Yes, I've read the rumors about Windows 10 being planned to finally natively support FLAC, which is I'm sure is partially due to WMA failing to gain any considerable traction, but that's further down the road).

 

Get one of these:



"Astell & Kern is breaking new ground at CES 2015 in Las Vegas with the launch of its first desktop audio product in the form of the AK500N – building on the success of its high-res portable players.

The AK500N is described as the "ultimate MQS (Mastering Quality Sound) network audio player", with features including one-click CD-ripping, DLNA-based networking capabilities and PCM to DSD conversion.

Two speeds – normal and fast – are available for the purpose of ripping your CDs, with files saved in either WAV or FLAC. Album art and music data are imported from Gracenote's latest database."

http://www.whathifi.com/news/ces-2015-astell-kern-to-unveil-ak500n-desktop-network-audio-player

 

Yes there are ways to play FLAC on Apple. And ways to play ALAC on Windows or Linux. But I generally wouldn't advise doing things that way unless you really know what you are doing. You'll be going against the flow. Always swimming against the current. The tools and players on Mac all know how to work with ALAC. Few know how to work with FLAC. The tools and players on Windows or Linux all know how to work with FLAC. Few know how to work with ALAC. You'll just end up making things difficult on yourself trying to manage a library of FLAC on Mac or mange ALAC on Windows or Linux.