Reasons NOT to rip all your CDs

I'm that way too with the liner notes....have to double up on reader glasses sometimes.

I'm in the process of moving and making sure all the cd's have been ingested. Not going to make the same mistake that I did with LP's.

Bern

 

It’s kinda looking in on a couple fighting. They aren’t fighting over how the toilet paper was oriented on the holder. They are arguing over a lot of history. If I go out of a particular thread I frequent often and comment anywhere else on the forum, something is said by 1 of 2. It’s always over the top picky from spelling to twisting my words. Usually if it goes more than a page or two the other one mysteriously pops up to start in on me.

 

You might want to check for those pine cones you mentioned earlier. I think they're in your attire now.

 

Life’s short.. ignore button is my perfect solution.

 

Perhaps you two should go to marriage counseling.

 

Not really. I reply accordingly and see where things head.

Some people laugh it off...others not so much. I liked his pine cones comment though, it was quite descriptive.

 

That is really slow.

 

My computer is only five years old. But my optical drive is a Pioneer Blu-ray burner. And Pioneer Blu-ray burners are not renowned for their ripping speed to begin with. They are excellent writers, which is the primary purpose of me getting that drive in the first place back in 2014.

 

To follow up on my last post:

The 18-minute ripping time was from a CD-RW, which is inherently less reflective than pressed CDs or even CD-Rs. It took just over 10 minutes for my particular drive to rip a nearly full 80-minute pressed CD. That's still relatively slow by modern standards.

 

Do you have max speed limited in your settings?

 

On slow rips, my PLDS drive starts around 6x and gets to about 14x by the end of the disc. On fast rips, it start around 6x, but gets to 10-12x by the end of the first track, and up to 42x by the end of the disc. A clean disc takes 1 pass.

 

No. I corrected myself because that 18-minute time came from a CD-RW. On a nearly full pressed CD, it took just over 10 minutes. Still relatively slow compared to some other brands of optical drives.

And I am now testing the accuracy of a rip from a CD that I have just ripped in iTunes. I have already verified a rip from that exact CD in EAC/AccurateRip as accurate. I will post the results in my next post.

 

Just as I suspected. iTunes does a poor job of producing a totally accurate rip from a pressed CD (and yes, even the exact same pressed CD that had already been verified as accurate when ripped with EAC/AccurateRip). My past results bore that out: Out of the dozens of CDs that I had ripped in iTunes over the past several years, only one of them was accurately ripped. This is based on the CRC values that differed from what AccurateRip had expected.

What that means is that iTunes may produce a WAV file that sounds slightly different from either one produced from AccurateRip or the original pressed CD itself. Worse, iTunes will not warn you of any errors, so one could have skips in the WAV files without letting him know it.

 

Are you talking about Apple Lossless? What are you talking about?

 

I didn't know that about Pioneer burners. I use $20 OEM Asus burners for their ripping qualities.

 

My reason is pretty simple - it's an exercise which offers no benefit. I don't listen to music on the go right now. If I want to play music at home, I just put the CD in the player. I'm not interested in making my own compilations, or playing selected tracks from an artist.

Despite getting on in years, I can still read CD booklets without issue, without glasses. So I value the booklets. I also enjoy having the things I love - in this case my CD collection - to hand and on display should anyone visit.

 

If you look back over the thread, you'll see some posters have found many more tangible benefits than this. It certainly doesn't figure very high in my list although it is a bonus for parties

 

Even though EVERYTHING that I have is online (backed up in various places), it is really a pain to recognize that I do sometimes want access to the booklets/liner information, but is now stashed away in storage. One especially troublesome situation -- letting other's know exactly which release that I am listening to/referring to. Most of that information can be gathered from the CD or accompanying information -- but I usually don't bother including that information in my online archives. If I was to do it over again, I'd at least log the identification material from the CD itself.

I keep all of my material online for two reasons -- convienience while I am working on projects of one kind or another (no need to get up, walk over to a big shelf full of CDS, turn around, insert the CD (sometimes frustratingly slow), and start the CD rotating.)
The more important reason why I keep my material online is that a lot of the older releases aren't properly mastered (as acknowledged more and more, even by individuals who did some releases), and to play with full quality, the CDs have to be NR decoded -- most often DolbyA, because other professional NR systems sound even worse, and skipping the final step isn't really a good choice at all. I keep the decoded copies online avoid the overhead/time to decode each album (CD) before playing them. Currently, my set-up doesn't keep the required per-album calibration levels online, and doesn't *automatically* utilize them. Even though my project doesn't require that calibration levels be automatically utilized from online files, I am thinking about adding that for my own convienience.

No more 'digital' sound from 1960's through early 1990s recordings -- when properly decoded, the old material can really sound good. Even though one of the 'defects' of undecoded material is an overly harsh sound with HF compression, the other more important defect is the flattening of the stereo image. Both of these defects (and other defects) result from skipping the decoding operation during mastering -- it seems that very often the 'NR' step is treble shelf -3dB@3k/Q=0.707. Doing a proper NR decode (when the NR is based upon compression/expansion) will tend to open up the stereo image. (I have had good luck with MFSL material actually being completely decoded/mastered, but *even* certain other premium brands/releases have gotten into my hands in 'incompletely' mastered form.)

Doing a 'decoding' operation for every time that material is played -- takes CPU time when I am working, and is simply another step outside of a simple player application. The inconvienient need to reach for an actual CD, spin it up (sometimes cleaning it a bit) -- is an anathema in these days of remote controls. If all of my CDs were complete and completely mastered themselves, I probably would only keep the material most listened to online.

John

 

Here is my library of 2,000 CD's, vinyl needle drops, and high res downloads. All are ripped and stored in uncompressed, lossless AIFF format with metadata and high quality cover art. I have most of the physical media on shelves in my basement, but don't bother with them once ripped. The library is always a work in progress, and I have multiple backups which are simple to keep updated.

I plug this HD it into my iMac, and play it through a DAC/headphone amp into headphones or desktop speakers. I have a similar HD connected to a dedicated MacBook Pro server in my family room which streams to one or more of my three stereo systems downstairs. I can find and pull up any album or song within seconds on the computer, or remotely from my cell phone or tablet. I also copy a few hundred selected albums to an old, repurposed iPhone for travel and the car.
The music sounds as good or better as it would played directly from CD's, and why wouldn't it.

 

Sorry I did not make that clear. I was talking about the ripping quality of iTunes, and somehow I put Apple Lossless in the mix. ALAC and other lossless codecs are only as accurate as the initial rip to begin with.

 

I'm obviously late to the thread, but the thread title is "Reasons NOT to rip all your CDs".

I know about the convenience factor, but it's just not a priority for me. I'd also say that while I obviously want the best sound I can get, I don't have a problem with the vast majority of my CD's as they are. I'd say a good reason not to rip all your CD's is because you're happy with how things are. New technologies come along, but if I wanted on the go I'd simply subscribe to Spotify and not have to worry about storage etc......

 

Maybe anyone advocating "no reason to rip" does not face a walk to the train station, a 45 minute train ride in 3rd world conditions (think no AC, no available seating, packed like sardines into a car where no one has the slightest regard for your personal space), and then a 30 minute walk to the office across a city providing free needles to its homeless. Seriously, I've been assaulted walking to work and navigate through human waste. If it weren't for all the CDs I've ripped into iTunes I would have gone stark raving mad by now. I've started driving on the mornings that I don't have to drop my kiddo off at school, and iTunes is just as important on those rides, involving gridlock traffic at least part of the way. Again, if not for iTunes, I would have probably lost it long ago.

The goal of sonic perfection makes sense in a home system with a quiet environment and speaker placement/room issues you can control. That is not at all the situation when you are in a train car, a city street or a car. There is loud ambient noise of all kinds at all frequencies. Having the CDs ripped via Apple Lossless and played over Bluetooth through Sony's latest noise cancelling headphone (which has a dedicated, separate chip for noise cancelling than for audio reproduction) is the best you can do, and more than sufficient to get good sound, given your circumstances. You have to carry your phone anyway, so it makes sense to have your entire library of music available to make the best of an absolutely horrific commute.

Do I listen to iTunes at home? Almost never. It's made for mobile devices.

 

Firstly, I'm sorry you have to go through that every day. I can't say I've been through what you're going through, but I can at least sympathize.

That out of the way, I'm not sure listening to music is such an environment is a smart move, I'd think you'd have to be very much aware of what's going on around you. Of course, you know best.

I can certainly understand the whole "music on the go" thing. I have an MP3 player myself. Hell, any commute is going to be enhanced by being able to play some music. I just don't need ALL my CD's ripped though. Ironically, it's during commutes (my last was 2 hours and 20 minutes one way - so 5 hours a day travel) that I've done some of my best deep listening. What you lose sonically - obviously there's ambient noise duri9ng a commute - is made up by being able to just sit and listen. So music on the go can be a lot of fun.

I also don't live in the third world. So while I'm not needing music on the go right now, I will in the future. It's at that point that I'll just subscribe to Spotify and save myself the entire ripping, storing, back up thing. I'm well aware of the drawbacks of streaming, but for a commute it'd work just fine, imo. Again, I'm not in the third world though.

In fact - let me just say it - in answer to the question posed in the thread title: The answer is Spotify. There's just no need to go through the process of ripping and storing because it's all there and more in an app.......

 

I think that I did (indirectly) describe why I might not rip everything -- if it wasn't more convienient to use from day to day. I gave examples why I do rip some of the material, and I could get by with that. However, i decided that it is indeed more convienient to rip everything anyway.
So, my reason for not ripping everything is that not all material is mis-mastered/defective thereby further processing for best quality. Probably no real technical reason (for my situation) for ripping all CDs if all were properly prepared AS IS.
If the material was always okay, it is very possible that I'd just grab the CD everytime that I want to listen.

However, when all is said and done, I generally rip everything that I might use for convienience reasons. I haven't 'ripped' CDs that I suspect that I'll never play again.

John

 

As I posted in the Spotify thread, I'm not a big fan of streaming and what it will do to the music and property rights ecosystem. I realize iTunes will have the same sort of effect, but the fact that all my music, movies and shows in iTunes come from a physical library at makes me a little comfortable with the legacy if not the future.

I didn't mean to imply that I'm in the 3rd world--it's just that I feel that way at times on my commute, and BART runs its trains like a 3rd world bus terminal except with more stabbings and fare evasion. Your last commute was longer than mine!