ISO is convenient if there are stereo and multichannel areas- for those discs I usually rip 3 ways- dff's of the stereo, dff's of the m-ch, and an ISO. The ISO is a safety copy- I can recreate either the stereo or m-ch dff's from it. I have basically unlimited storage space locally and unlimited cloud backups, so having the same data on my servers three different ways isn't an issue, ymmv!
I always rip an ISO and save it (and back it up) for two reasons. 1. I only do 2 channel now, but if I ever decide to do multi-channel the ISO is already ripped and I don't have to use the SACD to create the multi-channel files. 2. (Most Important) I want a copy of the ISO in case something ever happens to my original discs (loss, destruction, thief .... whatever) then I still have a copy (actually 3 copies) as backup.
I'm pretty much the same. I use my D: drive as my workspace, and do tagging and amend folder names* there. When I'm happy I move everything to my main music drive (G: and back up the .dsf folders/files to two other drives (I: and J: while the ISO files are moved to a K: drive and also backed up to J:. When the folders are on G: they get integrated into the rest of my digital file collection in JRiver. * - as it is possible to have SACDs by Sony, for example, and the same titles by MoFi or AF or Dutton, I change the folder name to reflect this (append [MoFi] or [AF] or ...). Why keep the ISOs? Pretty much for the reasons others have given. It is an image of the disc, you can go back to it and extract what you want, when you want. I have no idea how long my players which support SACD extraction will last. What's a few TBs of disk space in this day and age?
1. I only do multichannel if possible but if I ever find a need do to 2 channel the ISO is already ripped and I don't have to use the SACD to create the multi-channel files. Agreed.
Ugh! I thought I would do a little test to see what the time difference (if any) was ripping just to ISO versus ripping to ISO+DSF using SACDExtractGUI. To ensure as equal a process as possible, I decided to rip a 2 SACD set, figuring that they would be authored the same, etc. Well, just my frickin' luck that I chose Jeff Wayne's The War Of The Worlds for this test, and got the dreaded 'Unknown Album' with a folder full of unknown tracks. Now I have it tag it all manually! As for the time issue, it seems like there is little or nothing lost in ripping to ISO+DSF, so that is what I will do from now on.
I'm also looking for what I consider a good way to convert DSD to FLAC before I take the time to convert all of my SACDs. It's something that I don't want to do twice. I'm not happy with the sound quality of Foobar or JRiver doing the DSD to PCM conversion. It sounds good, but not good enough for me and my expectations. So I'm in a holding pattern as I look for a better way. I'm going to try HQPlayer and AuI ConverteR in the next month or two or three. Try them both. See if I like one or the other, or neither. If neither does the trick for me then it's on to plan B and find some other way. For now I convert my SACD rips to DSF files and import those DSF files into JRiver. Then let JRiver do its on-the-fly conversion to PCM so I can play them through my PCM only DAC. The JRiver conversion doesn't sound as good as I ultimately want, but it's good enough for now.
I've only run into that once so far and that was on The Kinks' Low Budget SACD. I'm dragging my feed on tagging it manually and always seem to find something better to do.
Last month I downloaded the complete Bach organ works in AIFF format with no tags. Had to manually tag 330 files. It was a free creative commons download. But not free in terms of my time to get them tagged and organized and imported into my library.
mp3tag will tag the files for you. I hope you will all allow me to give a quick 101 on the process. I've used the Koch SACD files for the same album you need to tag. Step 1 Insert the files you wish to tag and make sure you select them all within the app otherwise you will need to go back and do everything again.
Step 4 Scroll down until you see the release you are looking for. Do not worry. If you pick the wrong one, there is a Back button which will bring you back to the scroll down menu. Click Next once your selection is made.
Step 5 You will see all the information for your selection so you can make sure it's the one you're looking for. If you're happy with your selection, press OK.
Step 6 The tagging has been done and every field has been filled with the information. The last thing for you to do now is copy the tag info to the actual file name.
Step 8 You may use the suggested format string or write the one you wish to use. I tend to use simple file names. For an album by one group I use: %track%. %title% For Various Artists compilations, I use: %track%. %artist% - %title% These are merely the ones I use and are given as examples. You may find you prefer using other info to name your files. Under the Format String field, you see how you file will look after the renaming process. If you are happy with your selection, press OK.
End Result Your files have been tagged and renamed. I always save every step I do, just as a precaution. I hope you will find this information useful. Happy tagging!
Getting off topic but I'll add my 2 cents on this. The JRiver conversion is not good. I could clearly hear a difference between a JRiver converted to FLAC versus the unconverted DSF played on the same DAC. And I wasn't even looking for it. It is so far off that I wonder if the cd layer would be better. After getting a DAC that converts PCM to DSD before converting to analog, I "thought I deleted all the JRiver conversions and replaced them with the DSD files. One day I started a album and noticed something was off. Didn't take long to realize I missed one conversion. It was still in the JRiver conversion to FLAC instead of DSD. Re-ripped it and all was better again. Now I get the reason to keep the ISO files. So I don't have to re-rip some day. I keep three copies of the ripped files, a play library, a disconnected backup, and an offsite backup. Thought that was enough but probably good to have the ISO also.
Thanks, Simon! I use mp3tag, but had forgotten all about the search function for tags. Will give this a go.
I also added two tools to MP3Tag. "Album Art Downloader" and "Open In Folder". Now it is perfect! When I right click a selected file or files, now I get these two additional options that come in handy under the "tools" section.
I've encountered it a number of times. Of course, because I convert the ISOs to DSF and name and tag the DSFs and name the original ISO files, I can't see now which ones were devoid of info. I do recall a bunch of Japan-only Seigen Ono titles being that way, and I can remember some audiophile labels deliberately asking to have no text info when I was involved in SACD authoring back in the day (Mark Levinson's Red Rose Music comes to mind as one). The presence of text information had no impact on sound quality, so it made little sense to omit it, and frustrated some consumers who assumed that text info was mandatory. Does anyone know whether the ripping programs can handle multiple languages? SACD supports up to 8 languages. I remember authoring a few titles for Telarc that used at least 3 languages (English, French, German), but I don't recall which titles those were (would have to be something like The Rite Of Spring/Le Sacre Du Printemps where the various language titles were well established). Unfortunately, a lot of SACD players were created without the capability to make use of the features built into SACD (multiple languages, multiple alphabets, index points, etc.). Philips made an emulator program that could display everything that was part of the ISO. It was a really powerful tool as it meant you could check the behavior of an authored file BEFORE going to glass-mastering/disc pressing.
Been around SACD a long time and learned something new today. Never knew that SACD supported up to eight languages. Someone needs to "leak" that Philips emulator program...
Sadly, neither Philips nor Sony did much to promote the multi-language support. Apart from Telarc, I don't remember any other label making use of the feature, and I'm pretty sure we only used it on 2-3 Telarc titles. For those who must know, the languages are identified by two character ISO 639 codes: ISO 639-1 - Wikipedia In the last version of the Scarlet Book that I have, there were also 7 character set codes defined for SACD: ISO 646 IRV (escape sequences are not allowed) ISO 8859-1 (escape sequences are not allowed) RIS 506 Korean KSC 5601-1989 [149] Chinese GB 2312-80 [58] Big5 ISO 8859-1 (escape sequences to single byte character sets are allowed) You can only use one character set per language. I have no idea whether any of the Asian SACD labels ever took advantage of this, or whether they just used English track text on all discs. As for the emulator, it was used with Philips SuperAuthor in the production of titles. I know SuperAuthor leaked (though I think it is only available from Russian sites now -- so, danger Will Robinson), but I don't recall whether the emulator was integrated into the same package, or was a separate program. The input to the emulator was the 'disc image' produced by SuperAuthor. It is not a true 'disc image' because the special formatters needed to make an SACD add the Pit Signal Processing encryption at the glass mastering stage. There were all kinds of battles between various camps during SACD. Mastering engineers/recording engineers/producers/artists wanted SACD-R to speed up the turnaround of test discs. Philips made SACD-R using specially coded blank discs. These discs were only made available to studios, they had unique codes identifying the licensed studio, and they were made artificially expensive to deter burning lots of copies. However, as soon as one major label heard about this they demanded that Philips recall them all otherwise they would not produce any SACD titles. So, we were back to having to make pressed discs as refs.! As a result of U-matic tape failures and other concerns about the longevity of archived media, the disc pressing plants wanted an SACD-ripper so that they could simply rip a pressed SACD if they needed to do a re-press and they had no master file to hand. That too was nixed!
Have you ever tried using the that software package from Teac to do the conversion from DSD to wave? I wonder if it might do a better job.
