Ripping CDs

[wetowne]

dBpoweramp only contains a cd ripper. No TT input.

[Aaron4345]

As others have said, Exact Copy is the way to go. I converted my entire CD collection of a few hundred CDs and this program made the process fairly painless.

[YK Thom]

On 8/30/2021 at 6:37 AM, rplace said:

I've been coaching some old timers on another music forum. Here is a copy and paste from a recent thread I posted in trying to help them out a bit. I've done this a lot. I would never use an all in one system for the ripping portion of it.

 

A bit late to the party but for those of you have not already jumped in the world of digitizing your collection(s) I'll throw out a few lessons learned. I've been doing this and re-doing it for about 15 years. The first few were very painful learning form experience by trial and error. Lots of good info online now as well.

 

Hard Drive (HDD) Space is cheap your time is worth something. Buy bigger than you think you need. Once you have 1TB or so and you max out a drive and need to copy it over it takes forever. I think right now 4TB USB 3.0 drives are the sweet spot. For about $100 give or take 20 you can get something that will fit most peoples needs. For an idea of space I keep all my music divided into two buckets. Standard Resolution 44.1Hz 16bit (CD quality) and High Resolution (anything higher than CD quality). My system which happens to be Roon reports that I have 2001 Artist, 7198 Albums and 93,944 tracks. When I look at how that is divided up my Standard drive has 69,892 files taking up only 1.98TB while my HighRez drive is just over 30,000 files but takes up 3.98TB. Also note that a 2TB drive when formatted won't give you 2TB of storage, so my 1.98TB of standard music won't fit on a 2TB dirve. I have a 4TB drive for standard music and 5TB drive for the HighRez stuff.

 

If you are just starting out ripping your CDs rip them to FLAC, onto a computer HDD, independent of some all in one box. Even if right now you want more portable files for your phone/tablet/traveling and think a 320 .MP3 will suffice there will come a day when you want lossless files for optimum fidelity. You won't want to re-rip all those MP3s to FLAC. It is very painful. There are lots of utilities that once you have FLAC files you convert to .MP3 (and other formats). FLAC works pretty much everywhere. Even if you are a 100% Mac person or 100% XYZ don't rip them to a priority format. Don't rip them into a system/box you buy to curate them. For example Roon sells a Nucleus that you can rip your CDs directly into their system. It does not put them into a very useful format (Artist/Album/File Name) should that crap out on you or should you want to move them somewhere else. Take the time to Rip them to FLAC, tag them properly and organize them in a way that makes sense to you. I'd suggest a folder structure like:
Artist
...Album
.....tracks 01 to NN

 

EAC - Exact Audio Copy is a great free utility for ripping CD. It is old and clunky but does a fantastic job of getting things bit perfect. It has a way to check against an online database of other rips of the same album to insure you got an accurate rip. There are plenty of others out there that do a good job too.

FlacSquisher will turn FLAC files into any size MP3 you want.

 

BACKUP everything. Since HDDs are so cheap you want to make sure your music that is on your home network is backed up, preferably off site. This can be as simple as getting a 2nd 4TB USB drive that has a copy of your music at home and leave it at a friends house, safety deposit box, work desk drawer, etc. If you lose your music after ripping it all you will be heartbroken.

 

There are tons of ways to get your newly ripped music to a player, computer, DAC, etc. One of the simplest. Is just to plug your USB drive into the USB port of your home Router/Switch...most these days have them. If not they are cheap. A networked USB drive will show up as storage and you can point your computer/player/streamer at it.

 

Quick summary:
Buy two 4TB USB drives
Rip all your CDs to FLAC
Copy all your music to both HDDs
Put one drive on your network
Put one drive at your friends house
Put all the CDs into storage and forget about them

 

It can be much, much more complex, fun, frustrating and time consuming if you want it to be. I've spent 10s of thousands of dollars on music and gear in 40+ years of being a hard core music lover. At 55 years old the best audio purchase I've ever made is Roon. That includes every speaker, every amp, every-every-thing. If you can snap together Legos you can make a simple networked Roon system. I've had and still have Sonos at my house, that is a very nice solution if you don't have a huge library of music. You are however somewhat locked into their equipment and ecosystem. Roon plays very nicely with Sonos, Chromecast, Airplay and a host of other endpoints.

 

If you are a movie lover and have tons of DVDs and Blu-Rays you can do almost the same things with a Shield from Nvidia as the hardware and PLEX as the software.

Hit me up if you have any questions.

Thank you very much - this is very informative and will be the route I take. This post should be stickied someplace. I've made a copy of it for future reference. All the best, Thom