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Ripping CD collection

Bsmooth said:
Yes I really like CD's. I also now have access to streaming music as well(Amazon Music). I used to like LP's too, but I finally moved on(and now there back!).
I don't understand the CD's deteriorate with time thing. I haven't run into one yet anyways..
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That;s because they typically don't... so far, since they appeared on the market.

Bsmooth said:
I could just do FLAC, and be done with it. Some recordings I must admit though sound literally like crap. I have remade some of them using Audacity, and they sound better than the originals. Granted there aren't a lot like this but there are some, even the streamed FLAC ones sound lousy, and why wouldn't they? There still the same badly engineered recordings.
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FLAC doesn't promise anything except lossless file size shrinkage. It preserves whatever audio quality is fed into it. It won't make it better or worse. You can make a FLAC version of a low bitrate, low quality mp3 sourced audio track if you want to. So writing 'even the streamed FLAC ones sound lousy' indicates a misunderstanding.


Bsmooth said:
I'm sure that paragraph alone is worth at least 20 entries into this thread, but these Audacity ones are just for me, and they do sound better to me.
Once all these different digital copies are made, whats the best way to actually find and play them ?
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Your audacity versions are already audio files, what do you use to find and play them? Or do you only listen to them on CDRs you burned?

Bsmooth said:
Or just not save them at all and just use streaming instead? I've seen some threads where people save the CD's to FLAC and donate there CD collection to the library. If you do that I'll take them gladly ! I couldn't give my LP collection away, and they were in just the same shape as my CD collection(not one fingerprint !)
Right now I am using dbpoweramp, Audacity, and Mp3 Gain when I need it. Just bought a new ASUS DVD Optical drive as my Samsung was giving me issues with the door getting stuck, and wouldn't work with Accuraterip anymore.
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Ripping your CDs to lossless (.wav or .flac) is a fine way to make them easily available to play from your own 'streamer' ( a computer/laptop, or, depending on storage, even a phone), with audio quality limited only by the playback hardware.

Streaming services work too...but you have no control over what was 'done' to the audio before it gets streamed.
 
dadregga said:
Yep. Seconded, and this is why I rip and tag the exact release down to the barcode and label code.

Most streaming services only offer the most recent major-label (re)masterings, and that's it. I don't always want that. Also, when new masterings of a particular album come out, older ones are usually delisted - whether or not they're better.

(Also, basically no streaming services offer multichannel - another reason I buy and rip digital discs)

No streaming service can give me everything I want, as specifically catalogued and organized as I want it - so I use Roon, serve my own streaming library, and supplement that personal library with Qobuz via Roon's "unified music library", which is frankly ideal for me.


For all the rather pointless talk about whether you can hear the difference between formats, I feel people forget that you absolutely can very easily hear the differences between masterings, remasterings, etc, and that having access to those is far more important than what format your digital files are in, or what medium they come on, or what service delivers them, or how you ripped them, because the mastering has a huge impact on what you hear.

If it's a crappy mastering job, it doesn't matter if it's delivered in 192/24 - it's going to sound worse to you than the old 44/16 release with the mastering you liked. Full stop.

Masterings matter. Formats and delivery mechanisms do not, comparatively speaking. Streaming services give you zero choices around what mastering you get.
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It continues to absolutely flabbergast me that people (like many here) can talk for weeks about a completely trivial thing like what influence the color of the cable has, while listening to the latest remaster of Michael Jackson's Thriller (the very first Japanese pressing was absolutely sublime as was the SACD, the latest remaster sounds like a dieseltruck idling with a busted cylinder head).

Mastering matters. A lot.
The human ear is absolutely incapable to hear the difference between standard CD resolution and anything so-called high resolution. If you do hear a difference, the difference you hear is either the mastering, or you play your digital files on different pieces of equipment.
 
For a period in my life, I switched to streaming and all my CD's and LP's were in boxes. I realised that I was no longer engaged with music the way I used to be, and music had just become a background noise when I was doing something else.

I had already ripped all my CD's (1000+) using EAC with accurip. I ripped them to a flac CD image and cuesheet as I have a lot of live music and albums that need to be gapless (I started ripping many years ago before a lot of players supported gapless playback). However, when I did all my original rips, I just tagged them using the online databases without paying careful attention to the actual release.

After deciding to go back to physical media, I wanted a way to properly catalogue my collections. At which point I discovered Discogs and Musicbrainz Picard.

So, my workflow is now:

1. Identify the correct release of my CD is Discogs and add it to my Discogs collection.
2. Rip with EAC to Image+cuesheet. Preferably using the correct release for tagging if identified in EAC - this image is then archived.
3. Using MusicBrainz Picard, use the CD to identify the exact release in the MB database. If it isn't identified, check to see if I can update the MD DB with the TOC from the actual physical disc. If the release does not exist, create it from the Discogs release and add the CD TOC.
4. Use this release to bring all the correct MB metadata into Picard.
5. Extract the tracks from the image into separate flac files.
6. Bring these flac files into Picard, and tag them correctly from the release identified in the MD DB.
7. Add this release into the Kodi library, using Universal Album Scraper which uses the MusicBrainz MBID to download associated meta data.

I use Kodi on a raspberry pi as my access using my TV, or over upnp to various players around the house, or on my phone.

I now have a 100% accurately tagged media collection accessible. Even though I still use the physical media a lot. I can then satisfy my hobby by trawling Discogs and purchasing CD's and LP's to fill the gaps in my collection. Back to loving my music again.
 
Anonamemouse said:
It continues to absolutely flabbergast me that people (like many here) can talk for weeks about a completely trivial thing like what influence the color of the cable has, while listening to the latest remaster of Michael Jackson's Thriller (the very first Japanese pressing was absolutely sublime as was the SACD, the latest remaster sounds like a dieseltruck idling with a busted cylinder head).

Mastering matters. A lot.
The human ear is absolutely incapable to hear the difference between standard CD resolution and anything so-called high resolution. If you do hear a difference, the difference you hear is either the mastering, or you play your digital files on different pieces of equipment.
Click to expand...
When I went back and starting identifying exactly which releases I had in my collection, I started to get a much better appreciation of this. Then understanding how compression had been used in later remasters. Very interesting subject this.
 
Bruce Diesel said:
When I went back and starting identifying exactly which releases I had in my collection, I started to get a much better appreciation of this. Then understanding how compression had been used in later remasters. Very interesting subject this.
Click to expand...
There's plenty of older material where the final stereo mix was over-compressed, too!
 
I know Steve Hoffman was a rebel and technically a pirate. Decades ago he held a forum auction, which was full of CD-R copies of old unreleased digital tape masters. Even some guy uploaded his personal song "Cecilia Ann" to YouTube and he didn't really care by sharing it himself.

The RIAA is just pure evil. It was okay to dub tapes, record from the radio and give away your mix tapes. RIAA was worried about DAT creating a perfect copy of a CD, which they killed fast and later they had there sights on Napster and other similar sites. Napster and other similar sites offered "radio quality" MP3 files which was an inferior product when compared to CDs. On 1 hand these inferior downloads did cause CDs sales to go down but on the other hand, most of these artists had already made a lot of money.

Metallica at the time spoke the loudest and wanted "control". It was not okay to download a butchered MP3 copy of their song but it was okay to record a copy of their song from the radio :facepalm: . By the time FLAC came around Metallica butchered the hell out of there albums and people didn't want the effort to download a dogshit version of there albums. Metallica not learning there lessons, decided to release MQA versions of there albums, fucking over fans that actually wanted to supported these uncaring bastards.
 
ThatM1key said:
I know Steve Hoffman was a rebel and technically a pirate. Decades ago he held a forum auction, which was full of CD-R copies of old unreleased digital tape masters. Even some guy uploaded his personal song "Cecilia Ann" to YouTube and he didn't really care by sharing it himself.

The RIAA is just pure evil. It was okay to dub tapes, record from the radio and give away your mix tapes. RIAA was worried about DAT creating a perfect copy of a CD, which they killed fast and later they had there sights on Napster and other similar sites. Napster and other similar sites offered "radio quality" MP3 files which was an inferior product when compared to CDs. On 1 hand these inferior downloads did cause CDs sales to go down but on the other hand, most of these artists had already made a lot of money.

Metallica at the time spoke the loudest and wanted "control". It was not okay to download a butchered MP3 copy of their song but it was okay to record a copy of their song from the radio :facepalm: . By the time FLAC came around Metallica butchered the hell out of there albums and people didn't want the effort to download a dogshit version of there albums. Metallica not learning there lessons, decided to release MQA versions of there albums, fucking over fans that actually wanted to supported these uncaring bastards.
Click to expand...

At least they went from MP3 quality to super MP3 (Mqa)
 
Allow me to hijack this thread:

Why is EAC considered superior? What advantages are there as compared to a WAV or FLAC that is ripped by Windows Media Player?
 
Rip City Dave said:
Allow me to hijack this thread:

Why is EAC considered superior? What advantages are there as compared to a WAV or FLAC that is ripped by Windows Media Player?
Click to expand...
Going to WAV or FLAC should be the same, no matter the tool, except that some tools may compress FLACs more efficiently at the expense of time taken.

Going to MP3 or any lossy format can however, be implementation dependent.
 
Rip City Dave said:
Allow me to hijack this thread:

Why is EAC considered superior? What advantages are there as compared to a WAV or FLAC that is ripped by Windows Media Player?
Click to expand...
I started using EAC many years ago when it was the only tool I knew of that could rip the entire CD Image into a single file and generate a cuesheet, which I wanted for archiving purposes. It also verifies the CDROM and uses accurip to ensure the rip is a bit perfect copy. Flac is lossless, so going from WAV -> flac -> wav results is an exact restoration of the original CD. I have various scripts that can generate individual tracks from this image depending on whether I wanted to put them on my phone, in which case mp3 320kbits was efficient and lossless playback wasnt a big deal, or flac if playing on my hifi.

At the time, EAC had the best error handling and would rescan the disc if it encountered any errors, doing so multiple times. Not sure if that is still the case today.
 
Robin L said:
I-Tunes is freeware. It's good for me. Of course, I've been using it for a very long time, so I'm used to the format. In any case, there's rip, tag and metadata in one fell swoop.
…
Click to expand...
I should start a discussion about iTunes (not I-Tunes). I started using it from day one, I still do (and I use it also as a streamer), I bought bazinga! of music from the Store, but still I have a love-hate relationship with it.
What I hate is that it continues to make a mess of the iTunes library, that from time to time gets corrupted, losing metadata, changing name of artists and album, sometimes I get an album split into two with no apparent reason, sometimes it loses track of what I bought and doesn’t let me download it again (one of the reasons I continue to keep a backup of the music I bought). And I am not the only one with this problem. It happens also with albums I ripped from my CD.
I continue to look for a valid alternative (for Mac), so far I haven’t found anything that satisfies all my needs (and I am not asking to brew coffee).
 
EAC is still good, and there are others that do acuurateRip etc.
Fre::ac is also a contender.

Itunes good, especially as an all-in one, but I ditched it. All my files are stored on a NAS/RAID, and I didn't need all the additional library data iTunes stored on my PC. Foobar and VLC are small and do what I need on a PC, which is playback, and my Evo works fine with the NAS/RAID. I'm a bit OCD about really understanding what is tagged in my files, so for minimalist uniformity I found MP3tag to be more useful than iTunes.

If you need specific thing in a ripper, this is a good place to start:

Comparison of CD rippers - Hydrogenaudio Knowledgebase

wiki.hydrogenaud.io wiki.hydrogenaud.io
 
While all my CDs are ripped and on my RAID server (accessible by everything in the house, over Samba/file systems or DLNA service on the server), my son (in his 30's) hates the idea of not having a physical object like a CD at hand...

He points out to me, things like printed artwork, sleeve notes, and "the fragility of everything needing a network and CPUs"..... He has a point, but on fragility, when we get a power cut every few years, he can't play a CD either, but in the same time my network and RAID system, and the multiple disk backups haven't failed me once. Hopefully, we're not about to have them all destroyed by EMP!

I have all my faves as FLACs and the rest as best possible MP3s, so the music all fits in less than 2TB.
 
I went back to physical because the music I listen to tends to be album based - AOR, Prog Rock, etc. This is how I fell in love with music. Sitting and listening to an album. I ripped it all, made playlists and used streaming, and found that I lost the connection that I fell in love with. Had a Sonos system in the house, and it because background noise. Scrapped that, and when back to putting an LP or CD into the deck, and listening to it. I still have Tidal as a way to discover new artists, but I buy the physical media. Also, because I have a lot of friends that are musicians, and streaming is killing them. My way of supporting artists that have given me so much
 
Yeah, Bruce Diesel - I hate the modern thing of all music "a track at a time", and I'm old school about actual albums, but then nothing stops me doing that when playing "files". I have loads of playlists - some for parties etc, and many just play whole fave albums, as it is easier. Some simply miss out "that one track" I always hated on an otherwise good album.

A good example of "albums at a time" that I have played in the last week or so, could be "Close to the edge" by Yes, and DSOTM/WYWH by Pink Floyd.

I recall I had a Sony E-series CD player many years ago - it would recognise individual CDs, and let you program in which tracks to play, like a playlist... So I have ripped CDs that I play as files today, where I keep getting confused about there being (e.g.) a "Track 5" that I don't recall being on the CD as played back then! Hahaha! OGS! (Old Git Syndrome) kicking in!
 
freemansteve said:
Yeah, Bruce Diesel - I hate the modern thing of all music "a track at a time", and I'm old school about actual albums, but then nothing stops me doing that when playing "files". I have loads of playlists - some for parties etc, and many just play whole fave albums, as it is easier. Some simply miss out "that one track" I always hated on an otherwise good album.

A good example of "albums at a time" that I have played in the last week or so, could be "Close to the edge" by Yes, and DSOTM/WYWH by Pink Floyd.

I recall I had a Sony E-series CD player many years ago - it would recognise individual CDs, and let you program in which tracks to play, like a playlist... So I have ripped CDs that I play as files today, where I keep getting confused about there being (e.g.) a "Track 5" that I don't recall being on the CD as played back then! Hahaha! OGS! (Old Git Syndrome) kicking in!
Click to expand...
oh I still play files, and have playlists etc. But there is something deep inside me that just loves listening to albums. Pink Floyd, as you say, has to be consumed as an album. Things like at the end of the Wall you hear "Isn't this where..." then at the beginning of the album ".... we came in" So, the album plays an endless loop. Things like that, as a teenager, I would pick up because I listened to the album, over and over again.
 
Bruce Diesel said:
oh I still play files, and have playlists etc. But there is something deep inside me that just loves listening to albums. Pink Floyd, as you say, has to be consumed as an album. Things like at the end of the Wall you hear "Isn't this where..." then at the beginning of the album ".... we came in" So, the album plays an endless loop. Things like that, as a teenager, I would pick up because I listened to the album, over and over again.
Click to expand...

I always play whole albums on qobuz . I don't even have playlists.
 
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