Calling Digital Music Aficionados

[Broch]

A bit of a curved ball this one but I'm hoping someone out there has the knowledge

I want to rip all my CDs onto a large hard drive - I know CDs are very passé but I don't like the new structure of Prime Music and I'm not paying more a month for their 'better' service. Anyway, I find myself selecting music from my collection more often than not.

So, what's the best ripping software? is there one that can rip faster than about 3 mins per disk? What's the best digital format? (I know that WAV is not compressed but it's 10 x the file size of MP3, so what alternatives are there?) Finally, for now, what music play interface is recommended on a PC platform?

 

[Winnet]

I used iTunes back in the day and it did the job for me. I presume it is still around.

G

Sent from my SM-G973F using Tapatalk

 

[Jared]

Been a long time since ripped CDs, used CDex in the past, but looking at the wiki page, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDex seems that is no longer a good idea.

Format is probably FLAC still. A compressed lossless format. https://xiph.org/flac/
Best playback software is Foobar2000 still I imagine, https://www.foobar2000.org/

Looks like Exact Audio Copy might be the go to these days for ripping https://www.exactaudiocopy.de/

 

[bobnewboy]

“JRiver” app for windows is highly regarded amongst audiophiles. It rips CDs and plays just about any audio format. Ripping speed depends upon CD drive/transport quality, hard disk read/write speed, processor speed and available memory.

 

[Broch]

Thanks guys; I'll look into those

 

[shibafu]

Looks like Exact Audio Copy might be the go to these days for ripping https://www.exactaudiocopy.de/

That's the one I'd recommend. It automatically plugs in to the various online databases to check the accuracy of your rips, and has strategies to read problem discs.

FLAC lossless compression will reduce file size by a third to a half with no loss in quality.

 

[JB101]

Can you yourself hear the difference between a track converted to mp3 file or FLAC .
If not then rip to mp3 as will be a lot quicker and take up less space.
Also when complete make a back up of the ‘music’ hard drive & keep the cd’s .
ATB
James

 

[Broch]

I haven't tried FLAC yet, but I can hear the difference between MP3 and WAV - the WAV file is 'brighter', more distinction between instruments and notes.

However, bearing in mind that most music I buy comes in MP3 downloads now, maybe the extra storage space isn't worth it.

 

[leanrascal]

I ripped my whole CD collection a few years back (then sold the CDs). Since I use MediaMonkey as my music playing software, I used that to rip the CDs. The advantage is that I could set my own templates so files would be named exactly the way I wanted. But ultimately it doesn't matter what software you use. I did tend to use the slower setting to ensure all the information was picked up from the CD (like other softwares the rips are checked for accuracy anyway). Time was not really an issue. It was a slow steady process that took several months. As I also dabble in music production, the only format I ever used was WAV. So everything was ripped to WAV without any second thought. FLAC is indeed also an option for loseless format that takes less space than WAV, but space was never an issue. I have a 10TB external hard drive. Also, once you have the WAV files, you can always easily convert them to MP3 to transfer to mobile devices for example. And when it comes to music production, DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations) tend to handle WAV. They can definitely handle other formats, but transforms them in WAV first before processing them, so might as well have WAV straight away, less processing needed for the PC. Hope this helps, but happy to answer any further questions.

 

[Jared]

Yeah these days with multi TB hard drives, and CDs only holding roughly 700Mb of raw data. A 10TB HD can hold over 14,000 CD ISO images.

Over 20 years since last ripped a CD, and just had 10Gb HDs back then. Think was paying somewhere in the £200 for 10Gb back then, now £200 for a 10Tb. 1000x more storage.