Nice. I like “intelligent marching band”.
For a handle on actual weird micro-genres I go to http://everynoise.com/ - it’s based on internal classifications used by Spotify, and it’s a pretty good way to poke around and find new things and awful things.
Holy cow, this is amazing - north carolina emo! Some of the names, taken out of context, could be pretty disturbing (technical deathcore, balkan trap, and aggrotech) while others are nice and quirky (shiver pop, pony, barnmusik). viking folk? spanish invasion? And what do you suppose vegan straight edge sounds like?!
I also love the place-specific genres. Some seem a bit improbable. winnipeg hip hop? And all the indies! leipzig indie, sardinia indie, tamaulipas indie, new hampshire indie! Who knew? I’m not being condescending; there’s one from where I come from.
Back on topic, sorry! Has anyone got a Innuos Zen Mini? It’s a Roon-ready combined CD ripper, NAS and streamer. They had an exhibit at CanJam this past February. At half the price it would be appealing.
This project has made it to the front burner. I bought dBpoweramp and am starting to experiment and develop a plan.
Tagging is a nightmare and I’m not sure dBp or mp3tag will be the answer. It might work out but am currently gearing up to write a tag editor to do what I need.
My question for today is whether there are any downsides to storing in ALAC format. The intent is to be able to play on ipad/iphone, android, pc and dap.
It seems like ALAC is the least friction since it’s native to Apple but I’ve also read there are iOS players that handle FLAC so maybe it isn’t an issue.
Anyone been down this road already?
Looking to possibly help my parents digitize their CD collection. Since most of this ripping software has error checking, is there a good reason not to use any old half-decent external drive? For example, this one: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07ZJX5HSH/
Here’s a list from the dbPoweramp people:
The ripping software verifies the rip but the drive still has to supply accurate data. The ripping software doesn’t fix a bad rip, just tells you it’s bad.
Edit: Also, there is more to the project than just getting good rips.
You don’t want to do it more than once so thinking the whole thing through winds up being important.
i just finally completed my 5 year CD Ripping journey yesterday!
I was using a variety of software, but ended up using fre:ac which is free open source software. It also auto-loaded tag info, ripped the CD, and ejected, so I’ve been autopilot loading and ejecting CDs the past week and burned through the last 150 or so CDs i had left to do quickly.
I just used a cheap $30 cd drive I bought on amazon with it.
I also use another free software called FreeFileSync which has a real time monitor of a folder and then sends mirrors of it to other locations. I batched it to send my music to my external usb drive, DAP, NAS, and Roon server each time a new file is detected. Makes the whole process pretty easy.
I started a re-rip recently using this: https://www.exactaudiocopy.de/
It’s free and it has a zillion options and technical settings. I set it to maximum error checking given my poor prior experience (see my comments above). Exact Audio Copy reports errors, minor time discrepancies, and tracks with missing database entries. It confirms the output versus the database too! I’m saving log files for every CD ripped, so I can work-around problem disks, or not. So far the rips sound fine with testing (spot checking a couple dozen from about 100 CDs ripped so far).
The interface is…dated…and reminds me of the 1990s.
I’m using a $30 Samsung USB DVD drive. It’ll rip at 24x with the factory cable, but is incredibly unreliable on a USB extension cable (par for the course in my experience).
Thanks for that context! I’ll be storing as FLAC, and using either dbPowerAmp or ExactAudioCopy. If the software does a good job error checking, I can just re-run anything that doesn’t go well. I haven’t had an internal bay in my PC builds for years now, so will just grab a decent external drive, unless someone has a convincing argument for something else.
I’ve been using dbPoweramp mainly because it gets tags from Discogs, GD3, Music Brainz and freedb.
These almost never fully agree and dbP reconciles and selects fields with the most agreement.
dbP is also very fast for most cd’s (around 90 seconds) and has useful utilities. EAC has been the free techie go-to for a long time.
Am I a sinner for using iTunes as my ripping software? lol
I don’t actually use iTunes except for organizing metadata…am I doing it all wrong?!
Same here - right in the middle of re-ripping most CDs to lossless. And actually using iTunes on the Mac for playback.
It really just depends on how hard core you’re trying to be. If you plan on meaningfully going down the audiophile rabbit hole (higher end headphones, amps, dacs, etc), then you may end up regretting ripping via iTunes, especially if you ever operate outside the Apple ecosystem. That said, if you’re a “normal” person (and I’m not saying that in a judgy way at all), iTunes is fine.
Beware of cheap external drives. I had one by LG and it was useless. I spent a while looking at the affordable drives and found that many of them are poorly reviewed. My solution came when I inherited by father’s old 2012 Macbook Pro. Its internal drive is excellent and has always worked well with dbpoweramp software. I realize that may not be of any help, in which case my apologies
If you’re ripping a CD every now and again and then listen to it, and you’re not hearing any skipping or other problems, I wouldn’t worry about it too much.
If you’re sitting down to rip 500 CDs in one go, and if your drive isn’t a reliable one (i.e. it has trouble readings slightly scratched CD), then I’d consider something else like dbpoweramp
The thing is I’ve been in that rabbit hole already. I literally just use iTunes for ripping to ALAC and that’s it. From my understanding, the ripping software part only matters for errors for scratched up discs…I could be wrong but I haven’t noticed anything “wrong” when ripping from itunes compared to other software…
What exactly would I end up regretting? I’m just curious…
That’s some solid advice…I was always curious about those high-end cd drives from astell&kern, innuos, etc…Aside from features, does it do anything else special to those discs? Maybe someone here has some experience with them…
Andris, you will want an optical drive that can go through the paces as the wear and tear will affect the accuracy, as in never use a drive that is meant for a laptop, they will wear out a lot quicker as the tolerances are not the same as for a desktop drive. This also applies to the sleek/small external optical drives you see, and linked to.
I would look for a LaCie optical drive that is a metal enclosure, or OWC sells a drive that is equally up to the task.
https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/MR3USD24/
Good luck
I did that the first time (ALAC), and its error detection/correction was a lie. Many disks skipped and skipped and skipped. They’d often do this with later tracks (outside of the disc), as the read speeds were high and flutter was the worst out there.
I’d say use a newer model and not worry about it. My first rips were executed on a solid internal drive that I moved to an external case. It ended up being awful, and switching to a slimline modern external drive proved to be fine. Positive detent disc clip-in mechanisms work best for me.
[No errors in the digital extract = fine.]
To each his own, was providing a recommendation as I had the opposite experience you had which forced me to go with a more rugged external optical drive. Still works well to this day, 10 years and 2000 rips later.
If you’re ripping to ALAC, then the quality shouldn’t theoretically be any different from FLAC. The only potential downside there is, if you ever want to leave the Apple ecosystem, it becomes more difficult. The second consideration is errors in ripping. It doesn’t seem intuitive, but there are typically very small error rates in transmitting digital data, particularly if it’s being read off of media like a CD. If you don’t have (or plan to have) a highly resolving system, you won’t ever notice (unless it’s a REALLY bad rip, but that should be rare). However, if you start getting super picky about extracting every last ounce of quality from your audio chain - as many audiophiles do as they descend deeper down the rabbit hole - you may actually notice if there is a fraction of a percent difference between what’s on your CD and what makes it onto your hard drive. I’m not an advanced ripper, but I do know that many rips have non-zero error rates, and the software being discussed in the posts above helps you get a better read on what those error rates are, and optimizing for lower error rates. Of course, I don’t know what Apple is doing for this, but it’s probably not as intense as programs specifically geared toward audiophiles.