The 'I've still got tons of CDs to rip!' Support Group Thread

[shadowritten]

Think of this as a place to share you're ripping/encoding woes. A place of sanctuary to visit and let off steam when the sight of the remaining 500 CDs you've still got to rip drives you to the brink of despair.

This is a non-partisan thread - whatever DAP you own, you'll find that those of us with enormous CD collections are all in the same boat. This is where we can have a sense of community and encourage each other to keep going. It'll all be worth it in the end.

So let me start.

I own about 800-900 CDs. Over the past two years, I've ripped and re-ripped my entire collection twice: once in WMA, once in MP3. Now that I own a Sony, I'm re-ripping for a third time - in ATRAC3Plus. And it's taking an inordinate length of time! So far, I'm still shy of 4000 tracks (that's about 285 CDs, in case you're wondering). I dread to think of how many hours I've spent on this already, but now that I've started ripping gaplessly, I can't stop. I may need therapy by the end of it all!

Anyone else care to share their experiences?

 

[mcfarfs]

You know, if you actually own the CDs technically you could use bittorrent to download the albums, and it wouldn't be illegal because you own the original. But that wouldn't be much help to you if you are using ATRAC. And it is probably more longwinded than ripping anyway.

 

[Sasso]

Well i think SS3.2 has wrecked us all, now that you have to re rip to take off DRM, or convert it to the same bitrate. I cant be bothered reripping for that, i have the majority of the songs as MP3 as well anyway.

I sometimes get jitters in my songs, (even with jitter correction on) and i cant be bothered finding them all and reripping. I'm going to wait till i get a new fast computer with a DVD burner drive to get rid of read errors and make it a hundred times quicker.

 

[shadowritten]

... if you actually own the CDs technically you could use bittorrent to download the albums, and it wouldn't be illegal because you own the original

Never occurred to me, but how true ...

 

[shadowritten]

Well i think SS3.2 has wrecked us all, now that you have to re rip to take off DRM, or convert it to the same bitrate. I cant be bothered reripping for that, i have the majority of the songs as MP3 as well anyway.

I sometimes get jitters in my songs, (even with jitter correction on) and i cant be bothered finding them all and reripping. I'm going to wait till i get a new fast computer with a DVD burner drive to get rid of read errors and make it a hundred times quicker.

Yeah, I've been wrong-footed by the DRM thing, too, Sasso! And like you, can't be bothered to get rid of it from the nearly 2000 tracks that have it on them!

As for jitters, see my thread: Anyone getting poor rips with SonicStage? ?

 

[davehk]

I'd just rip them once as uncompressed .wav files. Then convert to whatever format the player needs, and then compress the original .wav file using Monkeys Audio, which is lossless, for long term storage and conversion to other formats as required.

 

[shadowritten]

I'd just rip them once as uncompressed .wav files. Then convert to whatever format the player needs, and then compress the original .wav file using Monkeys Audio, which is lossless, for long term storage and conversion to other formats as required.

Good move. Only, you'd still need a lot of hard disk space to store so many CDs, surely?

 

[davehk]

Well, yes - but a 400Gb SATA drive is only £173.

 

[lukey]

i remeber my first dap was a hd1 and spent days converting everything in sonic stage to atrac (about 200 CD's)...then the hd1 went bust after a couple of weeks, was so pixxed off with sony that I decided I wouldnt use the atrac format again, so had to recopy all my cd's again but this time did them in Mp3. Even though i own an ipod now i wouldnt consider aac or another other specific format for specific players. At least i feel safe that mp3 can be used by everyone...i think.

You would think in this age of modern technology there would be a quicker route to importing your cd's into a compressed format.

 

[AMc]

Went through 2 rips of over 1000 CDs. 1st time I failed to set digital error correction and ended up with lots of high speed garbage MP3. 2nd time around I used error correction and got much better results.

I used iTunes as my partner was doing a lot of the work to get stuff onto her iPod. I also ripped to 196Kbs MP3. I would have liked to have gine higher but wanted to avoid transcoding for the iPod and didn't want to be locked into a more DRM friendly format.

I fitted an additional dual layer DVD burner and I discovered that iTunes will import sequentially from each drive. That would have saved me a lot of trips up and down stairs and would probably have take 30% off the time.
If I'd known I would have fitted a couple of cheap CD rom drives and stacked up 4/5 CDs at a time.

 

[shadowritten]

Dual drive ripping rocks! When I was going through my MP3 hell, I found EAC (with LAME) supported ripping from both drives at once. What a shame I only realised this halfway through! So I decided to say hell with high quality and switched settings to burst mode: less accurate, apparently (though I had absolutely no problems with the rips), but an incredible amount quicker!

 

[Steven]

I have 2 PCs - total = 3 x CD RW drives + 2 x DVD RW drives

 

[shadowritten]

I have PC (CD-ROM + DVD-ROM) plus a laptop (CD/DVD-ROM). But it was just easier using the PC by itself.

 

[drmoze]

Quick question: How much space would it take to store about 1000 CDs in uncompressed wav format? (and in compressed lossless format?) Many of them are over an hour; I'd say the grand average time per CD is about 1 hour.

Right now I'm going thru everything to Atrac format for my HD5. Will ripping to wav and then later converting to Atrac retain gapless playback? How slow is conversion of wav to Atrac?

 

[shadowritten]

Right now I'm going thru everything to Atrac format for my HD5. Will ripping to wav and then later converting to Atrac retain gapless playback? How slow is conversion of wav to Atrac?

Far as I know, you'll lose gapless by storing in WAV first then converting. And converting should take less time from your HDD than from CD, as SonicStage doesn't have to wait for the CD to spin for information to be fed to it (as I understand it).

 

[DaveA]

Wouldn't you store in Flac? Use Mareo to compress sequentially to Flac then MP3.

Plus you can re-expand Flac (lossless you see) to WAV anytime for re-ripping.

 

[KiNeL]

You know, if you actually own the CDs technically you could use bittorrent to download the albums, and it wouldn't be illegal because you own the original. But that wouldn't be much help to you if you are using ATRAC. And it is probably more longwinded than ripping anyway.

A common misconception I'm afraid.

Under UK copyright law you are NOT permitted to copy anything. The fact you own the original CD is irrelevant. This has always been the case!

You are NOT allowed to copy CD to tape either.

 

[Agincourt]

Are you allowed to copy music you have downloaded? Or is it technivcally only permissible to keep it on your PC?

 

[shadowritten]

What about copying CDs you own to tape to play in your car?

 

[Agincourt]

This is contentious. Strictly speaking it is illegal. However, I don't believe anyone, including the music industry, is interested in prosecuting people who are copying for their own use. It doesn't increase their profits and creates an immense amount of adverse publicity for them.

 

[Demon]

Just a quick note,

I've been ripping all my latest CD's as a single MP3 with a cue sheet, I personally prefer VBR (upto 320Kbs, using LAME and the -alt preset standard or extreme parameter), I then archive this single album MP3 and CUE sheet.

I then use a simple MP3 cutter like BeSplit to split the single MP3/Cue to temporary, individual MP3's to transfer to my player.

So when the MP3 player manufacturers wake up to the fact that the easiest/guaranteed method to produce gapless playback is simply to use a single album MP3 and CUE sheet to give the track names/times, I am ready to just transfer the single MP3's over..

For the purists, I assume you'd rip the CD to a single FLAC with CUE Sheet, and then you are set for the future, gapless playback included..

 

[Uridium]

I know it's trendy to hate Microsoft but try this......

Go into options of WMPlayer10, configure the folder you want to rip music to ( I use an External USB2 disk) then set 320k MP3 output and set it automatically rip CD's when a CD is inserted.

Quickest way I found of ripping my 400 CD's.

Once you're done just import to SS and convert to Atrac3+ when you transfer to player. This way when SS goes TU or you change DAP's you still have all your ripped music.

I then installed Twonkyvision pointed it to the same folder and stream the same stuff using a Netgear MP101 plugged into my Surround sound in Living room.

Haven't touched a CD for months!

 

[AMc]

Quick question: How much space would it take to store about 1000 CDs in uncompressed wav format? (and in compressed lossless format?) Many of them are over an hour; I'd say the grand average time per CD is about 1 hour.

A 700MB CDR holds 80 mins so thats about 525MB or 0.512GB per hour(roughly). So your looking at a little over 500GB for WAV. I believe that lossless compression saves you about 30% on that but I've no direct experience.

You'd either want an external back up or RAID1 array so that you didn't end up having to rerip everything if your disk crashed and space for what you buy next.

In the end this was too expensive for me when I did this last year so I went for a comparitively low (now) bit rate of 196Kbps CBR using iTunes to rip (for convenience).

 

[nsherin]

Regarding backup, I use a RAID-1 mirrored array that includes my music partition - ripping 650 CDs all over again would be a major pain. I've also mirrored that to an external 160GB USB HDD. I'm going to pick up another 160GB drive and USB enclosure at some stage that I can keep in my desk at work, so I have a third backup that is also offsite of all photos and music.

 

[shadowritten]

Some good news: I'm over the 5000-track hump (5075, to be exact!). Some not-so-good news: just discovered I have no more IDE buses left on my motherboard, so I can't stick in another large capacity HDD for music file storage . Gonna have to settle for external HDD or DVD-ROM. That sucks!!

About 250 (maybe more) CDs to go, btw.