Ripping Yarns

[webby]

I posted this in another thread but hope it might work better on it's own.

Basically, I wonder what ripping strategies you may have. What do you consider when ripping your library?

Do you rip everything losslessly? I know that, ultimately, hard drive space is the only limitation.

Do you selectively rip to high bit rate lossy formats for those less essential albums?

Do you decide that you never want to hear certain CDs again and choose to not rip those discs, or is it a case of 'you've got it, so why not rip it'?

I'd be interested to hear your tactics and methods.

[The Grand Wazoo]

Shame, I thought this thread was about something else...........



........oh well, sorry for interrupting. As you were.

[lovejoy]

I used to be happy with the sound of MP3/AAC so quite a lot of my music was high bit rate MP3. Then as the system got better it became quite clear that this just wasn't good enough, so I'm finally nearing the end of ripping everything onto a 1TB NAS in Apple Lossless format.

I'm using Max (on the Mac) to rip the vast majority of discs as the whole process is nicely automated and I can tell it how I want my directories laid out i.e. Artist/Year - Album/TrackNo. - Song title.

That's for the standard red book stuff anyway. Anything I have which is more than 44.1KHz/16-bit gets stored in AIFF as I don't trust Apple Lossless to be able to decompress the files into their original state if I ever need to change formats again (already been bitten by this one once).

I have a couple of DVD-Audio discs which I've used "DVD-A Explorer" to rip and stored those in AIFF.

I also have a few HDCD discs which I've decoded on a Windows PC using "HDCD.exe". This program decodes the extra 4-bits of HDCD info and pads out a Wav file to 24-bits, which can be played into a DAC without the need for an HDCD filter. These get stored in AIFF too and sound rather good.

At the moment there's still plenty of space on the 1TB drive. I have a fair few CDs that I know I'll probably never play again so I don't see the point of them taking up space on the HD. They're still taking up space on the CD shelf though, so if I ever did feel the need to listen to them again then I'll rip them as and when.

...and the stuff that I don't have currently as a lossless rip - well, that's what my Spotify subscription is for, rather than keep the MP3s on the hard drive.

[webby]

I used to be happy with the sound of MP3/AAC so quite a lot of my music was high bit rate MP3. Then as the system got better it became quite clear that this just wasn't good enough, so I'm finally nearing the end of ripping everything onto a 1TB NAS in Apple Lossless format.

Nice one Rich. I'm the same. When I got my imac, around 5 years ago, I wasn't so much into hifi like I was in the 90's. So, i was ripping stuff to everything from 128 upwards. Then we moved house and I finally upgraded my speakers and started to get interested in hifi again. Once I decided to go the computer audio route and bought the Airport Express (and discovered AOS and the excellent computer audiophile forum) I decided to start ripping losslessly. Plus, I bought a new imac that has a 500gb HDD, heaps more than my original imac's 160gb. I have a 1tb backup drive too that's working via Time Machine.

I reckon I could easily give over 150-200gb to music. That ought to hold around 500 albums at 3 albums per gb. So I'm gonna keep ripping, maybe leaving out those that I've grown out of and see how it goes.

I browsed your library the other day and we have VERY similar tastes!

Cheers

[webby]

Phew, I'm glad I haven't got 1000's of discs to rip like I know some of you have done, or are doing. Pretty boring isn't it?

I've done about 85 discs in the last week and I reckon I've got around 500 discs. I think I'm gonna put a fair few in the 'don't want anymore' box.

[Themis]

I rip everything on three different formats simultaneously (in three different locations) using dbPoweramp:
- FLAC
- AAC 400VBR (highest lossy available)
- AAC 128CBR (medium lossy)

The first two are protected against disk failures in WHS (soft RAID)
Everything is backed up on remote volume once per 10albums / month (whichever comes first)

[twelvebears]

Phew, I'm glad I haven't got 1000's of discs to rip like I know some of you have done, or are doing. Pretty boring isn't it?

I've done about 85 discs in the last week and I reckon I've got around 500 discs. I think I'm gonna put a fair few in the 'don't want anymore' box.

Hi Lee.

Yes it is boring, which is why I'd strongly suggest doing what I did and picking up a cheap external USB drive to get through the ripping process. Using the internal iMac superdrive (aint nothing 'super' about it's speed, that's for damn sure!) will make the process MUCH slower. Trust me, providing your iMac is pretty modern, the speed of the internal drive is the bottleneck and using an external drive will about halve the time each disc takes.

Personally I have always just ripped straight to Apple lossless using iTunes and have the whole lot on a DROBO to protect from a HD failure. If I need to convert to MP3 for a car CD or something, I use XLD, which is about the closest you'll find to dbPoweramp for Mac (supports all formats inc Apple lossless, FLAC, MP3 etc and uses both cores of a dual core processor to encode two tracks at once).

For the amount HD space costs and the amount of time involved in the initial ripping, I'd never recommend ripping to a lossy format. Your system might not show the difference now, but it will do eventually and that lost data can never be got back.

[webby]

That's interesting Steve, will ANY usb CD-RW drive do? Any specific spec I should look for?

I would use iTunes to rip but it doesn't report any errors, but saying that, I have had XLD report a bad rip for a couple of tracks that I've then ripped in iTunes successfully. At least XLD reported those errors though.

I have a 1TB drive backing up everything hourly via the Time Machine app.

Cheers

[twelvebears]

That's interesting Steve, will ANY usb CD-RW drive do? Any specific spec I should look for?

I would use iTunes to rip but it doesn't report any errors, but saying that, I have had XLD report a bad rip for a couple of tracks that I've then ripped in iTunes successfully. At least XLD reported those errors though.

I have a 1TB drive backing up everything hourly via the Time Machine app.

Cheers

For just basic ripping, yes, it doesn't have to be specifically Mac compatible. Just get one that quotes a x48 nor x52 read speed.

[webby]

Did you buy just a cd-rom, or a cd-rw? Or even a dvd-rw?

What's the read speed of the imac drive?