Ripping Yarns

[webby]

I was gonna recommend a paid for service until the last sentence. Still, it might be worth considering. Really, there is no difference between ripping to a computer and the Brennan. I wouldn't touch the Brennan as I don't like the interface. Do you have a Premium Spotify account? The bit rate is higher at around 320kbps.

iTunes has gapless playback ability. I can't comment on any other player myself. I believe gapless info is embedded on the cd itself.

[dave2010]

I wouldn't touch the Brennan as I don't like the interface.

I've not seen the Brennan. What are the problems with it? Don't tell me - it uses 8 character MSDOS file names

Do you have a Premium Spotify account? The bit rate is higher at around 320kbps.

Yes - it's quite good. I also have Napster, Classical.com and some free services such as last.fm, radioio, Deezer - which on occasions also sound OK. I recall that Bluebeat has a high quality option too - and some good stuff - though not used it for some while. I had it set up on my Philips SLA 5520.

[webby]

The Brennan? By the interface I mean the little display that you have to search your library in. I wouldn't get on with that. I couldn't be fiddling with a text search like that. Check out the Brennan site videos.

I much prefer my desktop mac/itunes solution.

[Alex_UK]

Hi Lee, good to see you back, hope you and the family including the (not so new now) little one are all well. I'm still procrastinating on moving to lossless, but to be honest for proper listening I still like the tactile involvement of spinning a silver or black disc - AAC or Spotify Premium for background music is fine - especially as I also sync up my ipod, and want the capacity rather than quality for that. Anyway, good luck with the rest of the process!

[webby]

Thanks Alex. The kids are very well. Lucas is 5months now. It goes so fast don't it? I trust your little one is well?

I moved to lossless cos of space issues really. I'd be happy to have all my cds out on a row of shelves but my missus isn't so keen. I refer to sleevenotes less and less these days what with the mountains of info on the internet at my disposal, so I decided I didn't really need them close to hand. They're still under the bed if I need them. However, if I was going to store them away, then I decided that it had to be lossless compression, even though I can't discern the difference between 256kbps and lossless. Future equipment may reveal that, so I thought sod it, it's only drive space isn't it?

Cheers

[webby]

Note: The hardest thing, as I've touched on before, is deciding whether to rip everything or to rip selectively. When you haven't listened to a disc for years you wonder if it's worth ripping it.

[webby]

I now have 4243 tracks ripped to ALAC, containing 94 artists and 346 albums.......and 5 storage boxes filled with cds!

A small library compared to some, but I'm happy with it.

[dave2010]

The Brennan? By the interface I mean the little display that you have to search your library in. I wouldn't get on with that. I couldn't be fiddling with a text search like that. Check out the Brennan site videos.

I much prefer my desktop mac/itunes solution.

Ah, but I wasn't intending to actually use the Brennan to do anything than (1) play the original CD - hopefully the quality wouldn't be too bad for a one off listen, and (2) rip the CD at the same time to a hard drive - which I understand can be done. Then I'd unattach the hard drive once a sufficient number of CDs had been ripped, and connect it to my network. Possibly would require moving all the files to another hard drive.

At a cost somewhere around £400, or say £600 including one or two extra hard drives, that'd work out at rather less than the cost of employing a firm to do the ripping for more than 2000 CDs.

For FLAC formatting it'd be necessary to transfer the WAV files from the Brennan, but that could surely be done with script in Linux or Unix, or on a Mac.

Just an idea. Don't know if anyone else has tried this. I'm not rushing to do it yet, but maybe in due course, the fullness of time etc.