Should I bother re-ripping my collection?

[realysm42]

Hi, I've got all of my CD's ripped @ 320 kbps, if I were to re-rip them, which is the best format and why; is it safe to assume lossless WAV as it's the highest 'resolution' (I understand the principle behind it, I guess I'm actually asking which is the best lossless format)?

I use WMP, that's the best it offers, should I consider using something else and if so can you tell me why please?

Also, what would be the best setting for my sound card to play them back at? My sound card can do 24 bit 192000 hertz, but how do I know what my music was recorded at and if the rates don't match, will sound quality suffer?

Sorry to ask so much but I can never seem to find a proper answer online; thanks in advance :eek:

[roob]

Depends on how good the rest of your system is.

[Ali Tait]

FLAC or WAV will do. FLAC takes up less space.

[Tim]

FLAC, WAV or even ALAC if that floats your boat, but whatever you do, rip to a lossless format and keep that as a master archive. FLAC will take up less space and there are arguments which claim a WAV file sounds better than a FLAC, but to me I cannot tell the difference - try it and see that's the only way in reality?

But rip to whatever you choose as long as it's lossless, then you won't need to do it again. If you want to convert to a lossy format, you can do it later on from your master library. 1TB will easily hold 2,000 + FLAC albums.

I use FLAC myself.

[Beechwoods]

Rerip the stuff you listen to, and any new stuff you get, in lossless. Get round to the rest when you want to hear it properly... It depends how big your collection is and whether you want to take the hit on reripping in one go.

[Welder]

I shall probably get shouted at for seeming rude and unfriendly ;)
I’m not, its just these are some of the most asked questions relating to file based audio.
So, to save people typing loads of stuff over and over again there are guides.
We have one here at AoS. The guide is pretty much what you will get on any serious computer audio site.

So, yes it is worth re-ripping your CD collection to a lossless format.
For music players try foobar200, JRiver (free version) or Media Monkey.

A bit above your post is a Sticky that says ripping guide.
http://theartofsound.net/forum/showthread.php?t=8238

If, and I must assume this is the case because of your question, you are not familiar with getting the best out of file based audio then follow the guide; no ifs, no buts.

The truth is nobody can tell you what differences you will or wont hear and whether or not certain players are better than others; you need to listen and decide for yourself.

[morris_minor]

+1 for FLAC. Tagging makes it preferable (for me, YMMV etc.) over wav. You can always convert to other formats with no loss of quality.

[dave2010]

Since I use Macs now much more than PCs I use ALAC with iTunes. There are currently some problems with iTunes 10.5.n, but mostly it's OK. I'm getting over 95% success with ripping CDs. Hopefully by the time I've got through this, I'll be able to pick up the other 5%.

iTunes is not perfect, but it's quite good. I am now getting much more familiar with how to edit the names and track titles. Knowing how to do this can save a lot of time, particularly when it's likely that some CDs will turn out to have the same album name.

The PC version of iTunes, is not so good, allegedly. PC fans seem to like EAC - Exact Audio Copy and dbPowerAmp.

There are some rippers which can rip to multiple formats, which might be useful for you if you want to have a lossless format, plus a lossy format for mobile use. Generally it makes sense to go for a lossless format now, as it's nearly always possible to convert to a lossy format later.

If you are going to re-rip your files or take more care over new rips, you might want to use a ripping tool which will take care of any discs in odd formats, such as HDCD or with pre-emphasis. I think dbPowerAmp does this.

However, this is only likely to apply to a few CDs, if any, which might be in your collection.

[Tim]

In case you miss it, you really should check out this website for some useful information. http://www.thewelltemperedcomputer.com

As well as this one http://www.computeraudiophile.com/

[Vincent Kars]

The advantage of a lossless format is
-It is lossless so an exact copy of the source (CD)
-You can always convert to any other lossless format without loss

If you are using WMP you have two options.
WAV: it is lossless but tagging support is very poor, not recommended
WMAL: lossless with tagging support but poor support outside WMP
If you stick to WMP, use WMAL.

You can get WMP to play FLAC but it is a bit of a hassle.
http://thewelltemperedcomputer.com/SW/WMP/FileFormat.htm

My personal preference
-dbPoweramp for ripping, fast and excellent meta data
-JRiver for playback, plays everything and has excellent sound quality and a flexible interface.
In this scenario ripping to FLAC is the best option (lossless + tagging)

[realysm42]

Thanks all for the information and yeah I bet you get asked this one often (Welder lol) so cheers for the patience; I'll read the links provided and embark on my journey (I'm not in the same position as some, I've got noe more than 200 cds).

One thing I'm not looking forward to doing is backing up my Drum and Bass tape pack collection, I've got about 90 packs, each with about 8 1 hour tapes in them, that's about 720 hours of non-stop rippage!

[Beechwoods]

:eek:

Good luck with that lot!

[Rare Bird]

FLAC get my vote too.
I was only on about ripping to a friend this afternoon, he couldnt get it in his head when i told him that ripping his MP-3's to Lossless such as FLAC would be inferior to a fresh rip direct to lossless becuase the damage (if you like) is already done when originally ripping to Lossy! he still wont have it :rolleyes:

[dave2010]

Martin

You didn't say how many CDs you needed to rip or re-rip. I'd strongly advise buying some backup hard drives, and keeping them fairly well up to date.
[Correction - now seen your post a couple back - you have around 200 CDs. They should fit easily on a 500Gbyte drive in FLAC or ALAC, and if you're determined you could get them done in a month or two. I'm doing about 10 a day right now.]

If I were doing this again, I'd use a 2Gbyte or even a 3Gbyte drive with Time Machine on my iMac, as well as the drive I'm using to put the ripped files on. That would give me one less thing to remember, as the music files would be automatically backed up. I have actually taken the music library out of the Time Machine backup, at least for the moment, due to storage constraints, though perhaps I could put it back in for a while. I'm really not sure what's best to do about that.

PC users probably won't understand this, unless they are using a comparable backup system. It looks as though the TM backup drive needs to have at least twice the storage capacity of the files which might be backed up.

As it is, I have to remember to copy the files over to yet another spare drive from time to time (I'm due to do this again around now), and also to take the one of the drives off-site to another location where I can also copy them on to other machines.

At present the ripped (and some purchased or other files) are taking around 150Gbytes on my 750Gbyte drives, so there's still quite a bit of spare space to store more. Of course backing up will take longer as the number of CDs processed increases.

[Tim]

I was only on about ripping to a friend this afternoon, he couldnt get it in his head when i told him that ripping his MP-3's to Lossless such as FLAC would be inferior to a fresh rip direct to lossless becuase the damage (if you like) is already done when originally ripping to Lossy! he still wont have it :rolleyes:
Wish I could have heard that conversation ;)

[Tim]

If I were doing this again, I'd use a 2Gbyte or even a 3Gbyte drive with Time Machine on my iMac, as well as the drive I'm using to put the ripped files on.
Terabyte (2TB or 3TB) surely?

[realysm42]

Thank you all, I'll check this properly after I've had a sleep, infact why am I even awake right now?!

[webby]

Martin

You didn't say how many CDs you needed to rip or re-rip. I'd strongly advise buying some backup hard drives, and keeping them fairly well up to date.
[Correction - now seen your post a couple back - you have around 200 CDs. They should fit easily on a 500Gbyte drive in FLAC or ALAC, and if you're determined you could get them done in a month or two. I'm doing about 10 a day right now.]

If I were doing this again, I'd use a 2Gbyte or even a 3Gbyte drive with Time Machine on my iMac, as well as the drive I'm using to put the ripped files on. That would give me one less thing to remember, as the music files would be automatically backed up. I have actually taken the music library out of the Time Machine backup, at least for the moment, due to storage constraints, though perhaps I could put it back in for a while. I'm really not sure what's best to do about that.

PC users probably won't understand this, unless they are using a comparable backup system. It looks as though the TM backup drive needs to have at least twice the storage capacity of the files which might be backed up.

As it is, I have to remember to copy the files over to yet another spare drive from time to time (I'm due to do this again around now), and also to take the one of the drives off-site to another location where I can also copy them on to other machines.

At present the ripped (and some purchased or other files) are taking around 150Gbytes on my 750Gbyte drives, so there's still quite a bit of spare space to store more. Of course backing up will take longer as the number of CDs processed increases.You really ought to get that music drive backed up. I now use 2 1tb drives; one for time machine and one (split into 2 500gb partitions) for my music library. Time machine backs up my music library, so my music files are not on my mac at all, they just take up too much space.

Ideally, your time machine drive should be twice as large as your files, as you say. Generally, matching the size of your mac's drive is a minimum. Time machine only backs up changed files though so you don't need mega amounts of space to make multiple backups. Day to day, you're only maybe changing small gb's of data. What size is your time machine drive?

[dave2010]

You really ought to get that music drive backed up. I now use 2 1tb drives; one for time machine and one (split into 2 500gb partitions) for my music library. Time machine backs up my music library, so my music files are not on my mac at all, they just take up too much space.

Ideally, your time machine drive should be twice as large as your files, as you say. Generally, matching the size of your mac's drive is a minimum. Time machine only backs up changed files though so you don't need mega amounts of space to make multiple backups. Day to day, you're only maybe changing small gb's of data. What size is your time machine drive?Lee

I tried 750Gbyte drives for TM. They fail on the weekly backup.
Currently I'm using a 1 Gbyte drive. It's not failed yet with TM, but it still might.
My machine has a 650 Gbyte drive. I'm using several 750Gbyte drives for backups and music libraries.

Where TM might give rise to problems is if there's a lot of throughput on the computer system. For example, currently I'm working on a project with 400 Mbyte files. I run utilities, then delete the files, then run again. If I did this 25 times a day (unlikely, but possible) then the throughput would be 10 Gbytes/day, and I think some of the traffic would get stored by TM. However, if TM only takes snapshots every hour, then the TM throughput might not be so great.

Another example would be if I use iTunes to rip CDs. As is now known, sometimes this leads to bad rips. If these are deleted, and subsequently ripped again, there will be multiple copies on the TM drive, yet the storage on the main drive will be fine.

Most people won't find this a problem, but anyone who's doing a lot of work with high throughput (e.g video editing, audio editing) may hit a wall sooner than they'd like.

The problems may only get worse, as systems "improve". Next time I buy a machine I hope it'll have a 1 or 2 Gbyte drive. That'll imply I'll need at least a 2 or 4 Gbyte drive respectively for TM.

[webby]

Dave,

Time machine doesn't do weekly backups so I'm unsure of its failure at that point. Also, I'm a little confused as to your system spec. 650gb is an unusual size for any machine.

You are right in what you say about the throughput of data and the issues that that throws up. It can get a little complicated. Time machine will backup every hour. If you rip a cd, then delete it before the next backup, then afaik time machine will notice no change. Obviously, if it backs it up before you delete it then you'll have an issue. I'll have to test out what happens in that scenario, ie when does the deleted rip get wiped from the backup?

[webby]

Incidentally, I use XLD for ripping and I never get bad rips, except the other day.... One cd would not rip the final track. Tried twice in XLD. No joy. Tried iTunes and it worked first time! :scratch:

[bobbasrah]

720 hours of drum and bass....Good grief... That's a lot of disk space without the CD's. Storage expansion is going to be essential for sure, either as portable or inboard 2Tb drives... Cheap enough these days (or were until about a month ago when they went ape...)
A bit curious on the backing up business though. I do not know the TM system referred to. I use Win7 for system only backup and a finished work folder, but excluding all libraries and work in progress, so nothing temporary clogs things up. Physical backup of media I do every month to external drives, but only for changed or new media files.

If your backup system can select specific directories, you could use a temporary folder for your rips until you are happy with them then slide them into the destination folder.
Just a thought....

[dave2010]

Dave,

Time machine doesn't do weekly backups so I'm unsure of its failure at that point. Also, I'm a little confused as to your system spec. 650gb is an unusual size for any machine.

You are right in what you say about the throughput of data and the issues that that throws up. It can get a little complicated. Time machine will backup every hour. If you rip a cd, then delete it before the next backup, then afaik time machine will notice no change. Obviously, if it backs it up before you delete it then you'll have an issue. I'll have to test out what happens in that scenario, ie when does the deleted rip get wiped from the backup?I think TM does do weekly backups, though perhaps you use different terminology. What I think it does is do updates every hour for 24 hours until it's got a day's worth. I think it then does some form of consolidation process. Then it repeats the process for every day, then at the end of the week it consolidates the weekly data. That's the point at which it'll run out of storage if there's not enough available. It also uses some of the drive space for working space, which is why at least twice the data storage is the recommended allowance. I did actually reach that point with one of my smaller drives, which was about a week after I'd started using it for TM. I've not (yet) had a problem with the 1Gbyte drive.

That's my working model, based on what I read. If you're sure it doesn't do this, then what do you think it does?

OK - what's a few Gbytes between friends:

Hitachi HDT721064SLA360:

Capacity: 640.14 GB (640,135,028,736 bytes)
Model: Hitachi HDT721064SLA360

This may have been a special end of run model. I just got the best deal I could when I bought it.

[webby]

Hitachi HDT721064SLA360:

Capacity: 640.14 GB (640,135,028,736 bytes)
Model: Hitachi HDT721064SLA360

This may have been a special end of run model. I just got the best deal I could when I bought it.

And this is the internal drive in your iMac is it? Mac Mini? Other? How much of that is free space?

[dave2010]

Not much free space right now - I need to delete or back some files off.

Don't even think of commenting!

I have been surprised at how relatively little of all this data is represented by music files.

Trouble is that I use this machine not only for doing the music thing, but also for other work related stuff, and experimenting.

I guess I need to remember the Unix commands I used to know to identify large files. The most sensible way to clean up a drive is to hit the really big files first. Something like this http://www.unixtutorial.org/2008/03/find-large-files-and-directories/ - I seem to recall.

[bobbasrah]

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1427
Not an Apple guy so excuse my ignorance of it, but it seems from the above link that TM can be configured much the same, excluding what you wish.... I would guess the frequency would also be customisable....
Using a excluded folder for rips on a temporary basis would seem viable. I would not use this method to back up media as this is likely to grow.
I suspect you are using a laptop, so any expansion will have to be external.

My main MS desktop has 2 system drives, one active, one backup. Never overloaded the backup yet, as it only covers MyFolders and the system files, so there is generally enough headroom. You are trying to do this on the main system disk I think, but in principle it should be ok unless you overload it.
The 4 hot-swap drives I use for storage (media etc) are backed up periodically to 1 and 1.5Tb external drives manually, excluding files already in the backup unless changed.
That minimises the backup process considerablly with 8Gb to contend with.
You will need to go external for this storage, as well as any backup, so would a NAS not be a better option in your case?
Christmas is coming...

[webby]

Not much free space right now - I need to delete or back some files off.

Don't even think of commenting!

I have been surprised at how relatively little of all this data is represented by music files.

Trouble is that I use this machine not only for doing the music thing, but also for other work related stuff, and experimenting.

I guess I need to remember the Unix commands I used to know to identify large files. The most sensible way to clean up a drive is to hit the really big files first. Something like this http://www.unixtutorial.org/2008/03/find-large-files-and-directories/ - I seem to recall.

Skip that and just get OmniDiskSweeper. This will scan your system and give a you a file view in size order. Great for finding that 6gb video you never knew you had!

[dave2010]

Skip that and just get OmniDiskSweeper. This will scan your system and give a you a file view in size order. Great for finding that 6gb video you never knew you had!Lee

Great tip this. Thanks. Doesn't actually solve all the problems, but does help a bit, and faster than using Unix commands. Oh - I like the price too. [Free!]

I think I still need to organise the files onto a few more external volumes, and also have a better backup strategy. I'll get round to trying Super Duper soon ... maybe!

Re your XLD rips - does XLD do special CDs, such as HDCDs and CDs with pre-emphasis? I guess there aren't too many of these, but it'd be good to know that a ripper could cope or at least give an indication of any of these types. Some rippers will rip, but won't apply the correct de-emphasis.

I hear rumours that iTunes is supposed to do this, but the latest versions have been very poor and fall over on some discs. Which version did you use?
I'm still hoping that Apple will get round to issuing a new version with fixes.

[dave2010]

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1427
Not an Apple guy so excuse my ignorance of it, but it seems from the above link that TM can be configured much the same, excluding what you wish.... I would guess the frequency would also be customisable....
Using a excluded folder for rips on a temporary basis would seem viable. I would not use this method to back up media as this is likely to grow.
I suspect you are using a laptop, so any expansion will have to be external.

My main MS desktop has 2 system drives, one active, one backup. Never overloaded the backup yet, as it only covers MyFolders and the system files, so there is generally enough headroom. You are trying to do this on the main system disk I think, but in principle it should be ok unless you overload it.
The 4 hot-swap drives I use for storage (media etc) are backed up periodically to 1 and 1.5Tb external drives manually, excluding files already in the backup unless changed.
That minimises the backup process considerablly with 8Gb to contend with.
You will need to go external for this storage, as well as any backup, so would a NAS not be a better option in your case?
Christmas is coming...TM is only moderately configurable. It is possible to skip folders and drives, and conversely if there's enough space on the TM drive - it can store the contents of several drives - space permitting.

There are probably some equivalent backup systems for Windows systems, but they may be harder to use, which will deter many users. Some may be more flexible, but even harder to use, which will deter almost everyone.

I am using a variety of drives with my iMac - not a laptop. I have tried some NAS drives before. They were OK until they hit problems when I tried to archive one to the other. The good thing about NAS drives is that they can be accessible by several different computers. The bad thing is that they're often rather slow - usually considerably slower than USB or Firewire or now USB 3.0 or even Thunderbolt.

One strategy is to create files on fast drives, then copy them to slower NAS drives, which makes the files available over the LAN.

I wish that programs, such as iTunes, which work with large libraries could work with multiple drives, to form a larger logical drive. Maybe in the future!?

Speed is still an issue, and will get more important with larger drives. Although my machines don't have USB 3.0, my Time Machine backups are to a USB 3.0 device. If I ever upgrade I expect that moving data around might be a lot faster.

On the other hand, for typical audio work it's not unreasonable to use moderately slow drives, but for video files speed is important as well as storage capacity.

[webby]

Lee

Great tip this. Thanks. Doesn't actually solve all the problems, but does help a bit, and faster than using Unix commands. Oh - I like the price too. [Free!]

I think I still need to organise the files onto a few more external volumes, and also have a better backup strategy. I'll get round to trying Super Duper soon ... maybe!

Re your XLD rips - does XLD do special CDs, such as HDCDs and CDs with pre-emphasis? I guess there aren't too many of these, but it'd be good to know that a ripper could cope or at least give an indication of any of these types. Some rippers will rip, but won't apply the correct de-emphasis.

I hear rumours that iTunes is supposed to do this, but the latest versions have been very poor and fall over on some discs. Which version did you use?
I'm still hoping that Apple will get round to issuing a new version with fixes.
I don't know about hdcds but I'm sure XLD handles pre emphasis. The thing is, that is dependant on the drive and my drive doesn't handle it. I only discovered this recently. I have thought about getting an external cd/DVD drive but I can't justify it at the moment.

I think I'm on iTunes 10.5

I'm happy with my backup now. I have around 190gb on my mac and 220gb on my iTunes drive. This is all backed up to my 1tb time machine drive which has over 300gb free on it. It has one other partition on it.

[webby]

Check this link with regards to hdcd ripping: http://www.stevehoffman.tv/forums/showthread.php?t=266032