Starting from scratch

[wee tee cee]

I run an old Dell lap top that I used apple i player with. Ripped everything to flac. Sounded great.

Just got a newish acer lap top from my good lady and want to start a fresh-rip all my cds at full bit rate.

Can anyone help recommend a free player that will let me store everything on the lap top.

My computer skills are awful- I just want to build a digital library but without all the apple comparability problems.

If I could copy all my stuff from i player on the Dell it would be great but I dont know where to start!!!

Dont mind ripping a few hundred disks if thats what it takes.

Please keep it as idiot proof as possible.

I have spotify playing thrugh the dac ok. I can play a cd on the lap top just dont know how to store it on the hard drive.

Any help greatly received.

Thanks Tony.

[Stratmangler]

I run an old Dell lap top that I used apple i player with. Ripped everything to flac. Sounded great

What's apple i player?
I've heard of iTunes, have a copy installed on my Windows laptop, and it doesn't rip to or play flac.

[wee tee cee]

yup its i tunes-think its stored at aac....whatever the highest quality setting is. the new lap top is windows 10 so i am really struggling.

[Ali Tait]

I tunes is the work of the devil IMO Tony. :-)

Not free, but dbpoweramp is a very good way to rip all your cd’s. Just make your own music folder with a separate folder for each music genre. How much space does the hard drive have?

[wee tee cee]

Ali,
Im in agreement i tunes is evil. The lap top has 5oo gig. Is db power amp a player or just a means to rip bit perfect?

Might have to ask Gary for help!!!

[struth]

Jriver does most of work for you and is a good player too. Not overly expensive in my opinion. Gary can set it up for you easy too

[Sherwood]

Ali,
Im in agreement i tunes is evil. The lap top has 5oo gig. Is db power amp a player or just a means to rip bit perfect?

Might have to ask Gary for help!!!

dBpoweramp is both a ripper and a player but there are better players including the fantastic swiss army knife of players VLC (which is free). I can highly recommend dBpoweramp as a ripper and as an audio file converter. You can set it up to batch convert all your aac files to flac or whatever format you want. It has a free 21 day trial and the price is very reasonable as there are no annual licenses as with some products. I would strongly advise on buying it as part of a bundle along with Perfect TUNES which is a neat app to manage your music files (e.g. check the integrity of files, get the best artwork for rips and remove duplicate rips). For playing I would use VLC

Geoff

[brian2957]

Gary's your man Tony . Ali knows his stuff too , but he's a bit far away :)

[wee tee cee]

dBpoweramp is both a ripper and a player but there are better players including the fantastic swiss army knife of players VLC (which is free). I can highly recommend dBpoweramp as a ripper and as an audio file converter. You can set it up to batch convert all your aac files to flac or whatever format you want. It has a free 21 day trial and the price is very reasonable as there are no annual licenses as with some products. I would strongly advise on buying it as part of a bundle along with Perfect TUNES which is a neat app to manage your music files (e.g. check the integrity of files, get the best artwork for rips and remove duplicate rips). For playing I would use VLC

GeoffGeoff,
Thanks for that, very helpful.

[Stratmangler]

I use dBPoweramp myself, so that's another recommendation.
EAC is another decent ripper. The results are identical to the ones you'd get from dBPoweramp, but EAC is a bugger to set up right.

If you've already ripped your CDs to AAC, forget about converting them to anything else.
You can't properly reconstruct a file if the bits aren't there to start with.
If you want the full fat version you'll need to rip the CDs again, as AAC is a lossy format (ie it removes data), just like MP3 is.

As for the various media players out there, I don't really use them.
When I do use one I use Foobar, because it does the job without having a nice GUI - GUIs always have higher processing power overheads.
Foobar is a bit hair shirt, but once you get used to playing with it it's easy to use, and it's extremely flexible too, because there are plugins to expand its capabilities.

[wee tee cee]

All my stuff is ripped lossless in i tunes-was hoping i could convert it/back it up on an external drive etc.

Had a look at dbpoweramp-cant seem to find out what it costs.

Had J river for a while found it a terrible faff and a bit flaky!

[Sherwood]

All my stuff is ripped lossless in i tunes-was hoping i could convert it/back it up on an external drive etc.

Had a look at dbpoweramp-cant seem to find out what it costs.

Had J river for a while found it a terrible faff and a bit flaky!

Bundled with Perfect TUNES https://secure.dbpoweramp.com/store_purchase.aspx?p=11

By itself for a single PC https://secure.dbpoweramp.com/store_purchase.aspx?p=9

Geoff

[Stratmangler]

All my stuff is ripped lossless in i tunes-was hoping i could convert it/back it up on an external drive etc.

You said you'd ripped it all to AAC, which is not lossless.
There are three lossless options using iTunes, which are WAV (Microsoft version of PCM), AIFF (Apple version of PCM - I believe it also supports tags), and ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec).

[Gazjam]

Tony,
got your PM, replied fella.

If your Tunes are in AAC then your files have been compressed and as the guys have said you cant get back whats been discarded if you ripped them compressed.
It'll be a ball-ache re-ripping but will be more than worth it, I spent months but once its done its done for life.
Worth it if you want to know your getting the best sound possible - no point compromising!

DBPoweramp is my go-to ripping software, though Jriver does a good job too.
Not so much as a player (It can be flaky as you say) but as a swiss army knife for tagging, ripping and all that good stuff its pretty great.

Happy to help out mate, lemme know and we can arrange summit.

[wee tee cee]

Thanks Gary,
PM replied to.
Tony.

[Rothchild]

Foobar, rip to FLAC highest (data) compression setting. Job's a good'un.

[WAD62]

Foobar, rip to FLAC highest (data) compression setting. Job's a good'un.

...or no 'job's a bad un', just leave it at the default of 5, any more is futile :scratch:

[Stratmangler]

...or no 'job's a bad un', just leave it at the default of 5, any more is futile :scratch:

You got there before me, Will :)
+1 - the default setting carries a lower processing overhead

[Rothchild]

FLAC processing is asymetrical, it takes more processing to encode it with higher compression but they all take the same overhead to decode. Futility is in the eye of the beholder I guess imo the marginal extra time it takes is worth the space over a large collection.

https://xiph.org/flac/faq.html#general__asymmetry

[wee tee cee]

Bundled with Perfect TUNES https://secure.dbpoweramp.com/store_purchase.aspx?p=11

By itself for a single PC https://secure.dbpoweramp.com/store_purchase.aspx?p=9

GeoffGeoff,
Thanks, software aint cheap but I suppose its a sound (pardon my pun ) investnent.

[WAD62]

FLAC processing is asymetrical, it takes more processing to encode it with higher compression but they all take the same overhead to decode. Futility is in the eye of the beholder I guess imo the marginal extra time it takes is worth the space over a large collection.

https://xiph.org/flac/faq.html#general__asymmetry
OK I'll take futile back, and replace it with trivial...;)

Example CD 'Grizzly Bear' 'Painted Ruins'...

FLAC album size;

Level 5 = 342,807,339
Level 8 = 340,950,111

...so a saving of 1.85 Mb per CD, or approx 0.5%...so my 3k cd's would require 5.5 GB less, pretty trivial in the context of a 2TB drive...

[Rothchild]

Not just disk space, bandwidth counts too.

Given that it makes no difference sonically and (for all practical purposes) in terms of time to rip etc why wouldn't you? Folk chase down 'the last n %' for their systems for cable etc, why not use all the tech available to glean network and storage efficiency too?

[Stratmangler]

Not just disk space, bandwidth counts too.

Given that it makes no difference sonically and (for all practical purposes) in terms of time to rip etc why wouldn't you? Folk chase down 'the last n %' for their systems for cable etc, why not use all the tech available to glean network and storage efficiency too?

Because not all rendering devices are equally capable.
It was an issue that kept on raising its head over on the Squeezebox forum.

[pgarrish]

If you ripped them as Apple Lossless the first time around, copy them to the new machine and either stick with iTunes, or try Plex or any number of free players. A 500GB library will however be a fair few albums and iTunes wont be great to use at that size. Replacing the drive with an SSD will make a huge difference in that respect though.