Fast ripping of CDs (and storage)

[dave2010]

TIm

Thanks for encouragement. I posted this - http://theartofsound.net/forum/showthread.php?t=12494 - but went ahead and downloaded Squeezepad anyway. According to forums elsewhere I'll end up downloading iPeng as well. Not absolutely perfect, but amazing that it can drive the kit (several players including the iPad itself), and I reckon the sound quality via

iMac -> Wireless LAN -> Squeezebox -> Caiman -> Beyer DTX900 or alternatively
iMac -> Wireless LAN -> Squeezebox -> Caiman -> Bantam Gold -> Sanyo Hi Fi Ones
is pretty good.

I have a feeling that the quality via the Squeezebox beats most other modes, so it's not just the convenience factor. Currently listening to a download from emusic - Miklos Rozsa piano concerto, and this sounds much better than I remember it, which considering the mangled sounds one sometimes gets from compressed audio is an achievement.

The convenience is also good though, just a few seconds tapping, and I can be listening to something completely different.

There are several other points/queries I want to make/ask about ripping, but they can wait for a little while (day or two), now that I'm having some success with this.

[WAD62]

I use SqueezeCommander on my Android phone to handle 3 SBs, much better than the Squeezebox controler...

dBpoweramp is the way to go for ripping to FLAC, and get yourself a good CD drive, makes it much quicker and more accurate...

[Tim]

There are several other points/queries I want to make/ask about ripping, but they can wait for a little while (day or two), now that I'm having some success with this.

No probs and ask away, there are a quite a few members who use file based audio, so a problem shared, should hopefully be a problem solved.

[dave2010]

No probs and ask away, there are a quite a few members who use file based audio, so a problem shared, should hopefully be a problem solved.

OK. I shall ask away with specific topics. First one follows almost immediately, but there may be a few coming shortly.

[dave2010]

The first issue I considered is which lossless format to use. AFAIK the most common ones are ALAC and FLAC. Some other formats may have both lossy and lossless variants.

Personally I can convert to either ALAC or FLAC, but since I use an iMac frequently the "obvious" choice is ALAC. This gives immediate iTunes compatibility, and it seems to be compatible with my Squeezebox kit too.

I assume that if necessary I can convert from ALAC back to FLAC, so there is no harm in choosing ALAC at the outset.

On the other hand, some people may recommend FLAC, which for me would give an immediate compatibility issue with iTunes, though there are ways round, for example using Fluke - http://code.google.com/p/flukeformac/

Some people may find FLAC is immediately more convenient for them.

Can I assume that, for me, that ALAC is really the way to go?

[dave2010]

Following Issue 1, it seems reasonable for me to stick with iTunes for playing some of the ALAC files, and my Logitech kit works with those.

Some people - particularly those who don't use iPods or iMacs, but who are using PCs may wish to use other players and playback devices. It is quite possible that some players and devices won't play ALAC, in which case that either restricts the players to be used, or step 1 - choice of format - needs to be changed.

[dave2010]

I assume that there are good converters which can convert from ALAC to FLAC and/or FLAC to ALAC. While I hope that I don't need these initially, at some later stage it might be necessary. By then I would hope to be able to do batch conversion from files on one drive to another.

Is it easier going one way rather than the other? Are some tools easier to use than others? Recommendations!

[webby]

I rip everything to alac using XLD. It's pretty easy to use. I only use that over iTunes own converter cos iTunes doesn't produce a log report or reference the accurate rip database.

Tags are handled by freedb or musicbrainz in xld and for my purposes are perfectly adequate. XLD also offers replay gain. I don't use it but some do.
XLD converts to all kinds of formats and I believe can rip to 2 formats at once.
So you could rip to alac for the home and aac for the iPod for instance.

I add artwork manually using album art exchange.

[Stratmangler]

IIRC Squeezebox Server transcodes ALAC to FLAC on the fly.

ALAC is fine - it can be decompressed back to AIFF or WAV if necessary.
I don't use it myself because it's proprietary to Apple, and that usually means that using a licensed Apple product is a must.

[dave2010]

Most tools, such as iTunes etc., will try to match CD tracks against a CD database - often the Gracenote one.

This clearly saves a lot of time, and in many cases will also cause the artwork to be located - not sure how - but it does, and can appear in a user interface, such as for SqueezePad.

Some rippers are not so good at this - for example when I ripped a CD using Max for MacOS the other day, it couldn't find the data for one CD, so I had to partially enter it manually, and all the tracks were given numbers - relative to the name I provided.

I don't know how easy it is to modify such metadata afterwards, but in the first instance it helps to get as much accurate data as possible. The time taken to enter/correct such data can easily approach or exceed the ripping time. If only a few CDs aren't recognised this might not be a problem, but it could be if this happens relatively often.

I noticed a few years ago that some tools use different databases, and give different results. Are there any preferred tools/databases?