Best way from CD to formatted flac files to PC?

[k0rww]

I have arouund 100 classical CDs I want to reformat to flac files and store on a HTPC.

I tried using Media Center V17 and it worked fine except it couldn't find the volume information on my 1980s and 1990s CDs. Music collector will catalog my CDs, along with volume information, but I haven't found a way to combine the volume information in the Music Collector into Media Center.

Is there a way to do this or maybe a better way altogether?

 

[sholling]

I use dbPowerAmp Reference ($37) because it automatically rips, tags, and files according to your rules. It works well with popular music because it accesses an online database of album information and uses that to populate the fields but with some unusual CDs it may not find them in the database.

MediaMonkey also does auto rip and excellent tag functions. I'm just not sure if it does auto-filing.

The other thing you will probably need is playback software that supports gapless playback because a lot of music spans multiple tracks.

 

[k0rww]

I use dbPowerAmp Reference ($37) because it automatically rips, tags, and files according to your rules. It works well with popular music because it accesses an online database of album information and uses that to populate the fields but with some unusual CDs it may not find them in the database.

MediaMonkey also does auto rip and excellent tag functions. I'm just not sure if it does auto-filing.

The other thing you will probably need is playback software that supports gapless playback because a lot of music spans multiple tracks.

Hi Scholling,

Thanks for the information. This is a great deal more complicated than I expected. I will try dbPowerAmp and see how it does with older CDs.

 

[cpp]

Hi Scholling,

Thanks for the information. This is a great deal more complicated than I expected. I will try dbPowerAmp and see how it does with older CDs.

I also use dbPowerAmp nice and more user friendly than foobar200 which I also use. Just depends on what I want to do and if the software has the necessary plugins to support the task.

 

[k0rww]

I also use dbPowerAmp nice and more user friendly than foobar200 which I also use. Just depends on what I want to do and if the software has the necessary plugins to support the task.

I tried dbPowerAmp and it's much slower when formatting to flac than Media Center.

For modern CDs, Media Center does everything except give you a searchable database. I don't understand why a single program isn't available to do everything.

 

[sholling]

I tried dbPowerAmp and it's much slower when formatting to flac than Media Center.

You probably have error checking turned on. It gives you a choice you can have rock solid error correction, medium correction, or no error correction. I have a 4 core system and it rips pretty darn fast even with maximum error correction. Tekzilla's Patrick Norton based his own multi-drive RipMonster 3000 CD ripper on dbPowerAmp. It's a machine he built to rip his own collection. It starts at 24 minutes into the show.

Patrick's Ripmonster 3000 Batch Rips CDs - Wireless HDMI Roundup, Free Dynamic DNS, Ripmonster 3000... - Tekzilla

For modern CDs, Media Center does everything except give you a searchable database. I don't understand why a single program isn't available to do everything.

MediaMonkey has a free version you could try.

 

[cpp]

You probably have error checking turned on.

sholling was thinking the same thing.

 

[k0rww]

Hi scholling,

Thanks for the response.

You probably have error checking turned on. It gives you a choice you can have rock solid error correction, medium correction, or no error correction. I have a 4 core system and it rips pretty darn fast even with maximum error correction. Tekzilla's Patrick Norton based his own multi-drive RipMonster 3000 CD ripper on dbPowerAmp. It's a machine he built to rip his own collection. It starts at 24 minutes into the show.

Patrick's Ripmonster 3000 Batch Rips CDs - Wireless HDMI Roundup, Free Dynamic DNS, Ripmonster 3000... - Tekzilla


MediaMonkey has a free version you could try.

I'm more than willing to purchase a program that will do everything. I consider everything to be a program that reads the CD then converts the music to flac, and creates a searchable database. I'm new at this, am I being unrealistic?

I'm using an i7-3770K running at 4.1GHz. dbPowerAmp which as you pointed out was probably running at maximum error correction took almost an hour. I will rerun the test and pay attention to the CD's lenght and the error corrrection. That's a pretty good endorsement of dbPowerAmp by RipMonster.

Richard

 

[sholling]

I'm using an i7-3770K running at 4.1GHz. dbPowerAmp which as you pointed out was probably running at maximum error correction took almost an hour. I will rerun the test and pay attention to the CD's lenght and the error corrrection. That's a pretty good endorsement of dbPowerAmp by RipMonster.

Richard

Something is very wrong. My desktop is an old and much slower Core 2 Quad and as a test I just ripped a Classical CD to FLAC in 2 minutes flat using dbPowerAmp and an old IDE DVD burner for the ripping drive and that's about average for my machine. That's using "level 8" (highest) encoding, "secure" (error correction) ripping, AccurateRip (CRC checking) and having it tag the files. Let's confirm that you're using an internal drive and not a USB drive but even a USB drive shouldn't be that slow.

 

[k0rww]

Something is very wrong. My desktop is an old and much slower Core 2 Quad and as a test I just ripped a Classical CD to FLAC in 2 minutes flat using dbPowerAmp and an old IDE DVD burner for the ripping drive and that's about average for my machine. That's using "level 8" (highest) encoding, "secure" (error correction) ripping, AccurateRip (CRC checking) and having it tag the files. Let's confirm that you're using an internal drive and not a USB drive but even a USB drive shouldn't be that slow.

I ran a new CD:
It took 8 minutes for 10 tracks totalling 405MB. I used level 8.
I don't know what happened the first time, but you were right...something was wrong.

Richard

 

[sholling]

Even 8 minutes is a long time for an i7. My test rip was only 290MB but even a 400MB rip shouldn't be over 3-4 minutes. What may have happened that took an hour is a damaged CD. If error correction is on and it runs into a marginal CD it will retry the tracks very-very slowly and painstakingly doing its best to extract music from the damaged CD. I've run into that with good quality but scratched music CDs and with super thin cheapo audiobook CDs, CDs so thin you can see the printing on the other side.

 

[Grador]

Ripping speed is invariably limited by CD rom drive, it's an extremely non-compute intesive process and FLAC encoding is just about the easiest thing you can do. My rips take slightly longer on my current i7 laptop than they did my old core based laptop as the drive is slightly slower.

Error correction adds time as any errors get reread a multiple of times, but on a completely error free disk should take approximately the same ammout of time to rip as with error correction turned off.

As for software I don't have a suggestion for an all in one solution but I personally use EAC [Exact Audio Copy] to rip my music, and XBMC for playback. EAC does the tagging properly, and does add replaygain information to the FLAC files, and XBMC does read replaygain information. Technically XBMC will rip CDs strait to FLAC, but for no real reason a tall I don't trust it. So technically it could be an all in one solution?