CD Ripping Advice

[davidmore]

All,

I have a collection of about 1500 CDs (98% classical) and want to store them on my computer - ultimately to have the files on a music server.

My experience so far is that for classical music there are real problems naming the .mp3 or whatever files and organising them sensibly.

I wonder how people recommend going about the naming / arrangement task.

Disk space is not an issue - am ripping are 320kbps to optimise quality.

Any advice would be appreciated. (Best software to rip with, which codec is best, how best to lay out directores in classical collections etc)

Thanks

David

 

[mustang_steve]

I just organize by disc.

Maybe it's just me, but I like having my MP3 archive seem like a virtual CD rack.

 

[WmAx]

All,

I

Any advice would be appreciated. (Best software to rip with, which codec is best, how best to lay out directores in classical collections etc)

Thanks

David

If you need mp3, Lame encoder(using the approved modes) appears to test the best in control listening trials. Refer to approved version(s) and setting(s) here:

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Recommended_LAME

-Chris

 

[corey]

LAME for an encoder, Exact Audio Copy for a ripper. I think you can get both at the link WmAx posted.

 

[samNOISE]

PC Issues

A note about the PC itself. I'm a certified PC tech and must stick my nose in insofar as suggesting that you keep the 'tool' itself in mind as well. Before you start your ripping session, it would be a great idea to rip to a secondary hard disk drive. This will partially alleviate potential pauses in the ripping process as the operating system caches data from ram to drive. This can manifest itself as hiccups or drops in the final product.

Also, do the rip on a ‘clean’ PC: no spyware, ad-ware, loads of TSRs in the startup menu. Defragment the hard disk drive to start things off, and thereafter, reboot every few dozen ripped CDs.

I see loads of PCs each day, and the number one problem, aside from virus / worm / spyware / trojans…, is that folks have tonnes of crap running in the background on their PCs and then relate stories to me about their MP3 rips / burns exhibiting audio anomalies.

Andrew D.
www.cdnav.com

 

[WmAx]

By the way, there is currently a thread at hydrogen audio discussing how to tag/organize classical music; a seemingly related topic that the original poster might want to read:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=46751&hl=

-Chris

 

[GlocksRock]

IMO, the best and easiest program to use for ripping is CDex 1.51 available from download.com it uses LAME encoding, and you can select what bitrate to use, I would reccomend VBR. It also connects to the CDDB for easy disc/song title naming. Once it rips the disc, all the files will be correctly named, and it will also organize discs by artist and album title, which is how I have all my albums organized as well, which makes the most sense cause you will easily be able to find your music when you are looking for something in particular.

 

[Jedi2016]

I use a freeware program called GoldWave that I got years ago (not even sure if it's still freeware). It's mainly a low-end sound editor.. add various effects and what have you. But it also has a CD-ripper function, and does a pretty good job at it, I think. Like the one that GlocksRock mentioned, it can connect online and get info about the album and name the output files accordingly. One feature I like, which is probably a bit silly, is that it uses the full speed of your disc drive.. it'll rip an entire 70-minute CD just a few minutes.

 

[tbewick]

I recommend considering not using MP3 and maybe trying WMA (Windows Media Audio). The pop music I've listened to sounds better at 128 kb/s with WMA.

One thing you might want to note about Exact Audio Copy is that it has an option to normalise tracks automatically and does this based upon the peak volume in the track. It might be a good idea to disable this otherwise you could get a quiet section of music being boosted in volume relative to an intentionally louder track.

One other thing is that I'm not sure that it covers up errors if it finds them on extraction. It should interpolate them, but I've heard some tracks I've extracted where there has been the very occasional brief pop/click. I could just be imagining it though, seeing as the few extractions I've done usually have a 99-100 % quality rating.

 

[corey]

What ever you do, don't rip at 128kb, but since your post already said that you are going to use 320kb I guess that's not an issue.

If you envision an all Microsoft, all the time future; then maybe the propriatary wma format is the way to go - for me, I'll stick to mp3.

I tend to make large play lists that combine lots of different music types; and find that normalizing makes that work better. For classical, I'd turn it off as tbewick says.

 

[GlocksRock]

if you do decide to go .wma, cdex will rip to .wma as well I believe

 

[Francious70]

I just use iTues to rip and organise my files. I encode them at 192kbs. with the higest sampling rate available. Even when burned back to a CD from the .mp3's I can't tell much of a difference over the original.

 

[jcPanny]

CD ripping

For a large CD library like yours, consider ripping to a lossless format like FLAC. It will require more disk space, but you don't want to repeat the ripping process once you decide that MP3 audio quality isn't good enough.

 

[Rob Babcock]

For a large CD library like yours, consider ripping to a lossless format like FLAC. It will require more disk space, but you don't want to repeat the ripping process once you decide that MP3 audio quality isn't good enough.

I concur. It could take you months to rip your whole collection; if you go with a lossless codec you won't have to re-rip everything again if you decide to change formats. HD space is pretty cheap nowadays.

 

[MDS]

The only risk of using a lossless format (pick one - there are many) is that the decoder may not be around forever. None of the formats except indows Media Lossless are backed by large companies and shareware/freeware/open source projects go away all the time. It might not be a large risk but is something to at least consider nonetheless.

A WAV file (or AIFF on the Mac/Unix) is essentially raw PCM with a header and thus is the lowest common denominator of digital audio formats and will always be supported. Disc space is cheap and getting cheaper so unless your CD collection is already extremely large you might want to just save the uncompressed WAVs. That's what I have done and they are always available should I ever want to transcode to a format other than MP3 which I currently use. Of course you then have the issue of how to backup a very large amount of data. [My entirely unscientific approach is to buy a new external drive every few years, but a RAID setup would be a good alternative].

My current collection is around 525 discs and a little over 5K WAVs so they all fit easily on a 300 GB external drive.