OK audiophiles, I need to rip my entire CD collection. What software to use?

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cvanc

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Setting up a Synology NAS and a Sonos Connect as the playout engine... but what software to use to rip all these discs?

Audiophile file formats and high bit rate are essential, this will feed the big system in the basement and I want it to sound as good as possible.

But equally essential is 'as easy as possible and as fast as possible' because it's darn near a thousand discs. Thanks for any suggestions...
 
When you rip CD's you are actually ripping the individual tracks. You'll want to start thinking of this as 20,000 tracks, grouped by album, and 1000 albums, grouped by artist, etc.. There is a lot of labeling data that goes into this process. The track name, artist, album name etc is NOT included on the data on the CD's. You will also want to think about how it all gets organized on the NAS in nested folders.

FLAC is a good format that allows for tagging. CD's are 16bit technology, so you won't "improve" sound quality above that even if you create 24bit rips. Accuracy is at least as important as speed when ripping your collection, as you are likely to induce read errors at the fastest speed possible.

Expect to dedicate 50 - 100 hours (or more) to rip 1000 CD's

I have been working on my music collection for years. I have 52,070 tracks, and 2507 albums stored in 358GB.

I might suggest starting here... https://www.techradar.com/how-to/how-to-rip-your-cds-to-flac
 
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There are services that will rip CD collections for a fee. Have never used any of these.

Been through music migration with LPs to reel-to-reel and cassette, reel-to-reel and cassettes and CDs to digital and iTunes, trust me when I say this is a LOT of work if your collection is large like mine.

Software for ripping CDs: EAC (Exact Audio Copy), MP3Tag for editing info, iTunes for all in one solution.

Lately I just wait for my LPs or cassettes to show up on sale on Amazon or iTunes. Much less hassle.

PS. I still have 4 and 8 track cassettes.
 
I recommend CDEX. I've used it for a long time. If you have internet access, it can go to a database and identify tracks/albums for you (otherwise you have to do it manually). You can set up the way the tracks are labeled (name, track #, album, artist, etc.). It can rip to just about any format.

features: https://cdex.mu/features

download: https://cdex.mu/download
 
...The track name, artist, album name etc is NOT included on the data on the CD's.

Since when?

Not sure where you're from, but the process hardly needs to be as difficult as you present it to be.

The first question the OP needs to answer is if he wants lossy, lossless, or a combination of both compression types.
 
Since when?

Not sure where you're from, but the process hardly needs to be as difficult as you present it to be.

The first question the OP needs to answer is if he wants lossy, lossless, or a combination of both compression types.

Album and track names are definitely not included on the CD. Unless by name you mean 01, 02, etc...

That's why Gracenote was invented. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracenote
 
I don' think he was suggesting that it needed to be entered manually. But unless you're going to let iTunes control how your music gets organized, (please don't) there's a lot of thought that goes into how a large music collection like cvanc is talking about gets organized and cataloged.

I really like JRiver Media Center. It is by far has the most "Audiophile" credentials, has some great media server options and runs my entire home theater set up as well. Just be prepared for public forum based support and the need to spend some time setting things up. But it sounds great and will do just about anything. It's also not free, but not expensive.
 
I use Goldwave audio editing software. Not the most user friendly to use but VERY versatile with lots of options. It does cost but it does let you use it for free for so many (300?) functions. This software will rip the CD and put the individual tracks of each CD into it's own folder. You could rip around 150-200 CDs before they'll want you to pay for the software. And just rip it as 16 bit 44.1 kHz; the quality on a CD isn't going to get any better than that.
 
I use Goldwave audio editing software. Not the most user friendly to use but VERY versatile with lots of options. It does cost but it does let you use it for free for so many (300?) functions. This software will rip the CD and put the individual tracks of each CD into it's own folder. You could rip around 150-200 CDs before they'll want you to pay for the software. And just rip it as 16 bit 44.1 kHz; the quality on a CD isn't going to get any better than that.

Oh yeah! I second the Goldwave. Good stuff and after re-reading your post this is probably more in line with your needs than JRiver.
 
When I rip CD and I’m on the Internet - they names automatically fill out and no need for manual , not sure why yours wouldn’t


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Freeware - Exact Audio Copy

https://www.exactaudiocopy.de/

Features of EAC

All kinds of CD and DVD drives are supported (including USB, Firewire, SATA and SCSI drives)
Hidden sector synchronization (jitter correction)
A secure, a fast and a burst extraction methods selectable. Fast extraction should run at the same speed as other grabbers with jitter correction, but is probably not exact anymore. Burst mode just grabs the audio data without any synchronization.
Detection of read errors and complete losses of sync and correction in the secure mode, as far as possible
Output of time positions of all non-exact corrections and the possibility to listen to these positions
EAC is able to copy ranges of music data, not only tracks
Automatic speed reduction on read errors and fallback to a higher speed afterwards (depends on the used drive)
Volume normalization of extracted audio to a given percentage
Usage of the Windows Audio Compression manager (ACM Codecs) for direct compression to e.g. MP3 waves
Support for the LAME DLL that is usable like an ACM Codec for on-the-fly MP3 compression
Support of external MP3, WMA, flac and OggVorbis encoders for automatic compression after extraction (supports multi-processor environments)
Batch compression to WAV files and decompression of supported encoded files to WAV
Compression offset support for exact compression/decompression
Detection of pre-track gaps (positions where negative track times runs towards 00:00:00)
Detection of silence in pre-track gaps
Automatic creation of CUE sheets for Burnnn, Feurio, Nero or even EAC, which can include all gaps, indicies, track attributes, UPC and ISRC and also CD-Text for an exact copy
CD player functionality and prelistening to selected ranges
Automatic detection of drive features, whether a drive has an accurate stream and/or does caching
Sample offsets for drives with noaccurate streams, including the option of filling up missing samples with silence
Synchronizing between tracks for non-accurate stream drives
Trackname editing with local/remote CD databases support and more features like ID3 tagging
Browse and edit local database
Certified Escient ® CDDB(TM)Compatible
Local CDDB support
Record and loop record functions for recording from LP, radio, etc.
Automatic renaming of MP3 files accordingto their ID3 tag
Catalog extraction function (e.g. first 20 seconds of a track)
Multisession (CD-Extra) support
CD-Text support
CD-Write support for some drives (internally and using CDRDAO)
ID3 V1.1 tag editor with drag and drop ability from track listing and CD database browser
Glitch removal after extraction
Small WAV editor with the following functionality: delete, trim, normalize, pad, glitch removal, pop detection, interpolation of ranges, noise reduction, fade in/out, undo (and much more)
Program is free for personal use, so feel free to copy
 
The internet is good for a lot of things, and automatically filling in track name, artist, etc. is one of them. However, it's not perfect. A lot of this data is edited by anyone and contains misspellings and other incorrect information. After ripping 100 CDs one summer I loaded everything into an ipod and noticed that I had the following bands in my collection:
The Rolling Stones
Rolling Stones
Roling Stones
Rolling Stones The
Rolling Stons

And that wasn't the only one. So then it took another bunch of hours to look through all the information within iTunes and edit the band, song, and album names so they all were cataloged correctly.

Don't expect that the other information will be even remotely accurate. Release year, genre, etc. are all seemingly random. Rock albums will be shown as country from one source and comedy from another.

The more accurate you want your information to be the more time you'll have to spend in the database when you're done ripping all the CDs.
 
I use the free version of MediaMonkey. I edit whatever details I want to see, rip to FLAC and store directly on my Synology DS213 NAS. My Sonos system is configured to read directly from the NAS so I can play music anywhere in the house. Put some thought into how you want to organize the files on your NAS. If you have a collection of classical music that seems to be the most complex to classify.
 
If you want a totally accurate rip, then the only PC app out in the wild that can accomplish this is EAC. But, there is a catch. If you are transcoding to Mp3 format, then EAC is a complete waste of your time. This is because Mp3 is a really lossy format, ie, it discards a ton of audio info during the transcoding process. There are only a few codecs out that can actually benefit from using EAC. The two that I am familiar with are Flac and ACC. Flac is by far the most preferred of the two as it is completely royalty free and very configurable.

Edit: I've been using EAC for about 15 years and still have over 0.5 Terabytes of CD rips despite several HDD failures over the years.
 
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