Thoughts on using a PC to rip your CD collection.

The may be quite a few people out there contemplating ripping their CD collection to a NAS.  I am currently 75% of the way through ripping a 1000 CD collection in anticipation of buying a streaming client of some kind (can I afford an NDX?) and I thought I would share my experiences.  I claim no special expertise, but do know a little more now than I did 750 CDs ago.

1.          Plan to spend a lot of time.  Most CDs will rip quickly and easily but some won’t (see below) and it is these that will consume your time.

2.          Decide what format you are going to rip to.  I have chosen flac because it is widely used, it supports metadata (tagging files with artist name, track name, etc.)  and, most importantly, it is lossless.

3.          Invest in good quality ripping software.  I bought dbpoweramp’s ‘CD Ripper’ and am very happy with it.  It automatically goes on line and retrieves track names, cover art, etc.  It reads and re-reads the CD until it is as confident as it can be that it has an accurate rip.  It then calculates a checksum for each track it rips and compares this on-line with checksums obtained by other users when they ripped the same track.  If they match you can be highly confident of a totally accurate rip.   If no one has ever ripped the track before, it re-rips many times until it is as confident as it can be that it has read the data correctly.

As backup, I also use the free ‘Exact Audio Copy’ beta.  I find it less pleasant to use but occasionally it will read a track that ‘CD Ripper’ cannot.

4.          I use a tower PC with two DVD RW drives.  By running two simultaneous sessions of ‘CD Ripper’ I can rip two CDs at the same time.

5.          Drives are cheap.  Buy new ones.  My new Plextor rips far more reliably that the old drive it replaced.   If you can have two drives, have different brands.  Sometimes my Plextor drive will read a CD that my NEC cannot, and vice versa.   Give the drives a rest occasionally.  Mine seem to rip less well at the end of a long session.  Do they get hot?

6.          Think about the directory structure you are going to create and how you will use tags.  I am ripping to a computer running the Asset Upnp software (seems excellent) and assumed that the file structure I used would be reflected when I browse the Upnp server.  Not true.  Upnp organises music by artist, album, genre, etc. purely based on the tags your ripping software adds to tracks.  The directory structure is irrelevant.  You can use a tag editor (I use mp3tag – it works with flac) to put it right afterwards but it is far better to get it right first time.  Do you want Bob Dylan to appear in the Bs or the Ds?  How many different genres will be used?  Experiment a little.

7.          I naively thought “I’ve always taken care of my CDs.  I put them back into their cases after use.  They’ll be in good nick and will rip easily.”  No.

          Most do rip fast and clean but a significant minority do not.  Typically a dodgy disc will have two or three tracks that either cannot be read at all or give checksums that do not match those in the on-line database.      My strategy then is to try it in my other drive.  Next I take it into the kitchen, rub it with washing-up liquid, rinse and dry thoroughly, then try again.  This often works.  I have considered buying a CD repair machine but haven’t done so yet.  I have also bought new copies of around half a dozen CDs so far.  Hope you have a better experience.

8.          Think about backup.   RAID discs mean you won’t lose data if a disk fails, but this is not enough.  You need multiple copies of you data, preferably in different locations.  While I am still at this early stage I run a script with copies the ripped files on to a second PC.  Once I’m finished, I may also buy a cheap external drive, copy to that, then leave it at a friend’s house.

9.          I have worked in IT for most of my life and have loaded many, many programs and much data into computers off CDs.  In IT such data transfers have to be perfect.  If one bit is wrong its byte is wrong and the program or data is therefore corrupt.  No ifs or buts. 

So I have always assumed the same must be true when a CD player reads an audio CD.  My recent experience suggests this cannot be so.  Sometimes the ripping software takes ages to read a track, reading and re-reading segments over and over again until it reads the same bits a sufficient number of times to be confident it read them right.  In extreme cases it can take five minutes to get a clean rip of a two minute track.  Are audio CDs made to a lower standard than data CDs?  Can anyone more knowledgeable explain this to me?

10.         I have yet to hear a good quality streaming client, but on the basis of point 9) above there must be a sporting chance it will sound better than CD.  Given that a CD player must work in real time, presumably it sends a quick ‘best guess’ reading of the bits to the DAC?  In a streaming environment we should be confident that the bits going to the DAC are highly likely to be exactly the ones that are on the disc.  So, hopefully, better sound.  Am I right?

Hey, I ripped 15 CDs whilst typing this!