Bored ripping CDs with errors

I have bought many discs from music magpie......only one would not rip. I thought about polishing etc, but quite frankly at prices like 4 for £6, I just bought another one. When I first started out buying cd,s over 20 years ago I was paying £10 or higher, so today even new cd,s are cheaper than that on amazon or magpie.

My long-term ripping strategy has been to use iTunes to rip to Apple lossless files - primarily for the car / iPod.

I use dbPowerAmp's batch conversion tool to convert these files to FLAC on my NAS for upnp to three points round the house.

I recently decided to run approx 1700 albums though their AccurateRip tool to check how healthy the FLACs were. I'm still working through these but it identified a good few albums (100-200) with one or more inaccurate (track) rips.

I'm now re-doing those using the dbPowerAmp ripping tool. Most it gets right / improves to fully accurate although there still one or two for which it gives an inaccurate track or two. I haven't yet gone back to try to find out why. It has ripped these tracks, and I'm assuming they're perfectly playable.

One interesting discovery has been that the ripping tool will identify hidden 'pre-tracks'. My copy of 'Think Tank' by Blur has one of these. I'm pleased that the tool did manage to rip it; it did take about three hours for a six minute track though!

Quite a few more to work my way through, and then there's probably a lot that it couldn't check for accuracy. 

Gavin - if I understand you correctly does the batch tool allow AccurateRip analysis of lossless tracks already ripped? If so that is a handy feature, as I've often found iTunes works very well, though more recently artwork is often wrong (or different).

Gazza posted:

I have bought many discs from music magpie......only one would not rip. I thought about polishing etc, but quite frankly at prices like 4 for £6, I just bought another one. When I first started out buying cd,s over 20 years ago I was paying £10 or higher, so today even new cd,s are cheaper than that on amazon or magpie.

I'll have to give them a shot I think.

What I find crazy is the cost of CD quality lossless downloads - on Qobuz for example many items not available in hi-res are £10-£12 for CD quality - apart from convenience this makes no sense when a physical CD is cheaper, maybe £5 online, and includes a free MP3 download to satisfy instant playback needs from one vendor.  

To be honest this is one area where Qobuz probably loses money from me - I have a Sublime subscription so can stream CD quality anyway - Sublime users get good discounts on much of the hi-res catalogue but not on CD quality material which is odd, and if such discounts were in place I'd probably buy some CD quality material from them, but not when it's cheaper to have a physical disc.

TOBYJUG posted:

Aside from "unknown" when ripping, I often get another album and artist being tagged up.  Must be from fulfilling similar data lookup of the number and time of tracks. Etc.

Some have had an uncanny resemblance.

I was looking for some cover art for a Kinks compilation on some websites - I kept getting 'no kinks' hosepipes coming up!

Alley Cat posted:

Gavin - if I understand you correctly does the batch tool allow AccurateRip analysis of lossless tracks already ripped? If so that is a handy feature, as I've often found iTunes works very well, though more recently artwork is often wrong (or different).

AccurateRip is part of the PerfectTunes suite from dbPowerAmp - an additional product to the ripping / batch conversion software. It costs something like £30.

I simply pointed it at the FLAC files on my NAS and left it to do its thing. It did take quite some time, but the results look useful. I suspect it could check the loseless file in iTunes if that's what you wanted, but I didn't do this.

You can export the results of the AccurateRip scan to text files to work through.

Gavin B posted:

Alley Cat posted:

Gavin - if I understand you correctly does the batch tool allow AccurateRip analysis of lossless tracks already ripped? If so that is a handy feature, as I've often found iTunes works very well, though more recently artwork is often wrong (or different).

AccurateRip is part of the PerfectTunes suite from dbPowerAmp - an additional product to the ripping / batch conversion software. It costs something like £30.

I simply pointed it at the FLAC files on my NAS and left it to do its thing. It did take quite some time, but the results look useful. I suspect it could check the loseless file in iTunes if that's what you wanted, but I didn't do this.

You can export the results of the AccurateRip scan to text files to work through.

It can check yor iTunes library if pointed at it.

It's also good in that it tells you which tracks are bad so you only need to re-rip the affected tracks, not the whole disk.

It's also good that it can scan your metadata and show inconsistencies for you to correct (good for "The Beatles" vs "Beatles, The" type of issues  in the sort and display fields which make artists appear where you don't always expect them

Alley Cat posted:

TOBYJUG posted:

Aside from "unknown" when ripping, I often get another album and artist being tagged up.  Must be from fulfilling similar data lookup of the number and time of tracks. Etc.

Some have had an uncanny resemblance.

I was looking for some cover art for a Kinks compilation on some websites - I kept getting 'no kinks' hosepipes coming up!

Have you tired Amazon - you can save the pictures from that to your local disk, then use Perfect Tunes, dBpoweramp, etc to "load from file". The same may apply to other sites which sell music, I've only tried Amazon.

TallGuy posted:

Gavin B posted:

Alley Cat posted:

Gavin - if I understand you correctly does the batch tool allow AccurateRip analysis of lossless tracks already ripped? If so that is a handy feature, as I've often found iTunes works very well, though more recently artwork is often wrong (or different).

AccurateRip is part of the PerfectTunes suite from dbPowerAmp - an additional product to the ripping / batch conversion software. It costs something like £30.

I simply pointed it at the FLAC files on my NAS and left it to do its thing. It did take quite some time, but the results look useful. I suspect it could check the loseless file in iTunes if that's what you wanted, but I didn't do this.

You can export the results of the AccurateRip scan to text files to work through.

It can check yor iTunes library if pointed at it.

It's also good in that it tells you which tracks are bad so you only need to re-rip the affected tracks, not the whole disk.

It's also good that it can scan your metadata and show inconsistencies for you to correct (good for "The Beatles" vs "Beatles, The" type of issues  in the sort and display fields which make artists appear where you don't always expect them

Thanks for confirming - those are excellent features - I must admit when I've loaded the demo I've not found it that intuitive which is perhaps why I'd not really explored it much.  Will need to revisit.

Alley Cat posted:

Gazza posted:

I have bought many discs from music magpie......only one would not rip. I thought about polishing etc, but quite frankly at prices like 4 for £6, I just bought another one. When I first started out buying cd,s over 20 years ago I was paying £10 or higher, so today even new cd,s are cheaper than that on amazon or magpie.

I'll have to give them a shot I think.

What I find crazy is the cost of CD quality lossless downloads - on Qobuz for example many items not available in hi-res are £10-£12 for CD quality - apart from convenience this makes no sense when a physical CD is cheaper, maybe £5 online, and includes a free MP3 download to satisfy instant playback needs from one vendor.  

To be honest this is one area where Qobuz probably loses money from me - I have a Sublime subscription so can stream CD quality anyway - Sublime users get good discounts on much of the hi-res catalogue but not on CD quality material which is odd, and if such discounts were in place I'd probably buy some CD quality material from them, but not when it's cheaper to have a physical disc.

I don't have a Qobuz subscription, but do use it to purchase music. I've been considering using Simon-In-Suffolk's technique of using Bubble upnp to be able to use Qobuz  gaplessly, but so far not found the time to try it.

Like you I find the "CD quality" prices too high - I find this with all sites I've tried. As you say, it shouldn't cost more than the physical product.  I do find that there's a bigger selection of High Res. albums at Qobuz that I'm interested in than other sites, hence buying them from there. I am fed up with having to rename all the tracks and change most of the metadata to make downloads from them look like everything else in my library.

TallGuy posted:

Alley Cat posted:

TOBYJUG posted:

Aside from "unknown" when ripping, I often get another album and artist being tagged up.  Must be from fulfilling similar data lookup of the number and time of tracks. Etc.

Some have had an uncanny resemblance.

I was looking for some cover art for a Kinks compilation on some websites - I kept getting 'no kinks' hosepipes coming up!

Have you tired Amazon - you can save the pictures from that to your local disk, then use Perfect Tunes, dBpoweramp, etc to "load from file". The same may apply to other sites which sell music, I've only tried Amazon.

Thanks - yes, it was Amazon turning up hosepipes!

You can usually find the artwork somewhere, though some albums are more tricky or have low res art found.

Interestingly for a couple of albums I've used a scanner app on my iPhone to get a photo of the CD booklet cover page - I use one called Scanner Pro which works very well (as do several others) and automatically crops the  square/rectangular shape and adjusts for the camera being held slightly skewed - sometimes takes a couple of goes, but I then email myself a JPG of the 'scan' and drag and drop it to dBpoweramp.