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Yep, I'd agree with NAS and Chromecast or Raspberry Pi or whatever to play.
The player is the bit that's most likely to date so I'd try and separate them and you'll also gene more flexibility for multiple players (e.g using Plex to play remotely).
I also used DBPoweramp for ripping. It's good for ripping with decent tags and minimal errors.
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More the latter, I guess.
The music in my collection is there for a reason. It's personal.
I find that my mind goes blank when confronted with a streaming service.
"Oh, it's like, all the music in the world on here, yeah?"
Then I have no idea what to put on.
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I think it all dates back to when you either owned it to play at your leisure (which was a great feeling) or you waited to hear it on the radio. Taping was a national pastime though.
Funny how there's not really a John Peel for music lovers despite everything being available. When you see the size of his collection it makes you wonder if he ever listened to most of it, just not enough time available.
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I’m with you. I’ve started compiling a collection within Tidal, that’s helping, but it’s nothing like running my finger along my CD racks.
So as I no longer own a computer with a CD drive presumably you can buy a USB one inexpensively. What do these software apps I’ve seen mentioned here do? Do they make it much more efficient than it used to be using iTunes?
I bought a FLAC download of Radiohead’s OK Not OK the other day to see what it’s about. It sounded great but it took several minutes to download. How long are we looking at to rip say 100 discs these days? -
I always wonder that. How do they take the time to let an album get under their skin over several listens? They do though. Marc Riley is my modern day Peel, not the same variety but if you like things that sound like The Fall you’re well served.
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I ripped 70 last week, it took me about 40 hours I would guess. That's to end up with them fully tagged and in folders with the album cover as the icon. It's a pretty intense process. I started with XLD but switched to a demo dbPoweramp which is a smoother experience.
I like the Fall stuff but Peel used to play Dub, Techno, Folk, Rock, Punk, Prog, pretty much anything that took his fancy. There are some great you tube videos of diggers getting access to his library. Of course physical rarity plays such a big part, you can put together a great collection pretty cheaply it's when you want the rare stuff it gets difficult.
Try Roon if you want something next level. They connect music and provide an intelligent wrapper for streaming from Tidal or Qubuz, it does cost a couple of hundred a year though for Roon and the streaming service.
I enjoy the Roon experience a lot but it's great to look through the record or CD spines and pick something you wouldn't have searched for or stumbled across.
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Oh wow, I definitely understand the appeal but is that right, over half an hour each disc? I’ve got several hundred in the loft, I would never have the patience. Must be great rediscovering all the old gems, mind.
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I bought a job lot. I guess I've ripped over a thousand by now. I don't think there's ever been a better time to put together a cd collection :)
When I say 40 hours that was my guess at the time I spent at my desk, I did manage to get some other stuff done at the same time (like reading this forum!).
I'm very deep into a recorded music phase at the moment. Sometimes I do more music production but the last few years have been about discovering new music.
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Ripping my cds takes less than 5 minutes per album at 320 kbps, I can no longer hear the difference at higher quality.
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Yeah, I'd say about 5 mins per CD on average.
I ripped all mine to FLAC. I've also used dB Poweramp to batch convert stuff ffom.the FLAC library to MP3 for use in the car, portable etc.
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Useful recommendations here, thanks! I need to free off the large bookcase occupied by CDs because it's needed...for books
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I ripped all my CDs to FLAC - I used EAC, not tried DBpoweramp - I guess they're all the same. I use a NAS to stream to a DAC. As per above - NAS does other stuff and the whole setup can be kept up to date more easily.
Took about a year to do all the CDs - I just used to do a few every now and again. I buy all music via downloads these days - 7digital, bandcamp, junodownload etc.
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I guess I've ripped over a thousand by now. I don't think there's ever been a better time to put together a cd collection :
I think about this quite a lot, I imagine people dumped vinyl way more slowly in the late 80s, than people dumping cds now.
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I look at my CDs and it's mostly dreck.
I took 200 odd of our CDs to Oxfam the other year as I simply wasn't picking any of them off the shelf to play (and they were mostly dreck). We probably kept 40 or so that we really didn't want to part with, still rarely play them.
Despite a strong hi fi heritage (which is why I lurk in this thread) I've got no recognisable hi fi system at home, there's a shit Sony mini system in the sitting room under the telly and most of the music gets played through quelle horreur an Amazon Echo Dot via Spotify, to be fair, it's mostly just radio, Baby Shark, or songs from Moana. All in glorious mono. I've got various bits (NAD 5440 and some random amp and speakers, etc) in cupboards around the flat but neither the time/space/need/inclination to sort it all out.
I think I'm blessed with sub-average quality hearing.
Loving the USB noise filters and digital signal balancers chat. Good to see that degrees of snake oil lives on in the digital world.
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USB noise filters
Not snake oil if you have an issue! Nothing to do with the digital signal (obviously) but you can get ground loops which will introduce audible RFI noise to your analog ins/outs.
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most of the music gets played through quelle horreur an Amazon Echo Dot
that would annoy me.
but then again, right now i'm happily listening to Fip Jazz which iirc is 192kbs, on a Rauk R2 mini thing. There was a time when that would annoy me.
Just played an Oscar Peterson track - sublime.
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ripped 800-900cd's via dbpoweramp over the last 4 years or so, all in lossless flac, download sections to my mp3 player for when i'm out and about, have listened to every cd i own over this period, good way to go through everything and get some variety in your listening
thought about offering a cd ripping service but i think it might get a bit boring after a while
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thought about offering a cd ripping service but i think it might get a bit boring after a while
Years ago (blimey, early 2000's) I was the techie in a group that came up with something very similar to the Brennan.
The prototype I knocked up with a Linux box demoed really well. You stuck a CD in and it would start playing, you could skip to the next track / etc and it all looked like a normal CD player (albeit in a huge box). But part way through playing the second track (usually about 5 minutes in) it would suddenly eject and the music was still playing, you could still skip forward/backwards/etc and select different tracks and it all still worked as if the CD was in there.
(Remember this was early 2000's, people thought this was some kind of voodoo)
Under the covers it was ripping the CD to raw data (using cdda2wav I think) as soon as you put the CD in and using that ripped data to play. If you skipped to the next track and it hadn't already started to rip that one it would stop the track it was ripping and rip/play the one you wanted, then go back and fill in the missing tracks. But it was great watching the faces of the people we were demoing it to when it just ejected part way through the spiel. It was even better when I got a faster CDROM drive and could rip things even faster (can't remember the speeds but ~5 minutes would make me think I had a 12x CDROM in there at the beginning).
The plan was to convert to FLAC or some other lossless format (FLAC was only just around in 2001) and allow people to store their entire CD collection on an internal HDD.
Broadband was also around and we also had the idea of allowing people to buy albums online and have it download the album over DSL to the box (assuming we'd already bought a copy and ripped it - the plan was to seed it with our own album collections and also regularly buy new albums when they came out - if we didn't have it they could pre-order it and we'd rush out to buy a copy and rip it ASAP). To try and avoid copyright/ownership issues we were going to buy a physical copy of each CD bought through the service (and store it for them - shipping it to them in batches as part of their monthly subscription).
Revenue was going to come from the unit sale plus a subscription if you wanted to buy stuff with the online service. We were also going to look to make money on each album sale through the system (hopefully making a small amount on each sale and also chasing cheaper prices by buying albums wholesale [if we got big enough] or in sales/promotions). I wasn't on the money or legal side of things...
Which all brings me to this point:-
thought about offering a cd ripping service but i think it might get a bit boring after a while
Having the prospect of needing to rip lots and lots of CDs, and quickly, we came up with various plans, in the end we looked at using PCs in big tower cases with as many CD drives as possible and automate as much of it as possible (metadata and artwork parts). With CD drives with a 50x read speed you could do a typical album in just over a minute. With 8 such drives in a tower you'd be swapping CDs about every 10 seconds, nowhere near enough time to deal with the artwork/metadata manual checks. We'd planned on doing two runs with each CD (in two different machines/drives) in order to ensure the data was read correctly.
With 2 drives and two passes you'd get about a minute to do the manual stuff with each CD (metadata checks and artwork stuff). The artwork is much easier nowadays as there are plenty of services that will get you that info from the metadata.
It's dull but if you can get someone to pay you to stick CDs in a machine once a minute every minute for a day (for ~400 CDs) whilst working from home then it could work out. The biggest cost/annoyance for the people involved would be transit of the raw media, easier if you just did it for friends who could box it up for you and deliver it in person somehow.
The project died for several reasons. We had too many non-technical people who all wanted to get involved, not enough non-technical work to do, and not enough technical people (only me really). We were all working at a tech startup anyway so we all had enough to do in our day jobs.
Well done to J.Brennan who had the same idea (probably earlier) and executed on it successfully.
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Audiophiles hifi appreciation thread old and new
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@coppiThat
CD Ripping - I did most of my collection years ago when iPods were fairly new, it all went when my computer died. Can’t imagine putting myself through it again. There’s not much from my collection that I can’t find on Spotify or Tidal so I don’t store any music files. Just wonder what the benefits are. Is it the higher res, obscure collections not found on streaming libraries or more that there’s a sense of ownership that you’re accessing music that you’ve actually bought on a physical format?