[rbalcom]

  Perhaps it's just me but... here goes. Before buying the ripper I used to rip from CDs using software on my computer. For some reason this software did not recognise when the 380 was attached (just didn't see it) so all rips were stored in a directory on my PC. So, lets say I have a few CDs to rip. I sit there with the software, watching it rip, waiting... now it's ripped. Go to the ripped file, search online for the mp3 tags - Album art. Rip another... rinse and repeat. Now using my file software copy all the ripped tracks to the 380. With the ripper. Take the ripper and 380 and plug into a convenient power socket. Put a CD in the ripper. Get on with my life (usually on my PC which is now not tied up or slowed down with ripping - I make my living using the PC). At some point, check that the CD is ripped and put another in to be ripped. And so on. When the last CD is ripped simply put the ripper away until next time. All the ripped tracks are in the ripping folder on my 380. If I want to I can do as mentioned in my post and copy them somewhere else or (which I usually do) just make playlists of whatever I want to listen to right from the ripping folder. Never need to touch the PC in the entire process. Neither do I need to even be present except to pop in from time to time to change to the next CD. And album art is automatically added during the ripping process. I'm not tied up. The PC isn't tied up. And once ripped there is nothing more for me to do except enjoy the music. I guess for me an analogy would be the difference between washing clothes by hand or just popping them in the washing machine and let IT do all the work. As I say - I love it.

Thanks for taking the time to explain it for me. I can see why you love it and that it is great for your use. I guess I am more of a hand wash guy liking the ability to control all aspects of the operation.

 

[TaylorDawe]

  Everything I ripped is in the Ripping folder and the AK380 has it all organised into Band / Album / Songs all alphabetical.
 
Would just be nice if a £3k player ripped to an SD card without you having to sort it yourself - or, even better, had a 1Tb internal memory - I've got an iPod Classic with a 1Tb flash, so how hard could it be? How does it work with other players - say iBasso - do they rip files straight to SD cards?
 
Somebody made an interesting comment re AK Ripper Flac file size being larger than it should - with 2 x 256Gb storage on my player and half that storage capacity now full, I seem to have have just under 7,000 music files (songs). So, with the whole thing full eventually I'll have approx 14,000 songs. I have a full 500Gb iPod Classic with just under 17,000 songs, so maybe the AK Ripper Flac files are larger. 

I don't know about the size of FLAC files produced by the AK Ripper as opposed to the same file produced by a software ripper on my computer but, tbh Monty, I don't care about file size, only about quality. I have lots of files of around a gig or so in 24/192 I've downloaded.

 

[bflat]

I made a suggestion to AK regarding AK Connect a long time ago. That is, add folder sync features that allows automatic download of any new music files added to a specified folder(s) from your PC to your AK DAP. This makes ripping and downloading new albums very seamless. On another note, for those with the ripper, I would highly recommend that you store your ripped files on a backup drive somewhere. There is no joy in having to re-rip hundreds of CDs if your primary device fails or gets lost. I even go a step further and have all my tracks backed up in Microsoft Onedrive since I get 1 TB of cloud storage with my Office subscription.

 

[TaylorDawe]

  I made a suggestion to AK regarding AK Connect a long time ago. That is, add folder sync features that allows automatic download of any new music files added to a specified folder(s) from your PC to your AK DAP. This makes ripping and downloading new albums very seamless. On another note, for those with the ripper, I would highly recommend that you store your ripped files on a backup drive somewhere. There is no joy in having to re-rip hundreds of CDs if your primary device fails or gets lost. I even go a step further and have all my tracks backed up in Microsoft Onedrive since I get 1 TB of cloud storage with my Office subscription.

Yes, I agree, no fun having to rip everything again. Even worse having to download or (worse still) buy stuff again. I back everything up to micro SD (multiple times for stuff I've bought online).

 

[Uncle Monty]

  I made a suggestion to AK regarding AK Connect a long time ago. That is, add folder sync features that allows automatic download of any new music files added to a specified folder(s) from your PC to your AK DAP. This makes ripping and downloading new albums very seamless. On another note, for those with the ripper, I would highly recommend that you store your ripped files on a backup drive somewhere. There is no joy in having to re-rip hundreds of CDs if your primary device fails or gets lost. I even go a step further and have all my tracks backed up in Microsoft Onedrive since I get 1 TB of cloud storage with my Office subscription.

Seriously, if that ever happens I'm chucking the Ripper and just going to drag ALAC files over from my iTunes EHD. I ripped about 1,000 CDs on my Mac over the years and I'm in the process of ripping most of them for the 2nd time on THE RIPPER ... I must be daft.

 

[rbalcom]

Somebody made an interesting comment re AK Ripper Flac file size being larger than it should - with 2 x 256Gb storage on my player and half that storage capacity now full, I seem to have have just under 7,000 music files (songs). So, with the whole thing full eventually I'll have approx 14,000 songs. I have a full 500Gb iPod Classic with just under 17,000 songs, so maybe the AK Ripper Flac files are larger. 

I made that comment and it is a big negative for me. I have a music library of over 17,000 tracks and growing daily. Those tracks vary from Apple Lossy format to various sample rate FLAC lossless format, to DSD. Because of the issues with file transfers between Apple and Android devices, my desire is to put my whole library on the DAP using its library functions and custom playlists to select what tracks to listen to. My current library is about 370GB so file size matters to me.

FLAC files can be compressed without loosing any data and are by most ripping programs like XLD or dbpoweramp. Typical FLAC file size from them is 17MB to 22MB while the AK Ripper only produces uncompressed FLAC files in the 40MB to 50MB range.

Those are the facts. Each person has to decide what matters to them. Personally, I think that the future will see streaming used using features like AK Connect in our homes and cars so size will not matter as much as it does today.

 

[bflat]

I made that comment and it is a big negative for me. I have a music library of over 17,000 tracks and growing daily. Those tracks vary from Apple Lossy format to various sample rate FLAC lossless format, to DSD. Because of the issues with file transfers between Apple and Android devices, my desire is to put my whole library on the DAP using its library functions and custom playlists to select what tracks to listen to. My current library is about 370GB so file size matters to me.

FLAC files can be compressed without loosing any data and are by most ripping programs like XLD or dbpoweramp. Typical FLAC file size from them is 17MB to 22MB while the AK Ripper only produces uncompressed FLAC files in the 40MB to 50MB range.

Those are the facts. Each person has to decide what matters to them. Personally, I think that the future will see streaming used using features like AK Connect in our homes and cars so size will not matter as much as it does today.

Interesting. Encoding FLAC takes a lot more processing power than decoding so the larger FLAC size could be due to a processor limitation on the ripper and/or AK DAP. I'm sure theres a FLAC utility somewhere that can show what the compression level is on the ripper FLAC files.

 

[haiku]

 
Seriously, if that ever happens I'm chucking the Ripper and just going to drag ALAC files over from my iTunes EHD. I ripped about 1,000 CDs on my Mac over the years and I'm in the process of ripping most of them for the 2nd time on THE RIPPER ... I must be daft.

Nope. I´ve tried all available ripping software for the Mac, and to me the AK Ripper makes the best sounding rips. That´s why I also ripped all my CD´s again. 

 

[Uncle Monty]

 

 
Seriously, if that ever happens I'm chucking the Ripper and just going to drag ALAC files over from my iTunes EHD. I ripped about 1,000 CDs on my Mac over the years and I'm in the process of ripping most of them for the 2nd time on THE RIPPER ... I must be daft.

Nope. I´ve tried all available ripping software for the Mac, and to me the AK Ripper makes the best sounding rips. That´s why I also ripped all my CD´s again. 

You don't suppose copying it onto your Mac via AFT and then re-copying to the AK SD card affects the sound? TBH, I currently have 2no copies of everything on my AK and I can't hear a difference. That said, I've spent most of my life listening to Motorhead turned uo to 11, so maybe I'm not the best judge.

 

[rbalcom]

Nope. I´ve tried all available ripping software for the Mac, and to me the AK Ripper makes the best sounding rips. That´s why I also ripped all my CD´s again. 

If you can hear an improvement in SQ then it is not daft, but if someone can not hear a difference, then it is probably daft to rip everything again.

 

[rbalcom]

You don't suppose copying it onto your Mac via AFT and then re-copying to the AK SD card affects the sound? TBH, I currently have 2no copies of everything on my AK and I can't hear a difference. That said, I've spent most of my life listening to Motorhead turned uo to 11, so maybe I'm not the best judge.

If you can not hear a difference, then why does it matter. In my opinion, no it does not have any effect on SQ, but I would not be surprised to see someone tell you the exact opposite of that on here.

AFT is on the bottom of the list of Apple to Android interface programs. SyncMate lets the Android devices show up in Finder, but is still very slow and unstable. My experience has been it is best if the Mac and the device are doing nothing else while trying to transfer files. Also, Blue Harvest from the App Store is good for cleaning up the invisible extra OS X files that are not used by the Android or Windows operating systems. What you decide to do is up to you. Just base it on your experience and desires rather than what someone else says they hear or love.

 

[Uncle Monty]

It's all gone wrong today - previously I copied files from internal storage to the SD card using AFT app - I then copied the files to an EHD for back up (glad I did) - finally deleted files from internal storage Ripping folder using AFT app in order to free it up for more music.
 
All music files have disappeared from the player - internal storage and SD card completely empty save for the music that came with the device. All artwork and artist / album / song titles still on player - when I try to play a song get message 'This song cannot be played back - Too many unsupported files - Exiting music player'.
 
What happened? AFT app seems to have deleted SD card as well as Internal Memory - but why?

 

[Uncle Monty]

Even weirder - plug player back into laptop - activate AFT app - AFT shows Internal Storage empty (as it should be) but SD card full of music files. 
 
The player, however, shows SD card as empty.
 
I don't understand these things - what's going on?

 

[rbalcom]

Even weirder - plug player back into laptop - activate AFT app - AFT shows Internal Storage empty (as it should be) but SD card full of music files. 

The player, however, shows SD card as empty.

I don't understand these things - what's going on?

You need to initialize the library by doing a complete scan. After turning the AK380 on, give it a little time to mount the sdcard. Since I don't know your settings I am going to tell you to pull down the menu and tap on the settings nut in the upper right corner. Scroll down to the Default Settings and tap it. The top item on the list is Initialize Media Scan. Tap it to start a complete scan of the device. That will take a while to complete. You can back out of the menu once it starts. A small circle on the left side of the information bar next to the icon that looks like an sdcard in a white circle let's you know it is performing the scan. When it goes away, it is done. Good luck.

 

[Uncle Monty]

 

Even weirder - plug player back into laptop - activate AFT app - AFT shows Internal Storage empty (as it should be) but SD card full of music files. 

The player, however, shows SD card as empty.

I don't understand these things - what's going on?

You need to initialize the library by doing a complete scan. After turning the AK380 on, give it a little time to mount the sdcard. Since I don't know your settings I am going to tell you to pull down the menu and tap on the settings nut in the upper right corner. Scroll down to the Default Settings and tap it. The top item on the list is Initialize Media Scan. Tap it to start a complete scan of the device. That will take a while to complete. You can back out of the menu once it starts. A small circle on the left side of the information bar next to the icon that looks like an sdcard in a white circle let's you know it is performing the scan. When it goes away, it is done. Good luck.

Thanks RB - I'm in the process of copying the music from the EHD to SD card on the ATF app, so the player's tied up for the next few hours. It does show the SD card filling up on the AK settings menu so I'm hopeful. Excuse my ignorance, but is the Media Scan simply to check whether there's anything on the SD card that's maybe not showing up? No music would play, so I'm pretty sure the SD card was empty. I tried un-mounting the SD card before ejecting it and removing it, then putting it back in but this just confirmed my worst fears. I'm sure this is an issue with the AFT app and my Mac rather than the player, though it is frustrating to lose a month's worth of ripped CDs. I take it none of this would be a problem using Windows 10?