[shuttleboi]

I am in the process of ripping my collection of 700 or so CDs to FLAC (using CDEx with the LAME and libFLAC libraries). I buy 99% of my CDs new. The whole process is going slowly.

Questions for you:

1. Do you rip every CD that you buy? I spend much of my time in front of my computer, so getting a good FLAC rip pays off for me, but ripping takes so long that I feel I shouldn't spend the time to rip CDs I probably won't listen to very much. On the other hand, I'm afraid that if I don't rip it, the CD will go onto my shelf of 700 CDs and will never be seen again.

2. Why do some CDs take a long time to rip and encode (e.g. a full rip-and-encode at a rate of 1 song every 2 minutes)? Other CDs can be done at a rate of 1 song every 30 seconds.

3. In Windows, are there any tricks to increasing the ripping speed? I am using Windows 7 on a new Intel i7 3.0Ghz CPU. is there any advantage to performing the CPU-intensive and CD-intensive ripping with different multicore affinities?

Thanks.

 

[jilgiljongiljing]

EAC with freedb to FLAC. If its a sucky recording then to MP3. I dont do a lot of cds at the same time, I dont buy many cds at the same time either, 2-3 at most. So its not too hard for me. But if I had to do it all again, I'll just download torrents for the cds that I have, cos its much easier that way.

 

[catachresis]

Another vote for EAC. I tried Plextools a few times, but the program was buggy and resource heavy. EAC is quite hard to beat.

 

[Ham Sandwich]

All of my CDs get ripped or they won't get listened to. I no longer have a stand-alone CD player.

I clean the CD with a little hand cranked CD cleaner before ripping. Even if the CD looks clean. A fingerprint or spec of dirt can cause EAC to take a longer time to rip.

 

[Jaska]

Quote:

Originally Posted by shuttleboi /img/forum/go_quote.gif I'm afraid that if I don't rip it, the CD will go onto my shelf of 700 CDs and will never be seen again.

I've been thinking about the same thing lately. My CD collection is around the same size, and I'm 38. I don't want to do the math, but clearly it's going to come down to finding some favorites in the collection and leaving the rest of the archive for the future generation.

As far as ripping advice goes, if I were to use my Windows desktop PC to go through the whole process again, I would probably just buy dBpoweramp Reference and use that. At this point though, I would really like to start ripping CDs on my Mac. I've done enough testing with XLD now to be sure that my rips always match my rips of the same CDs on my PC (comparing WAVs with EAC), so I think that's going to be my go-to software.

Setting up another listening area in my house is also one of my plans for this summer. I most likely will trim back my iTunes library and use the new CD player to play CDs I wouldn't necessarily listen to that much, but would still like to hear after going to the trouble of fishing the disc from the bookshelf--I somehow think I'll appreciate the music more that way

 

[Telix]

I ripped my entire collection (about 350 CDs) to FLAC with .cue files, to allow reburning to an exact copy, using EAC. I only rip to FLAC for the archival purpose, I can't a/b/x it vs a LAME -V2 encode. I then download cover art and put it in the directory with it, and it's done.

I also do not know why some CDs start ripping at like 3x and some at 7x. I would imagine it's pressing quality or reflective qualities and so on. I only buy Samsung drives because they don't (at least most of them don't, apparently) cache audio data, which means I don't have to enable the "disable audio cache" feature in EAC (which slows things down SIGNIFICANTLY). I would highly suggest getting a $20 Samsung drive if you have 700 to rip, as it will save you tons of time.

As to the previous comment that a fingerprint or scratch causes issues - no, it really doesn't. Nearly EVERY issue I've had with EAC are from LABEL SIDE issues. If there has been any damage on the label side, this actually is where the damage to the DATA ITSELF takes place. The side that everyone normally worries about is actually just a layer of plastic that can deal with a lot of damage. Unfortunately, this isn't the case with the other side. If you get a CD that causes CRC errors in EAC, I can basically guarantee you if you look closely you will see some area of weird flaking on the label side.

 

[guyx1992]

I rip every CD I buy. I use iTunes --> ALAC.

 

[jewman]

I rip all of them to my iBook.

Max --> FLAC --> OggS --> iTunes

 

[uraflit]

EAC -> FLAC or LAME -v 0 MP3

ez

 

[Elluzion]

EAC ==> .FLAC

then rip the .FLAC file to 320 CBR for whatever i need

 

[Ham Sandwich]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Telix /img/forum/go_quote.gif As to the previous comment that a fingerprint or scratch causes issues - no, it really doesn't. Nearly EVERY issue I've had with EAC are from LABEL SIDE issues.

I buy used CDs and not all of them are clean. I've had cases where fingerprints were enough to cause EAC to turn on the red lights indicating that it has to re-read parts of the disc. Cleaning the disc with a simple hand cranked CD cleaner is enough to fix that.

A disc that is truly unreadable without errors usually has obvious damage. The circular scratches from a CD being played in a car CD player are the worst. You can't really fix those.

 

[trickywombat]

I've ripped all my Redbook CDs and keep them in storage. Only CDs I have around are either SACDs, DVD-A or Hybrid Discs.

A disc rip might take longer if it needs error correction, so I won't be too concerned about getting it to rip faster.

Another alternative is to use a CD ripping service if you don't want to sit through 700 CDs getting ripped.

 

[rcb020]

I've been using foobar to rip my cds to FLAC, much like you would importing a cd on iTunes. What is the advantage of using EAC rather than just using foobar, are the quality of my songs not as good as they could be?

 

[Ham Sandwich]

I use EAC or dBpoweramp because they both support Accuraterip. Accuraterip gives me confidence that I've got a good rip (as long as the CD is in the database). A rip that fails Accuraterip is rare (I have only had very very few). But I'd rather detect an error like that at the time I'm ripping than detect the error possibly years later when I listen to the music and hear a pop due to a bad rip.

If you've got a CD that is clean (no scratches or other problems) you should get equal results with Foobar or EAC or dBpoweramp. It's the CDs that have problems where you might encounter a ripping error that Accuraterip would detect.

 

[ronnieb]

Truthfully, there is nothing you can do to speed the process on Windows hardware wise.. The Intel Core I7 lineup is currently the fastest processor you can get, and it has hyperthreading technology ,which means it seems like you have 8 cores at once.