Ripping Mission Accomplished (mostly) - Thanks to Spoon and Illustrate

[Dat Ei]

Re: Ripping Mission Accomplished (mostly) - Thanks to Spoon and Illustrate

And--until March--attended as many live shows as possible every year. My favorite way of enjoying music is still a live show, in a good venue.

Oh yes! I second that. Usually I visit up to 30-40 concerts a year in my favorite Jazz Club, but due to Covid-19 most of the concerts have been canceled. In the last weeks the first concerts took place with a drastically reduced audience. They are allowed to let 20% (36 people) of the max. capacity (180 people) in. And instead of a nearly daily concert only one or two concerts take place a week. That's really hard for the over 40 year ol' club, which has seen tons and tons of international Jazz musicians.

Dat Ei

[Spoon]

Re: Ripping Mission Accomplished (mostly) - Thanks to Spoon and Illustrate

Thanks, reminds me I have a whole pile of CDs to rip myself...

[garym]

Re: Ripping Mission Accomplished (mostly) - Thanks to Spoon and Illustrate

And don't forget - ripping is one thing - the joy to listen to and to support artists is even more important in those strange days! Copy kills music!

Agree. That's why I don't torrent and share around my library. And--until March--attended as many live shows as possible every year. My favorite way of enjoying music is still a live show, in a good venue.

[Dat Ei]

Re: Ripping Mission Accomplished (mostly) - Thanks to Spoon and Illustrate

Congrats, Gary!

My story is very similar to yours. An iPod was the inital reason to rip my CDs to mp3 - that is more than one decade ago. And we all know that those rips where everything but not free of errors. In 2014 I've re-ripped my collection containing something more than 2.500 CDs to flac with dBpa. With a single CD drive (like you) it took me about 3-4 months to accomplish the mission. Today, my collection contains about 3.300 CDs and there is only one Jazz-CD Box with 160 CD left - I lack a little bit of motivation to rip that last box, because I fear that the metadata in the databases aren't very neat for this cheap CD box. But maybe I should follow your example...

And don't forget - ripping is one thing - the joy to listen to and to support artists is even more important in those strange days! Copy kills music!


Dat Ei

[garym]

Only the digital music geeks that hang around here can appreciate my recent accomplishment. My wife simply says "meh...."

First a big shoutout to Spoon and his work. None of this would have been possible without the tools provided by Illustrate!

With the COVID-19 lockdowns, working from home, and nowhere to go, I decided to finally finish ripping all my CDs to FLAC. Many years ago when I got the first or second generation iPod, I ripped all my CDs to mp3 (192kbps CBR), not even using a secure ripper (something called "musicmatch" as I recall). Yes, I can hear you all groaning now (many in self-recognition). I eventually educated myself and started ripping new CDs with dbPoweramp. And I went back to re-rip thousands of CDs to FLAC. I made a lot of progress with my favorite CDs but still had about 1,000 CDs left to re-rip. Using my isolation time, I finally reripped all these (turns out there were about 900 to rerip). I did all this one CD at a time (no batch ripper). I make too many edits to artist name, genres, etc. to make batch ripping worthwhile for me.

Of course after the reripping (thanks AccurateRip!), I had to then painstakingly delete all the mp3 versions of these albums from my library. That was a real pain and required a lot of attention to detail (e.g., some things were either in or not in my "compilations" directory, some artists had been ripped with slightly different names, particularly when a couple of artists made an album together). But I got that done, then merged in the new FLAC files.

With my updated Library, I decided to also clean up some naming and genre issues. I'm a longtime PerfectTunes user (mostly for post-rip AR checking and some artwork cleanup). But I had never used the ID Tag updating part of the program. I used this to fix lots of artist naming issues for both album artist and artist. (For example, band names with "and" vs. & vs. "And" or with "The" vs "the" etc.). And the typical misspellings or different capitalization (Jimmy Lafave vs Jimmy LaFave). Anyhow, PerfectTunes made this dead simple. Also had wanted to simplify and reduce the number of genres I use. And PerfectTunes made this super simple.

New library now installed on my main systems at home, weekend cottage, and office, and lots of backups made. I used dbpa converter and "Covert to TEST CONVERSION" on all the drives to confirm that all the files are not corrupt and can be decoded properly. In the end, I have about 4,000 ripped albums to FLAC. CDs stored away in "jewel sleves" (with CD, booklets, and backmatter) in specially made cabinets to save lots of space, but hoping I never have to look at again!. Still have about another 4,000 "albums" in mp3/m4a (mostly thousands of live shows, etc., legally obtained (Archive.org, etc.).

Not that I'm ever really done. I still buy lots of CDs, but at least I can keep up with ripping the new ones, as I have for many years now. And as many of you know, tagging is a never ending job, as one finds things or changes ones mind about naming.

Anyhow, you folks are the only ones I "know" that can at all appreciate what I'm saying. Thanks for listening.

p.s. And in case you're wondering--yes, I maintained a couple of archive HDDs, containing my library *prior* to all this fixing in case I find something has gone horribly wrong.