Success! Finally ripped my whole CD collection! Here's my story (w/ stats). . .

[RecklessMission]

So, I finally finished ripping my entire CD collection this month! Scroll to the end for some stats, otherwise here's the story. . .

I began ripping my entire collection of 2,017 CDs with dBpoweramp in January of 2018 and finished in October of 2020. Took just under three years.

I started collecting CDs of just about every conceivable genre in about 1991, adding about 70 CDs to my collection per year, on average - with those numbers dwindling significantly in about 2016 as I switched almost entirely to a combination of Spotify streaming and buying lossless album downloads of my favorite new albums (from Bandcamp, Qobuz, 7Digital etc.). I think I bought only one CD this year, and one last year. I just don't have space for new ones anymore.

I ripped 41% of my collection in 2018, just 5% in 2019, and 54% in 2020. Working from home most of this year, because of the pandemic, gave me the opportunity to spend way more time ripping my collection. I used a 2017 MacBook Pro, with two LG "ultra slim" optical drives (GP65NB60) and one backup Lite-On internal optical drive (IHAS124-14) for those really tough rips. I ripped all my albums to 16bit/44.1kHz (CD quality) AIFF and have three backup drives, cloned from a single master drive. I also kept a running spreadsheet of artist and album titles, UPC codes, dates ripped, rip status, and other notes.

Here are the crucial stats:

• CDs ripped = 2,017
  
• Accurate ripped = 1,909 (95%)
  
• Partial accurate = 43 (2%)
  
• Not accurate = 65 (3%)
  
• Secure ripped = 1993 (99%)
  
• Partial secure = 22 (1%)
  
• Not secure ripped = 2 (0.1%)
  
• Burst ripped (full or partial) = 11 (1%)

The big numbers for me here (and the most satisfying) are the fact that 99% of my collection ripped entirely securely, and 95% ripped entirely accurately. That other 5%, the "non-accurate" rips, were mostly due to the fact that those albums weren't in the accurate rip database yet - but most of those did rip securely anyway. I had to burst rip just 1% of my collection due to scratched or faulty discs. 1% ripped "partially" securely (ie. some tracks secure, some insecure) and just 0.1% entirely insecure (but they still sound fine to my ears).

This is all a testament to the fact that dBpoweramp is an excellent product, and a huge lifesaver for me as I figure out what to do with my relatively large stockpile of CDs. Huge huge thanks to Spoon and dBpoweramp! I'll keep using this product for years, mostly the Converter functions now, but the Ripper too if and when I do acquire the occasional CD in the future.

Thank you!

[Spoon]

Re: Success! Finally ripped my whole CD collection! Here's my story (w/ stats). . .

Great stats, we estimate around 98% of discs will be error free, so you are right on the money so to speak.

[Michael1955]

Re: Success! Finally ripped my whole CD collection! Here's my story (w/ stats). . .

Congrats,Reckless ! I am also ripping my cd's. I'm retired & disabled,so I have as much time as I need. So far,since May 2020,I've ripped 1340 discs & then converted the majority to 24 bit.Should Be done by New Year's with the remainder.. My discs are approximately 50% factory and 50% CDR's.

[McJazz]

Re: Success! Finally ripped my whole CD collection! Here's my story (w/ stats). . .

Congratulation! I started... Would be fine if my Nimbie USB NB21 would start to work. Batch ripper (Version 6) claims "expired", but recently I purchased dBPoweramp 17. Batch ripper from Acronova and from the DBpoweramp site show the same result. As far as I see, batch ripper can^t be purchased soley. Do I have to purchase the whole bunch agan?

Regards

[RecklessMission]

Re: Success! Finally ripped my whole CD collection! Here's my story (w/ stats). . .

Congrats,Reckless ! I am also ripping my cd's. I'm retired & disabled,so I have as much time as I need. So far,since May 2020,I've ripped 1340 discs & then converted the majority to 24 bit.Should Be done by New Year's with the remainder.. My discs are approximately 50% factory and 50% CDR's.

Thanks, and good luck with your own ripping project! Looks like you've got a good pace going.

Curious, you say you ripped then converted to 24 bit - do you mean you're ripping straight to 24 bit or ripping to one kind of format then converting sometime afterward? Also, the CDR's you have, was the audio originally burned on 'em from mp3s (lossy) or a lossless master-quality audio file? Just FYI upscaling, ie. ripping factory CDs (16bit) or CDRs to 24bit, won't improve audio quality - just take up more space on your hard drive.

[Spoon]

Re: Success! Finally ripped my whole CD collection! Here's my story (w/ stats). . .

Congratulation! I started... Would be fine if my Nimbie USB NB21 would start to work. Batch ripper (Version 6) claims "expired", but recently I purchased dBPoweramp 17. Batch ripper from Acronova and from the DBpoweramp site show the same result. As far as I see, batch ripper can^t be purchased soley. Do I have to purchase the whole bunch agan?

Regards

Batch Ripper is free from here:

https://www.dbpoweramp.com/batch-ripper.htm

It is Version 4, and would not say expired, as there is no such restriction. It sounds like you are using something else than our batch ripper?

[schmidj]

Re: Success! Finally ripped my whole CD collection! Here's my story (w/ stats). . .

Wow, congratulations. First, you keep statistics better than I. I know how many folders there are, and how many files. Windows Explorer tells me that, but I have quite a few files that weren't ripped. They were my own recordings (I do a bit of location recording, or I was before COVID!) Some are transfers from other media, like records. Some are stuff sent to me by others as files. So I don't know exactly how many are my CDs. I've also ripped CDs belonging to my brother and some from a radio station I was Chief Engineer of.

I originally ripped about half of the several thousand CDs I owned to m4a for my Ipod. When I decided that wasn't adequate (in addition to some lack of quality, the real problem was the skipping rips, the rips that ended mid-track) I bought dBpoweramp and started ripping to FLAC. I first completed ripping the unripped (and newly purchased) CDs in my collection. I completed that a few years ago and started spasmodically reripping the ones previously ripped to m4a.

Earlier this summer I had about 700 CDs left to rerip and was planning to be done by now. But then the radio station moved and was disposing of their several thousand CDs. I "rescued" them shortly before the dumpster crew arrived. So I've been madly ripping for the couple of months since, I'm about 2/3 or so done. Then I'll get back to the 700 or so rerips.

At least a large percentage of the radio station CDs are in Accuraterip and have online metadata so the throughput is a lot faster than my CDs which are mostly uncommon Caribbean CDs and are not in Accuraterip (and many have no online metadata, I have to type it all in). Ripping my stuff is a lot slower.

But I continue to note the tremendous number of inaccuracies in the on-line metadata. Typos, misread words (Love becomes Live, etc.) No QC at all in that data. And I won't even begin on the on-line genre metadata entries. Some of it is personal taste, you call it rock, I may call it country or folk, and I call nothing "pop". But calling jazz rock? Oh well. So sorting out the metadata still takes some time.

[McJazz]

Re: Success! Finally ripped my whole CD collection! Here's my story (w/ stats). . .

Probably you are right. But why comes this message up if starting Batch-Ripper:

dBPoweramp Reference Trial
expired: Registration required [Register]

remnants of prior installation?

[RecklessMission]

Re: Success! Finally ripped my whole CD collection! Here's my story (w/ stats). . .

Wow, congratulations. First, you keep statistics better than I. I know how many folders there are, and how many files. Windows Explorer tells me that, but I have quite a few files that weren't ripped. They were my own recordings (I do a bit of location recording, or I was before COVID!) Some are transfers from other media, like records. Some are stuff sent to me by others as files. So I don't know exactly how many are my CDs. I've also ripped CDs belonging to my brother and some from a radio station I was Chief Engineer of.

I originally ripped about half of the several thousand CDs I owned to m4a for my Ipod. When I decided that wasn't adequate (in addition to some lack of quality, the real problem was the skipping rips, the rips that ended mid-track) I bought dBpoweramp and started ripping to FLAC. I first completed ripping the unripped (and newly purchased) CDs in my collection. I completed that a few years ago and started spasmodically reripping the ones previously ripped to m4a.

Earlier this summer I had about 700 CDs left to rerip and was planning to be done by now. But then the radio station moved and was disposing of their several thousand CDs. I "rescued" them shortly before the dumpster crew arrived. So I've been madly ripping for the couple of months since, I'm about 2/3 or so done. Then I'll get back to the 700 or so rerips.

At least a large percentage of the radio station CDs are in Accuraterip and have online metadata so the throughput is a lot faster than my CDs which are mostly uncommon Caribbean CDs and are not in Accuraterip (and many have no online metadata, I have to type it all in). Ripping my stuff is a lot slower.

But I continue to note the tremendous number of inaccuracies in the on-line metadata. Typos, misread words (Love becomes Live, etc.) No QC at all in that data. And I won't even begin on the on-line genre metadata entries. Some of it is personal taste, you call it rock, I may call it country or folk, and I call nothing "pop". But calling jazz rock? Oh well. So sorting out the metadata still takes some time.

Whoa, I feel like your ripping project would be a good task for an intern, or a school kid looking for a few bucks?!

You reminded me, yes, a lot of the metadata that auto-populated the fields while I was ripping were erroneous, absent, or formatted inconsistently. I did have to update/correct track titles, album names, formatting, and artwork manually pretty frequently. Arduous, but not a big deal. It didn't all have to be perfect. My main priority was to get all the audio ripped, while I had the time, for safe-keeping. I can get the metadata "just right" later using PerfectTunes.

Next project for me, I'm gonna systematically purge my iTunes library of all iTunes-ripped mp3s and re-populate with batch-converted mp3s (at 320kbps) from my "master" AIFFs using dBpoweramp. Honestly, I don't think I'll ever actually listen to most of the albums I ripped to AIFF. Maybe only a quarter of 'em, but it's good to have them all in lossless format for posterity. I think eventually, my iTunes mp3 library will represent about a quarter, maybe half, of my entire archived music collection.

[Oggy]

Re: Success! Finally ripped my whole CD collection! Here's my story (w/ stats). . .

So, I finally finished ripping my entire CD collection this month! Scroll to the end for some stats, otherwise here's the story. . .

I began ripping my entire collection of 2,017 CDs with dBpoweramp in January of 2018 and finished in October of 2020. Took just under three years.

I started collecting CDs of just about every conceivable genre in about 1991, adding about 70 CDs to my collection per year, on average - with those numbers dwindling significantly in about 2016 as I switched almost entirely to a combination of Spotify streaming and buying lossless album downloads of my favorite new albums (from Bandcamp, Qobuz, 7Digital etc.). I think I bought only one CD this year, and one last year. I just don't have space for new ones anymore.

I ripped 41% of my collection in 2018, just 5% in 2019, and 54% in 2020. Working from home most of this year, because of the pandemic, gave me the opportunity to spend way more time ripping my collection. I used a 2017 MacBook Pro, with two LG "ultra slim" optical drives (GP65NB60) and one backup Lite-On internal optical drive (IHAS124-14) for those really tough rips. I ripped all my albums to 16bit/44.1kHz (CD quality) AIFF and have three backup drives, cloned from a single master drive. I also kept a running spreadsheet of artist and album titles, UPC codes, dates ripped, rip status, and other notes.

Here are the crucial stats:

• CDs ripped = 2,017
  
• Accurate ripped = 1,909 (95%)
  
• Partial accurate = 43 (2%)
  
• Not accurate = 65 (3%)
  
• Secure ripped = 1993 (99%)
  
• Partial secure = 22 (1%)
  
• Not secure ripped = 2 (0.1%)
  
• Burst ripped (full or partial) = 11 (1%)

The big numbers for me here (and the most satisfying) are the fact that 99% of my collection ripped entirely securely, and 95% ripped entirely accurately. That other 5%, the "non-accurate" rips, were mostly due to the fact that those albums weren't in the accurate rip database yet - but most of those did rip securely anyway. I had to burst rip just 1% of my collection due to scratched or faulty discs. 1% ripped "partially" securely (ie. some tracks secure, some insecure) and just 0.1% entirely insecure (but they still sound fine to my ears).

This is all a testament to the fact that dBpoweramp is an excellent product, and a huge lifesaver for me as I figure out what to do with my relatively large stockpile of CDs. Huge huge thanks to Spoon and dBpoweramp! I'll keep using this product for years, mostly the Converter functions now, but the Ripper too if and when I do acquire the occasional CD in the future.

Thank you!

Congratulations on completing ripping your collection and maintaining those stats - very interesting. I haven't kept an accurate record of the odd error whilst ripping my CDs, but would be surprised if the stats weren't very close.

All I would add is that some of the very few CDs that didn't rip as Accurate to FLAC, would have something like 1-2 frames with errors on a single track, completely inaudible as a Secure rip. Insecure rips on at most two tracks on a CD have been extremely rare.

[Spoon]

Re: Success! Finally ripped my whole CD collection! Here's my story (w/ stats). . .

Probably you are right. But why comes this message up if starting Batch-Ripper:

dBPoweramp Reference Trial
expired: Registration required [Register]

remnants of prior installation?

It means you have not installed the registered version of R17 Reference, uninstall dBpoweramp, and install the registered version using the registered download link in your email receipt.

[warlock983]

Re: Success! Finally ripped my whole CD collection! Here's my story (w/ stats). . .

Thanks for all the info - I was looking at the CD Drive Accuracy 2019 list and wondering what drives to pick up...then I saw your post and figured since it worked for you it should work for me!

I'm pretty new to this and I'm getting ready to embark on a journey similar to yours (~1,000 CD's that need to be digitized). Now that I have the drives ordered and will soon have dbPoweramp CD Ripper to ensure good rips, I started to think..."What do I do with all this music after it's ripped?".

So I was wondering - how do I play this music on my home stereo, garage stereo, etc. after I have it all ripped and stored on drives and stuff? What are the other components that I'm going to need to be able to listen to it? How can I flip through it, find the album I'm looking for, and play it? For example, right now, I would go grab the disk off the shelf, put it in the CD player - it would send the digital signal to the DAC, the DAC would convert it to Analog, send it to the amps, and then push power out to the monitors...

So, is there a way to store this in a way that I can, I don't know, flip through it on a phone/iPod/thing and then send it to a processor to have it pump out the jams? I have multiple chromecasts installed and was hoping to just direct music to them via my phone or something like that but I feel like I might need some dedicated machine to handle that at this point. Anyway, it will still be some time before it's all ready...I just wanted to start preparing for any extra costs that might come up. Thanks in advance!

[garym]

Re: Success! Finally ripped my whole CD collection! Here's my story (w/ stats). . .

Yes, there are lots of ways. Sort of like asking, "I heard there are these new fangled things that can carry you from place to place, called automobiles. Which one should I get? Seriously though, tell us a bit more about what you already have in terms of stereo playback and home computers, etc. Where do you want to play these tunes to....

(for example, I have a headless music server (a tiny computer with no keyboard or monitor) holding all my music files, sitting in a back cabinet, linked to my home network via ethernet. I can control my music library that's sitting on this server from any computer or ipad or iphone in my my home. And I can play different songs to different endpoints in my home at the same time, or the same songs to the same endpoints. Lots of choices. Illustrate (dbpoweramp) makes one (Asset UpNP)

[warlock983]

Re: Success! Finally ripped my whole CD collection! Here's my story (w/ stats). . .

Thanks for the response Garym! I wasn't really sure how to even get started...

My current computer setup is pretty basic - I have a basic desktop with Windows 10 (it's a store bought HP). My network setup is just a cable modem (ARRIS SURFboard SB6141) and a Linksys WRT AC3200 router. Aside from that, we utilize google home (nest home now?) products to "cast" things around (video to TV's or audio to Processors).

My music setups are a bit more complicated:
1. Emotiva setup - Digital sources (Chromecast Audio) are connected to the DAC which connects to 2 monoblocs that power some JBL's
2. Living Room Setup - a Pioneer VSX-21THX receiver that pushes out to some Klipsch's
3. Garage Setup - another Pioneer receiver with the Chromecast Audio setup

None of these have integrated WiFi support (that I know of), so if there is a way I could have a setup like yours where I could use a tablet to send the data via chromecast, that would work great for me! If not, I'm not that invested in the chromecast stuff, I could find another way...but if I have to replace receivers, that could get expensive...I would like something that I could add to as I increase the number of listening rooms in my house, if that's possible.

Thanks again!!

[garym]

Re: Success! Finally ripped my whole CD collection! Here's my story (w/ stats). . .

Thanks for the response Garym! I wasn't really sure how to even get started...

My current computer setup is pretty basic - I have a basic desktop with Windows 10 (it's a store bought HP). My network setup is just a cable modem (ARRIS SURFboard SB6141) and a Linksys WRT AC3200 router. Aside from that, we utilize google home (nest home now?) products to "cast" things around (video to TV's or audio to Processors).

My music setups are a bit more complicated:
1. Emotiva setup - Digital sources (Chromecast Audio) are connected to the DAC which connects to 2 monoblocs that power some JBL's
2. Living Room Setup - a Pioneer VSX-21THX receiver that pushes out to some Klipsch's
3. Garage Setup - another Pioneer receiver with the Chromecast Audio setup

None of these have integrated WiFi support (that I know of), so if there is a way I could have a setup like yours where I could use a tablet to send the data via chromecast, that would work great for me! If not, I'm not that invested in the chromecast stuff, I could find another way...but if I have to replace receivers, that could get expensive...I would like something that I could add to as I increase the number of listening rooms in my house, if that's possible.

Thanks again!!

nothing will require anything too expensive and likely you can use chromecast audios for most things. I'll follow up with more info after I get a bit of time.