Service Ripping 500 cd's

[GVCCbob]

I have a service that will rip my cd's to an external storage device.

https://www.musicshifter.com

I have used dBpoweramp to rip CD's to flac files, but 500 CD's will take me too long.



These folks offer two plans using two formats:

Popular:
MP3
ACC

Using a variety of Bit Rates (128kbps CBR to 240kbps VBR)

and

Archive Format:
Apple Loseless
WMA Loselss
FLAC
WAV
AIFF

The Deluxe Package supplies you bot a Popular, and Archive copy.

The Package I would do is the Archive.

What would be the best selection. I do streaming to high end audio, bluetooth car, etc.

I plan on moving the ripped CD's to my NAS drive from their flash drive.

If I have to go to the trouble of sending them 650 CD's I want to make sure I get the music in the best sounding, most usable format.

Thanks

[garym]

Re: Service Ripping 500 cd's

go with FLAC. It is lossless (so is equivalent to WAV,AIFF,Apple Lossless, AIFF, but it has built in error checking capability for use in batch confirming files are not corrupted at a future date. And the metadata standards are much better for FLAC than WAV or AIFF. And it is widely used. A no brainer in my opinion (and I've ripped 6,000 CDs in my collection).

[GVCCbob]

Re: Service Ripping 500 cd's

6000 CD's, all can say is WOW. Did you do that yourself or use a service.
If you did it yourself, what settings did you use?


Thanks for responding.

[garym]

Re: Service Ripping 500 cd's

6000 CD's, all can say is WOW. Did you do that yourself or use a service.
If you did it yourself, what settings did you use?


Thanks for responding.

did it myself (one at a time), over a number of years. But managed to rip the last 1,000 CDs over the course of about 2 weeks during the pandemic lockdown during summer 2020. I could rip stacks of CDs per hour while doing other things on my computer. I prefer doing it myself, as the automated metadata services are pretty bad, so you end up having to edit the tag metadata to suit yourself in many cases. Easy to do while ripping. More of a pain later on. My settings were simple:

FLAC, default level 5 (if ripping all again, I'd just go with level 8, as no reason not to with modern equipment).
Using Ultrasecure ripping (so that if disk matches the AccurateRip database, it does one pass, but if not recognized it does at least 2 secure passes).
Only DSP I use is ReplayGain, adding track and album replaygain values, with setting at "18".
I don't embed artwork in each track. Rather I have a single "cover.jpg" created for each album (folder). Max size 1000x1000.
I don't use sort tags (i.e., artistsort, albumartistsort, etc.), but many really like these (so that a server will show "Nelson, Willie" rather than "Willie Nelson" when browsing one's collections.

This is my string for dynamic naming:
[MAXLENGTH]240,[IFCOMP]Compilations\[album][IFMULTI]\Disc [disc][]\[track] - [title] - [artist][][IF!COMP][IFVALUE]album artist,[album artist],[artist][]\[album][IFMULTI]\Disc [disc][]\[track] - [title][][]

This automatically handles compliations, multidisk sets, and whether a track has albumartist or only artist.

p.s. I knew nothing about how any of this worked when I acquired dbpa to start the ripping process. My early mistake was to try to use too many genres (I simplified later on greatly) and in not capturing album year/date data correctly in many cases (another reason to pay attention to your metadata when ripping).

EDIT: and my biggest mistake (pre dbpa) was that I ripped 4 or 5 thousand CDs to mp3 192kbps. Then I learned about lossy vs lossless and aquired dbpa for ripping.

[GBrown]

Re: Service Ripping 500 cd's

EDIT: and my biggest mistake (pre dbpa) was that I ripped 4 or 5 thousand CDs to mp3 192kbps. Then I learned about lossy vs lossless and aquired dbpa for ripping.

I feel your pain. Went through the same process twice as an early adopter, but now finally have all of my CDs ripped at lossless. Adding new music as I buy it now seems so much easier!