New to disc ripping-help required

[Ingwe]

Hello, please bear with me as I'm a 67 year old non-techie. I have the latest version of dbPowerAmp and and have successfully ripped a cd to flac saved on a 2TB external hard drive. I saved it in an album and can navigate to it fine. However, when I want to play the ripped files, I have to select them one by one to play back on my Mac Air.

How to I get the all the ripped tracks to play one after the other on my Mac?

Sorry if this is the dumbest question ever! I tried selecting all then open but it still only played the first track and then stopped. Many thanks.

[garym]

Re: New to disc ripping-help required

What program are you using as a player on your Mac?

[Ingwe]

Re: New to disc ripping-help required

What program are you using as a player on your Mac?

I believe it’s Quick Time. If I double click on a file, a ‘Q’ symbol appears on the bar at the bottom of the screen.

[garym]

Re: New to disc ripping-help required

QuickTime is a "helper" app I believe that runs behind both playing movies and music on a Mac. The music server/library/player program on a Mac used to be called iTunes. Now I believe it is called MUSIC. I'm not a Mac user, but in your Mac, find the MUSIC application, open it, and in its settings there should be a place to tell it the parent folder where your ripped music files are stored. Then there should be a way to tell MUSIC to catalog this as your music library. Once done, you can play albums, playlists, etc. directly from MUSIC on your Mac.

[Ingwe]

Re: New to disc ripping-help required

Thank you @simbun and @garym. In the event the Apple Music app doesn&*8217;t lije Flac files, can you suggest a good player app?

[schmidj]

Re: New to disc ripping-help required

I'm not an Apple person, but I understand there are plenty of players that will play FLAC (and most other formats) on a MAC. There are advantages to FLAC over ALAC, but either is OK. One well regarded player is Foobar2000. The one I use on my PCs. Written for the PC but ported to the Mac world. The Mac version might be missing a few features, I'm sure others here and on the Foobar forum can comment.

I will say, there is a bit of a learning curve and setup/configuration time, more than some other players, with Foobar, but once you get it the way you like it, it is very stable.

Don't worry about your ability, I'm turning 80 years old. Admittedly I've been around computers and software since college, but I still end up fighting software regularly. There are plenty of frustrating pieces of software out there, just stick with it, keep trying things until you succeed. And there are plenty of us users here on this forum to help you with dBpoweramp and related areas.


This has nothing much to do with your immediate player issue, but probably the most important thing to learn is that accurate tagging of the music is in the long run very important, much more important than the "naming string" which determines directory organization and filenames. Just about any player (except some very dumb car players) is written to allow you to select what you want to listen to by using the metadata tags that are stored in the FLAC (or ALAC) files with the music. The player will index all your music using those tags to make it easy for you to chose what you want to listen to. The concept of metadata tags is new to many people looking to digitize/computerize their collection. They are use to file and directory names, but selecting music in a player using filenames is very limiting. You can probably do it, but unless you can remember the filenames and how you organized them, it can be frustrating. That's why tags were developed.

Tags are stored when you rip a CD, it is probably more important to make sure they are correct that that you have a "bit-perfect" copy of the music. And the on-line sources of tag information used by dBpoweramp and other ripping software are full of errors and just poor information. Most were crowdsourced from people like you who entered the information, and sometimes people at the record labels, often carelessly. Also the algorithm that guesses (yes it is a guess) what CD you are ripping to provide the tags is known to miss and provide data for the wrong CD, particularly for CDs with few tracks. So it is wise to spend a few minutes checking the artist, track titles, album title, genre (a matter of personal choice, you may call it rock, someone else may call it folk), etc. before clicking on the rip button.

Yes, you can correct metadata after the CD is ripped, either using the tool built into dBpoweramp, or other software, but you can avoid, or at least reduce the need to do that by getting the tags correct before ripping.

Good luck on your efforts, it is really worth the effort.

[garym]

Re: New to disc ripping-help required

I also like foobar2000.

[BOOTP]

Re: New to disc ripping-help required

Highly recommend foobar2000.

However, I do recommend you look at downloading and installing the Columns UI component for numerous usability reasons.

I also use foobar2000 to calculate / write ReplayGain tags and also to verify the integrity of files.

[Jay Davis]

Re: New to disc ripping-help required

I too am a first time ripper. Using Windows 10 with a Nimbie, I have followed all of SPOONs steps in CD Ripper. When I click on the RIPPER silver disc, or insert CD(which is already insert) or retry on insert CD, nothing happens. Also note that the Play, pause, etc buttons in the lower left are dark.

[garym]

Re: New to disc ripping-help required

Jay, you should really start a new thread on your issues so folks will see it and chime in with help. Totally different subject because I assume you are using batch ripper with a NIMBIE.

[GBrown]

Re: New to disc ripping-help required

apple want you to use their format (no surprise there then) so there's very little FLAC support built in. I'm sure it's not supported by Music so you'll probably need to use a different player.
FLAC is the better format but if you're heavily into the apple ecosystem (especially if you have speakers) it might be easier to choose ALAC.

There is actually very little difference now between FLAC and ALAC. Both are truly lossless formats, and file sizes are within a very small difference of each other. There is one key difference that FLAC does offer over ALAC, with the CRC Checksum option that can help confirm file integrity in the future. While this can be a benefit is you are moving your files around regularly, a more effective method in my opinion is to maintain at least one complete library backup on a remote drive.

I personally have been using the ALAC format for probably 10 years or so, and have no compatibility issues between using MAC, PC, iOS (the main reason I started using ALAC), and Android devices interchangeably. For Mac and PC this means you can use Apple Music or iTunes, while on portable devices you can use a player like Neutron that is built for both iOS and Android. There are plenty of other options though, whatever format you choose.