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Hi - I am getting ready to Rip ~800 CDs to FLAC files and want to be sure I am ripping them the right way. Does anyone have a best tips and tricks for ripping CDs e.g. DSP Settings, Tags, Encoder etc. I want to do it the right way the first time if at all possible since it is going to take me some time to do it the first time. Selfishly, I want to learn from other user experiences. Thanks in Advance.
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Re: Ripping 750+ CDs to FLAC - Best Options to Check or Tips and Tricks
This guide has pretty much everything you need to know.
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Re: Ripping 750+ CDs to FLAC - Best Options to Check or Tips and Tricks
My advise is to rip a few different types of CDs (single artist, single disk; single artist, multiple disks; various artists, single and multiple disks). And then see how your music server/player handles these rips. That is, does it display what you expect it to display, etc. There's a learning curve to this, and you want to experiment a bit before you rip all 700 CDs then decide after the fact you wish you'd done something different.
I rip my files to FLAC and the only DSP I use in ripping is the ReplayGain DSP (adding RG tags; I add Album and Track tags at -18 LUFS.
This is the dynamic naming string I use, and it handles compilations (various artists), single disk, multidisk.
[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][][]Comment
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Re: Ripping 750+ CDs to FLAC - Best Options to Check or Tips and Tricks
Hi ASTUARTMILLS,
The guide linked above is very worthwhile but you may have to make sure you understand a few basic concepts and make some early decisions concerning some options. Many of us, myself included, have ended up ripping part or all of our collection more than once because of failing to understand things, because of changing the purpose of our rips, and because of not fully understanding the consequences of a particular choice we have made.
I started out ripping my large collection to Itunes to load onto an Ipod for listening while commuting. Something like 20 years ago. I soon discovered the issue of bad rips which skipped, were truncated, were misidentified, etc. About that time I setup a nice home playback system and realized that I'd probably like better quality audio than the low bitrate m4a's I had ripped already. I found out about dBpoweramp and realized its advantages of secure rips. I also did some research and realized that ripping to a lossless format would be advantageous from a quality standpoint. I was familiar with .WAV files as I do a fair amount of audio editing, but found that setting and editing tags in .WAV was problematical, there was no real standard. A little study made FLAC look to be a better choice, one that I don't regret. I now have something like 135,000 tracks in my library. The Ipod is very defunct, for personal listening I now have a large microSD chip in my phone. Obviously, 135,000 FLAC files won't fit any SD card, so I convert to m3a for mobile listening. (I listen to the FLAC files at home). Originally I used the converter in dBpoweramp to generate the m4a files, but now use another program offered by Illustrate, TuneFusion as a file synchronizer. I connect the phone audio to my car using Bluetooth.
But now some things to think about:
The most commonly misunderstood thing here seems to be the difference between file and directory names and metadata tags. Well,technically, the file name is metadata, but not a tag. And most music server library systems and players either require tagged files or work best with them. There are some who post here who think all they need are filenames for each track, and not to bother with tags. But if you ever want to search your library in any detail, you'll want to have it well tagged. Want all the songs by a particular artist displayed, even those on compilation albums? Much easier/faster with good tags. Want all the music with a particular genre? You need to have filled in the Genre tag. Into classical music and want to find all the Beethoven played by the Boston Symphony? You need tags. In most cases the tags are stored as data in the same files as the audio. The different encoders (FLAC, mp3, m4a, etc.) don't all use the same format for storing the tags in the files but dBpoweramp (and other rippers, servers and players) mostly deal with that automatically.
dBpoweramp will look at several sources of tag data and pick what it feels to be most accurate when you insert a CD into the drive. But often the tag data may be inaccurate, or not be formatted to your desire. It is well worth your time to sort out metadata issues before ripping the CD, although usually you can correct it later. You will find it worthwhile to click the red item that looks like a tag at the top of your screen after dBpoweramp has recognized the CD to see what the different tag sources have provided. Be aware that these source databases are not owned by dBpoweramp, they just provide the data to individuals on an "as is" basis. Some of it is "crowd sourced" by users, much of it these days comes directly from the record companies. In my experience, it is very error prone. Look for stupid spelling errors, incorrect information, whatever. The best information is usually what is printed on the jewel case insert that came with the CD. Type whatever you want to change directly in the appropriate field. Pay particular attention to data on compilation CDs, multi disk sets and tracks with more than one artist or that you want to have appear in more than one genre search. (The "delimiter" that dBpoweramp uses to know that you want to have the track show up with more than one artist or genre is the semicolon followed by a space (; ). The different tagging systems used by different encoders use different delimiters, but dBpoweramp automatically inserts the correct one, invisibly to you, when it sees the semicolon-space text where multiple tag values are allowed. (Some other tagging software uses different delimiters, mp3tag, a popular tagging program uses the double backslash (\\) with no spaces as its delimiter.) A few more thoughts on tags below.
The next item often misunderstood is the path and naming strings. The first misunderstanding is that these have absolutely nothing to do with the tags usually used to select what you want the player to play. They are only used to tell the program where to store the files and the format of the directory tree. While the default setting may work, most users with any significant number of CDs will end up storing them on a USB drive or a server, and the path must be changed to show this. You may also want to think about how you want multi-disc sets stored, one directory per disc with the music files for each disc in a separate folder, or with all the tracks from all the discs in one folder. There are a couple of traps to watch out for, one of which is the length of the filename string including the directory names. In most systems, you need to keep that under 125 characters or else files will "disappear". The next issue is avoiding duplicate filenames, or directory names. Duplicate filenames may result in files getting overwritten, although dBpoweramp usually warns you when this might occur. Duplicate directory names will often result in the tracks from more than one CD ending in the same folder. My experience is that becomes an issue with "best of" CDs, with more than one being issued for the same artist, usually (but not always) by different record companies. I've learned to include the record label as part of the album name for all "best of" issues. The final issue is "illegal" characters. Every operating system has its own reserved character list, and dBpoweramp has a table of reserved characters and what it substitutes. You are wise not to modify that list. But these reserved characters only apply to file and directory names, not to the text inside the tags. So the band AC/DC may have a file or directory name something like AC_DC (or is it AC-DC, I forget, but the artist name tag will still be AC/DC.
The actual filenaming scheme you use is relatively unimportant as long as it deals with the issues I've mentioned above, and the naming string format is, to put it mildly, obtuse, particularly if you have no programming experience. Try the default scheme, just correcting the path to put the folders on the correct drive. If you want to make further changes and get lost, there are several of us users here who can help you come up with a working string. And the only purpose the naming string serves is to make the file and directory names somewhat humanly readable and in an order that allows you to locate a particular file should you need to manually access it outside your server and player. They should be using the tags, and since the server is going to contain a database which will (hopefully automatically) scan all the tags and index them, so the server will access the correct file without your need to know the file name as long as you know the artist name or song title or genre you are looking for. This is why it is important to spend time with every CD you rip to make sure the tags are accurate and consistent.
A couple of notes on tags (not filenames). Entering the artist names consistently will make searching for an artist easier later. Having some entries as Beatles, some as Beatles. The and some as The Beatles will split them up in the server database. Also is it Crosby Stills and Nash or Crosby, Stills & Nash, or all the other possible permutations. You'll find the tag services very inconsistent, come up with a standard and follow it. I recently spent several weeks going through mt 135,000 tracks sorting out things like this and the inevitable typos to improve the search results for my server and players, and it appears I still missed a few.
Give some real thought to genres, if you ever think you might want to select by genre. Having a large number of genres with only a few tracks didn't work for me. Part of the weeks worth of tag updates I've done was to simplify and correct my genre dataa. Take advantage of the ability to assign a track to multiple genres, so you might have a genre "rock" and a genre "acid rock", with a particular track assigned to both. There is now a tag called "style" where you might put the Acid Rock tag, but I've found the metadata databases have the style field filled with garbage, like every subdivision of music you could ever dream of, so I clear it out and don't use it. Also some players and servers don't access it to allow you to select a particular style. It seemed like a good idea but is poorly implemented. But do remember, you don't have to re-rip the CD to fix the tags, dBpoweramp has provisions to do this (in Windows, a right click will give you access to a tab that takes you to the dBpoweramp tag editor, and the program mp3tag has the ability to edit batches of tags with one entry. (it works with almost every audio filetype, not just mp3, despite the name).
If you made it to here, I'm surprised, but giving a little thought to the process and getting to understand the way it all works will save you grief later on. And one final thought, rip a few dozen CDs, some compilation CDs, some multi-disc sets and try them with your server/player to make sure you are happy before ripping everything and realizing you made a mistake you regret.Comment
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Re: Ripping 750+ CDs to FLAC - Best Options to Check or Tips and Tricks
Give some thought to the use of ALBUMARTIST and ARTIST. At a minimum you need ARTIST. Some use ALBUMARTIST as well for every album. Some don't. I use ALBUMARTIST only in limited situations. For me, for example, I might have many Miles Davis CDs. But the ARTIST on these is "Miles Davis Quintet" or other Miles Davis Bands. But for all of these, I add "Miles Davis" as the ALBUMARTIST so that they are organized under a single "artist". Same with Doug Sahm. There's ARTIST values for "The Sir Douglas Quintet", "Doug Sahm & Band", "The Formerly Brothers", "Wayne Douglas". But these are all Doug Sahm, so I add ALBUMARTIST as "Doug Sahm" no matter what.
Also give some thought to sort tags. Most often people that use sort tags use ARTISTSORT and ALBUMARTISTSORT. For example, ARTIST could be "Willie Nelson" but ARTISTSORT would be "Nelson, Willie". This way in your file organization and browsing on your music server, you'd find Willie Nelson under "N" in the alphabetic listing. But on your player, when showing the album playing it will show artist as "Willie Nelson". I personally never bothered with this and just got used to the idea of looking for things under the first letter (fortunately, my server has a setting that allows me to ignore "the, a" etc. So "The Beatles" show up under B for me. I even rearranged all my physical CDs and Albums to be in first name order to match my digital library. So I'd find Willie Nelson under "W".
Regarding @schmidj's comment about GENRE. I started off with a very long list of GENREs. Different rock genres, different country, jazz, etc. Maybe 50 genres, all very narrow. That turned out to be useless for me. I've cut it down to about 10 or so. So now, just: Pop/Rock, Jazz, Country, Folk, Classical, Spoken Word, Holiday, Opera, World, and maybe a couple more....Comment
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Re: Ripping 750+ CDs to FLAC - Best Options to Check or Tips and Tricks
Starting from scratch, I don't see why one wouldn't use ALBUMARTIST on all albums. For some servers and players it helps keeping the album together, and you can also browse by ALBUMARTIST instead of ARTIST to get a shorter (often more relevant) listing. And if neither the server/player or yourself use ALBUMARTIST currently, it's good to have if required down the road. After all, it's only a tag and it doesn't harm anything.
Like @garym I keep only a few GENREs - I find too many being a distraction. So I complete with STYLE, e.g. GENRE=Jazz STYLE=Bebop. STYLE works in my server (Asset UPnP) where I use it occasionally, but it doesn't work in my car nor my portable player. I used to populate GENRE differently (=more generously) for car/portable, but I gave up that since it was an inconsistent hassle.
Also like garym I don't use sorting tags for the artists. While I know some people love the sorting tags, I just find them awkward and unnecessary. Paul McCartney is under P because I prefer it that way. And most often I omit "The" because I like the simplicity of e.g. "Beatles", but in rare cases I keep it, e.g. "The Band" which is then sorted under "T" which I actually prefer in this case.
I use ALBUM SORT though, to have my albums sorted chronologically by date. Some servers sort by year only, and sometimes in reverse. ALBUM SORT works in Asset, but again this is something that is not supported by my car/portable player.
And be aware that multiple values in tags, e.g. multiple ARTISTs or GENREs can be problematic in car & portable players. Sometimes not supported at all and sometimes in a non-standard way. You have to test what your player supports - and try to avoid crappy players.
Finally, your tagging approach could be very different for home/server vs. car/portable use - the latter players often being limited in tag support, while the former often support anything and even your own custom tags. My approach is to tag my home FLAC library according to my "high demands" with many custom tags. My car library is then extracted from that to mp3 but my car player doesn't make use of all the tags.
I haven't seen that figure before but you are probably referring to car or portable players and not to Windows. If I remember correctly you can have approximately 250 characters in Windows XP and not any less in later versions - but please do correct me if I'm wrong. So for exclusive home/server use you are not really character limited.Comment
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Re: Ripping 750+ CDs to FLAC - Best Options to Check or Tips and Tricks
Vilsen, excuse my memory lapse, 256 characters (more or less) not 125. Sorry for the misinformation.
Many if not most car players are awful. Some still don't read tags on USB stick files at all, only using the filenames. At least on Android, there are some good players which have built-in databases/servers. I most like Poweramp, the paid version. (absolutely no relation to dBpoweramp AFAIK.) The mobile version of Foobar2000 is OK, but to some degree still a work in progress. As I mentioned earlier, I have a 1 terabyte micro SD card with all 135,000 tracks in the phone as m4a files. That's what I listen to in the car, connected via Bluetooth. I've never thoroughly tested how well the app in the phone deals with multiple genres, as 99 percent of the time in the car I just have it set for random play and listen to whatever comes up.
Asset and Foobar2000 at home deal well with multiple entries, their database entries quickly find all my misspellings of artists or genres, accidental entries of commas instead of semicolons between multiple artists/genres, etc...
I used to use the multi-encoder feature in the dBpoweramp ripper to generate the m4a files for the phone, but that makes more work dealing with metadata corrections, I had to do them twice. Now I use the TuneFusion synchronizer also available here. Much better workflow.Comment
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Re: Ripping 750+ CDs to FLAC - Best Options to Check or Tips and Tricks
the windows length max is why I use the MAXLENGTH command in my naming string. I put it at 240 but it could be 256 or lower than 240. (after naming, I'm moving to another drive, thus it will use some of the 256 available.)
[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][][]Comment
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Re: Ripping 750+ CDs to FLAC - Best Options to Check or Tips and Tricks
Wow, this is very helpful and thorough. I read it all.
I didn't get an alert in my email that I had gotten responses to my question (or maybe I did and just missed it) so when I was able to get back to this, I looked and found all these replies. Based on the tips, I will keep the Genres to a minimum, look at the tags to be sure they are correct before ripping, add both the Artist and the Album artist since I am starting from scratch, make sure the Artist names are consistent, so they are together, add Replay Gain to the DSP and I also added a custom field for my specific use. We are currently using two Sony Jukeboxes with all the CDs and for now, I wanted to add the location of the physical CDs. That will ultimately not be important but could be for some time. A couple of things I was a little confused about was the "Asset and Foobar" comment... Are they part of DBpower or separate tools? Also, I currently own MediaMonkey to provide a user-friendly interface but wasn't sure if others use it or preferred something different. Finally, I already see that I mis-tagged my custom filed on some so I need to go back and fix those. I can right-click on each file and fix the tags but that would require me do it for every track on the album. I could also fix it in Media Monkey by Album but as I add new CDs and sync the folder, I imagine it would overwrite what I fixed in Media Monkey. I would like to fix the original FLAC file so that anytime I sync, it does not overwrite incorrect data. I believe someone mentioned that DB Power could do this in mass (in my case by Album). is that possible? Thanks again for all of your input....
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Re: Ripping 750+ CDs to FLAC - Best Options to Check or Tips and Tricks
Hi again,
Asset is a separate product by Illustrate, which makes dBpoweramp. A very powerful audio server with versions for many operating systems. Read about it on the dBpoweramp home page. It is not free, but as software goes, inexpensive. I use it. Foobar2000 is a highly regarded player. Not part of dBpoweramp but written by one of the same programmers. It is free. I and many others use it on Windows and I think the MAC.
If you have the right click option turned on, you can use it by selecting the directory holding a whole album's worth of tracks, and either do a mass correction (like fixing the spelling of the artist's name on all the tracks) or scroll through the tracks.
There is another very powerful tag editor many of us use called mp3tag, Again not part of Illustrate. It is free on the PC, but I think a small charge for the Mac. Displays directories like a spreadsheet, again good for mass or detailed track corrections and spotting errors and missing tags. You can even open it to see your entire collection as one giant spreadsheet (in my case about 135,000 tracks) if you wait long enough for it to open...
Hey, you want another Sony jukebox, cheap? I have one I used to use in a storage locker. It probably works...
You can add a special tag for the location or just add it to the existing "comments" tag if you aren't using that for anything else.
One other important thing: Back up your data. Back up, back up, back up. Keep at least one copy on removable data like a brick drive normally unplugged and stored elsewhere. You really don't want to have to start over again...Comment
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Re: Ripping 750+ CDs to FLAC - Best Options to Check or Tips and Tricks
Hi Thank you for the quick update. I downloaded and installed the Asset Product and not sure what to do with it. I only see a Configuration UI.. is that all that gets installed? I also downloaded and installed MP3tag and that works great. Thank you!! In reference to the Jukebox, I appreciate the offer but that is what I am trying to replace, and already own two and one spare. For the CD organizing & playing tool, it was easy to install and setup MediaMonkey but it may not be as good as Foobar2000. I installed the Foobar2000 but I think it would take me quite some time to figure it out. Do you recommend a specific Foobar2000 Skin? Thank you for the feedback on backing up the files; I will make sure to follow your advice. I definitely wouldn't want to have to go through this all over again
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Re: Ripping 750+ CDs to FLAC - Best Options to Check or Tips and Tricks
I wouldn’t recommend any skins for foobar2000. Too complicated. . I suggest using refacets within foobar2000 to setup how you want to use it as a library/player. How are you currently connecting mediamonkey to play through your main stereo system. Do you need to feed different rooms (Playing same thing or different things to each room).
but don’t get too far ahead of yourself. Ripping and tagging is one thing. Then there are dozens of good options for a music server/player.Comment
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Re: Ripping 750+ CDs to FLAC - Best Options to Check or Tips and Tricks
Asset is a UPnP audio server that streams the audio files to a UPnP compatible hardware player via network cable or WiFi. Optionally you can use an app (Control Point) on your phone to control the music.
So Asset UPnP itself has no UI for playing, only for configuration. The server runs in the background and index the tags in your audio files.
If you like the UPnP/Asset way of streaming music, but prefer to have a player UI on the computer screen or the TV screen, there are solutions e.g. the separate program Asset Control (very old program though).
Foobar2000 is something else - a highly configurable player by itself (with a steep learning curve). Primarily for listening on the computer, but if you connect the computer to your DAC/stereo you can listen there. But basically no UPnP functionality * so you would use the computer for selecting tracks.
Personally, I have both Asset UPnP + Asset Control installed. My screen is the TV, so I can operate Asset Control from my sofa with a remote keyboard. Sometimes I like the big TV screen for browsing & artwork, sometimes I just use the app on the phone instead.
* As a side note: Since Asset Control is outdated, I have tried to use the highly configurable foobar2000 as the Control Point on my computer, but that doesn't work well currently. The required UPnP component is outdated, described as "abandonware" by the author... My *1 wish is that someone writes a fully functional UPnP component for foobar2000 - that would be my ultimate choice for Control point.Comment
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Re: Ripping 750+ CDs to FLAC - Best Options to Check or Tips and Tricks
I'm using the same music library (or exact copy of it) for each of the 3 different music server/player systems I use. So the ripping, tagging, etc. I do with dbpoweramp works well with all my setups.
I use LMS (Logitech Media Server, but now not officially supported by Logitech, but maintained by an excellent community). My main system is LMS running "piCorePlayer" on an rPi4 (a tiny computer the size of a deck of cards), with a 4TB USB drive attached to the rPi4. I can play the same music to different zones in my house. Or different music to different zones. the rPi can also serve as a player, or one can use actual squeezebox hardware devices or other rPi units to serve as players. I can control the server to search, select, play, etc. from my iphone/ipad, my laptop, etc. They have a very active forum for LMS, and an easy turnkey install package to turn your rPi into a server/player (I don't program and it took me 20 minutes of following instructions).
piCorePlayer info:
LMS forum: (helpful with lots of rPi help)
for foobar2000, I use this as a player on my laptop and my desktop at work. As I noted, I use the 'refacets" as my media library format within foobar. With foobar, you can play your music without doing anything but installing basic program. It's making it look pretty that is time consuming.
I also use a program called ROON. It is like a modern version of LMS (but is not free). It has the core running as your server, then you can setup many different endpoints to work as players feeding your system(s). I use Roon's free server OS "ROCK" on a NUC for my server. Then I use an rPi3B+ running "Roipeee" as a bridge (endpoint) connected to my stereo.
roon forum:
mp3tag forum:
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