Help to create a new Music Collection

[Jorge22]

My first post in this forum and after several attempts throughout the last years I am finally decided to rip my entire CD collection, and several concert DVDs & BluRay discs. I want to thank you in advance for your patience as I've got more than one question.

INTRO: I just added to my HiFi system an all in one Streamer, DAC, PreAmp, DAP & DSP (Eversolo DMP-A8). This unit can have an internal SSD installed to store music up to 4TB. The software of this unit is based on Android and although is nice to use, I am not aware of the benefits or limitations that might have with my ripping configuration decisions.

FLAC vs AIFF: Since my collection will fit in around 1TB uncompressed, I am still undecided whether to use FLAC (uncompressed) or AIFF (better metadata than WAV and I only use MacOS and iOS devices). Is there any difference besides space (they take the same if FLAC is uncompressed) that I should consider in terms of robustness (I've read that you can verify the integrity of a FLAC file ripped several years ago) or any other future that will help me looking into the future (like converting to other formats)?

REPLAYGAIN: I am very confused with this. I know that this is a mere tag that does not change the quality of the file. I also totally prefer that the volume of all the tracks in my collection will not change in every track. What I don't know is if my player mentioned above cares about Replay Gain or what setting should I choose:
- Track Gain or Track, Album Gain & iTunes Track normalization (the second one seem to cover everything)?
- What type of calculation: ReplayGain or EBUR128?

DSP Effects: Any other DSP Effect besides ReplayGain? ...I have several HDCDs and I don't know how dBpoweramp will encode them... I'm totally ignorant about the rest.

DRIVE: I have two external drives that work with my Mac: A Samsung SE-S084 DVD Writer and an ASUS SBC-06D2X-U BluRay Player and DVD/CD Writer. None of them in the list of drives published here. From a theoretical point of view, which should be better as a player a DVD or a BluRay?

I am really sorry for all the questions asked, I am glad that all the previous reading of Spoon's Guides and many topics in the different threads have brought me here instead of having several hundred doubts (and therefore questions).

Thank you very much in advance to all that could help me with these responses.

Cheers,
Jorge

[garym]

Re: Help to create a new Music Collection

Welcome!

FLAC vs AIFF: Since my collection will fit in around 1TB uncompressed, I am still undecided whether to use FLAC (uncompressed) or AIFF (better metadata than WAV and I only use MacOS and iOS devices). Is there any difference besides space (they take the same if FLAC is uncompressed) that I should consider in terms of robustness (I've read that you can verify the integrity of a FLAC file ripped several years ago) or any other future that will help me looking into the future (like converting to other formats)?

WAV and ALAC are lossless but don't have embedded CRC. Not sure if AIFF has this (I'm pretty sure it does NOT). But as you note, FLAC does have the embedded CRC. This makes it very easy to check whether you have any corrupted files at any time in the future in a batch manner. I often run dbpa batch conversion to TEST CONVERSION after creating a new backup drive of all my music. This alone leads me to recommend FLAC. And do keep in mind that FLAC, WAV, AIFF, ALAC are all LOSSLESS. Thus one can be easily converted to any other codec with no loss at any time in the future.

REPLAYGAIN: I am very confused with this. I know that this is a mere tag that does not change the quality of the file. I also totally prefer that the volume of all the tracks in my collection will not change in every track. What I don't know is if my player mentioned above cares about Replay Gain or what setting should I choose:
- Track Gain or Track, Album Gain & iTunes Track normalization (the second one seem to cover everything)?
- What type of calculation: ReplayGain or EBUR128?

These are just tags. I would add them in my ripping process even if I don't plan on using them or my current player can't use them. It can't hurt anything and they are there if one ever wants to use them. For calculation I use EBUR128 (the more modern algorithm for creating replaygain tags). I use -18 for the LUFS setting within ReplayGain and the x2 times oversample option. These are in the ReplayGain advanced settings.

I have dbpa write both "Track & Album" gain tags. My players all allow me to select whether I want to *use* track or album tags. I prefer the album tags when playing entire albums (that way intra-album volume differences are maintained). But if I'm playing a playlist of tracks from different albums I prefer the TRACK tag to keep the playlist volume similar. All my players have an "automatic" setting where they automatically use ALBUM RG tag when playing songs from same album, and TRACK RG tag when playing songs from different albums. So I don't have to think about this setting.

I don't bother with iTunes "RG" (called SOUNDCHECK in iTunes) tags as I don't use itunes as a player (note itunes does not play FLAC, so if you plan on playing your files with itunes, don't use FLAC). However, I do play songs on my iphone and ipad, but I use the "foobar2000 mobile" app on my iphone and ipad that allows me to easily transfer files to my iDevices and also plays FLAC files using ReplayGain tags. So I don't need iTunes or Apple Music app to play my songs on my iDevices.

By the way, I use the dbpoweramp companion product called TuneFusion to transfer my FLAC files on my home system to my iphone/ipad. It works very nicely. I have it setup to transfer selected playlists or albums (and then can all be customized) to my iThings. I set TuneFusion to convert my FLAC tracks to mp3 or m4a on the fly when transferring to my iThings. That way I don't need to keep a parallel library of lossy tracks for use on my phone. TuneFusion does it automatically when transferring files. Highly recommended if one is often moving files to one's phone.

DSP Effects: Any other DSP Effect besides ReplayGain? ...I have several HDCDs and I don't know how dBpoweramp will encode them... I'm totally ignorant about the rest.

The only DSP effect I use is ReplayGain. I have lots of HDCD CDs (mostly Grateful Dead) and dbpa rips them just fine with nothing special. You can search the forum for HDCD ripping and spend hours reading, but a couple of important points. dbpa does have some special ways of ripping HDCDs to get the "20 bit" information. But if you do this special approach, you no longer have a bit perfect rip of the CD. And it turns out that many, many HDCD CDs don't actually use Peak Extension feature, so the special dbpa HDCD ripping is not even needed. If you decide you want to rip the HDCD in a special way you should rip the CD normally so you have a bit perfect rip of the CD. Then if you want the special 'hacked' HDCD rip, just use dbpa CONVERTER with the HDCD DSPs to convert your original rip to an HDCD version. By the way, I don't bother with any special HDCD conversion, because after comparing HDCD vs non HDCD rip in a blind test, even when Peak Extension was being used, I couldn't tell any differences in audio.

https://forum.dbpoweramp.com/showthread.php?45781-Hdcd-dsp/page2

https://forum.dbpoweramp.com/showthread.php?27540-Ripping-HDCDs-Best-practices&highlight=practices+HDCD

DRIVE: I have two external drives that work with my Mac: A Samsung SE-S084 DVD Writer and an ASUS SBC-06D2X-U BluRay Player and DVD/CD Writer. None of them in the list of drives published here. From a theoretical point of view, which should be better as a player a DVD or a BluRay?

You don't really care about these as a player. You care about them as a READER of CDs. And either should be just fine. That's the beauty secure ripping with AccurateRip database matching. Almost any old cheap CD drive will be just fine. In fact, I've ripped maybe 5,000 CDs, and the main thing I've learned is that it is good to have a few different CD drives, as a CD that has errors ripping on one drive may rip perfectly on a different drive.

Also note that dbpa rips redbook CDs (16/44.1). If you want to rip DVDs, BluRays, etc. you'll need different software. google ripping dvd/bluray to get some ideas.

It will be important to get your dynamic naming string setup to suit how you want to organize your folders and subfolders and how you want the track files named. I use the following string (but note this is windows, you'll need to change the backslashes to frontslashes to work on a Mac). This string automatically handles single disk, multidisk, and compilations (which I put in a folder called "Compilations" and you can change that to "Various Artists" in the string if you desire).

[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][][]

Have fun. And experiment. Rip a few different type things and see how you (and your players) like the output so you can tweak settings if you desire (which tags to save, artwork embedded or in folder as "cover.jpg" or "folder.jpg", etc.

[GBrown]

Re: Help to create a new Music Collection

FLAC vs AIFF: Since my collection will fit in around 1TB uncompressed, I am still undecided whether to use FLAC (uncompressed) or AIFF (better metadata than WAV and I only use MacOS and iOS devices). Is there any difference besides space (they take the same if FLAC is uncompressed) that I should consider in terms of robustness (I've read that you can verify the integrity of a FLAC file ripped several years ago) or any other future that will help me looking into the future (like converting to other formats)?

REPLAYGAIN: I am very confused with this. I know that this is a mere tag that does not change the quality of the file. I also totally prefer that the volume of all the tracks in my collection will not change in every track. What I don't know is if my player mentioned above cares about Replay Gain or what setting should I choose:
- Track Gain or Track, Album Gain & iTunes Track normalization (the second one seem to cover everything)?
- What type of calculation: ReplayGain or EBUR128?

The response from @garym is very detailed and should certainly get you on your way. I’ll share a couple of extra comments to help you finalize your direction for these two points.

FLAC will definitely have the widest compatibility. And the CRC is a great tool for future checking. However if you are using iOS and MAC devices, you may need to consider this choice, depending on your player choices. But I do suggest you consider ALAC over AIFF as it is also a lossless format and has much better compression and tagging support than AIFF,

And for the Replaygain tags, I would use the Track, Album Gain & iTunes Track normalization option as it provides all of the solutions without any impact on the actual audio data.

Otherwise as suggested use a couple of different discs and formats to test these to ensure they meet your expectations. Then rip away and get those songs into your library. Enjoy!

[Jorge22]

Re: Help to create a new Music Collection

Wow Garym!

Thank you very much for your thorough, clear and helpful response.

I will go ahead with FLAC Uncompressed, ReplayGain (Track, Album & iTunes TN in case I end up using iTunes instead of Foobar2000) with EBU R128, No DSP for HDCD and keep both players to switch them with certain discs (great tip BTW).

I have a doubt about your recommendation of the ReplayGain advanced settings. In my Mac version, and after the LUFS TV, I get to change the maximum gain that is set to 25dB, and set True Peak factor (1x no true peak, 2x, 3x...). This True Peak is what you refer as oversampling?

Thanks a lot for the naming string you shared.

I had this one: [MAXLENGTH]80,[IFVALUE]album artist,[album artist],[IFCOMP]Various Artists[][IF!COMP][artist][][][]/[MAXLENGTH]80,[Year]/[album][]/[MAXLENGTH]80,[track] - [title][]... but this one will not cover me with multidisc. I also need to enter the year, so the collection is organized by Artist and then their albums in chronological order.

I guess this should be the new string:

[MAXLENGTH]240,[IFCOMP]Various Artists/[Year]/[album][IFMULTI]/Disc [disc][]/[track] - [title] - [artist][][IF!COMP][IFVALUE]album artist,[album artist],[artist][]/[Year]/[album][IFMULTI]/Disc [disc][]/[track] - [title][][]

I promise to share here whatever I end up learning by ripping several hundred CDs.

Again, thanks for all your help.
Cheers,
Jorge

[Jorge22]

Re: Help to create a new Music Collection

Thank you very much GBrown.

I will go for FLAC because of its compatibility and ease of use to convert it to other codecs.

I also agree to add Album and iTunes TN to my initial ReplayGain choice. The last one in case I end up using Apple Music (iTunes) in my Apple devices, instead of other players.

I promise I will enjoy the process.
Thanks a lot!
Cheers,
Jorge

[GBrown]

Re: Help to create a new Music Collection

Thank you very much GBrown.

I will go for FLAC because of its compatibility and ease of use to convert it to other codecs.

I also agree to add Album and iTunes TN to my initial ReplayGain choice. The last one in case I end up using Apple Music (iTunes) in my Apple devices, instead of other players.

I promise I will enjoy the process.
Thanks a lot!
Cheers,
Jorge

If you choose FLAC, there is no need to add the iTunes normalization. There is no option for iTunes or Apple Music to play a FLAC file. If you do decide you want to use an Apple player, you can convert the FLAC files to ALAC or AIFF and add that normalization DSP at that point. These are all lossless formats, so nothing to lose when converting them in either direction.

[Jorge22]

Re: Help to create a new Music Collection

Great tips simbun!

Thanks for the link to the Primary and Secondary Release Groups. Never thought of 85% of them

I plan to organize my collection in three major groups/folders:

Albums & Live -> Artist/Year/Title/Tracks
Compilations - Various Artists ->Year/Title/Artist/Tracks
Soundtracks - Various Artists ->Year/Title/Artist/Tracks

Since most of the CDs are Albums & Various Artists Compilations, the tagging suggested by Garym takes care of the majority. The difference between a regular Album and a Concert is normally mentioned in the title so it's easy to identify live music.
I normally adjust manually the Compilations of Various Artists (maybe not needed after Garym's new suggested string) and Soundtracks before I rip the disc, so they go to the right folder with the correct tags.

I know, that its a simple approach but makes easy for me to search for everything I use.

Thank you for bringing all this considerations. I agree that "better before than after".
Cheers,
Jorge

[Jorge22]

Re: Help to create a new Music Collection

If you choose FLAC, there is no need to add the iTunes normalization. There is no option for iTunes or Apple Music to play a FLAC file. If you do decide you want to use an Apple player, you can convert the FLAC files to ALAC or AIFF and add that normalization DSP at that point. These are all lossless formats, so nothing to lose when converting them in either direction.

You're totally right.
Thanks for pointing it up.

[garym]

Re: Help to create a new Music Collection

I have a doubt about your recommendation of the ReplayGain advanced settings. In my Mac version, and after the LUFS TV, I get to change the maximum gain that is set to 25dB, and set True Peak factor (1x no true peak, 2x, 3x...). This True Peak is what you refer as oversampling?

yes, true peak factor, I'd use 2x. I'm not sure how 25dB relates to -18 LUFS. I'd just go with the dB number that is the default when you click on that option.

[Jorge22]

Re: Help to create a new Music Collection

yes, true peak factor, I'd use 2x. I'm not sure how 25dB relates to -18 LUFS. I'd just go with the dB number that is the default when you click on that option.

Changed!
Thanks a lot Garym.
Cheers.
Jorge