New CD Ripper user, setup questions

[simbun]

Re: New CD Ripper user, setup questions

I could use some help deciding if the following Meta Data and ID Tag Options in CD Ripper are necessary or beneficial.
The default for these items is not selected, should I select them and what is the benefit?
Write ID Tags
Length
Raw CD TOC
CDDB Disc ID
MBID
Checksum
Profile
Pre-Emphasis
HDCD

I believe MBID is a MusicBrainz ID that allows apps to be able to quickly lookup that album against MusicBrainz. Apps like KODI and MusicBrainz Picard rather than having to perform a TOC lookup.

HDCD and Pre-Emphasis CDs require special decoding to play back correctly, especially when streaming. HDCD discs can be identified post rip but you can't identify discs with Pre-emphasis so it's important to flag those during the ripping stage.
There's a bug (or a massive oversight) in CD Ripper where you NEED to enable the Track Technical column in the main CD Ripper display for these to be tagged, so make sure you do that.
You can have CD Ripper decode these CD's for you (add the HDCD dsp or leave the 'Apply De-Emphasis to CD tracks marked with Pre-Emphasis' selection enabled), but then you're left without a copy of the original CD so I prefer to make sure these options aren't selected and create these copies myself.
You may never encounter these discs as they're typically from the 80's and 90's, but if you think you may encounter them it's best to have the tags enabled.
Here's an non-exhaustive list of pre-emphasis and HDCD discs.

What do the following items provide versus the default not selected state?
Artist Sort
Album Artist Sort
Album Sort

Artist sort tags will typically switch person names to "surname, lastname" and groups to "Beatles, The" whilst also replacing characters so they're easier to find in a list e.g. Pink instead of P!nk.
When browsing artists I prefer to use the Sort variant, just because it's what I'm used to, but have the proper name (firstname surname) displayed everywhere else.

There's absolutely a minimum set of tags you need, but it's really down to how you want to browse your collection, for me I also tag:

• RipDate: I know most players support "recently added" but I quite often like to go further back than that. I typically browse this by YYYYMM.
• AlbumType: Studio, Best Of, Live, Soundtrack, Compilation e.t.c. If I'm listening casually I'll often choose a Compilation or Best Of, whereas if I'm going to sit down and listen to something it'll tend to be an Artists Studio album. I may go back at some point and align this with MusicBrainz definition but I defined these groupings before I really stated digging into MB.
• Original Date: I like to view an Artists Discography in the order that the albums were released (rather than reissue date or alphabetical) so have this tag set to the earliest release date.
• Remaster Date: I use this to identify remasters as I like to keep Album as just the name of the Album, I don't include 'Special Edition' (I put that in a RELEASE tag) or append a remaster date or anything like that.

Just remember that it's much easier to strip out tags that you don't use than it is to add them to an existing collection.

[garym]

Re: New CD Ripper user, setup questions

Write ID Tags
*Length
Raw CD TOC
CDDB Disc ID
MBID
*Checksum
*Profile
*Pre-Emphasis
HDCD

I use the ones I've indicated above with a *. Other things are info items I don't care about. But some do, and it doesn't take much space to save the info in tags. HDCD is a bit different. I don't use HDCD, as ripping with HDCD is no longer a bit perfect copy of the CD. I have some HDCD CDs, but rip normally and then later use CONVERSION with HDCD option to create 24 bit files that capture the 20 bit information and uses reverse engineering to allow these to be played with HDCD features on non-HDCD capable players. Also, it turns out that many HDCD CDs don't actually use the features of HDCD that need any of this special treatment. Read more than you want to know about HDCD ripping here:

https://forum.dbpoweramp.com/showthread.php?27540-Ripping-HDCDs-Best-practices

What do the following items provide versus the default not selected state?
Artist Sort
Album Artist Sort
Album Sort

sort tags are used by some music servers and players. I don't use these, but some people do. For example, in my server, "Willie Nelson" is listed as Willie Nelson and shows up under "W" in alphabetical listing. I could have an ARTISTSORT and ALBUMARTISTSORT tag for his CDs with "Nelson, Willie" in the tag. Then Willie Nelson would show up under "N" in alphabetical listings. Same idea for ALBUMSORT.


ReplayGain
Set this to Track and Album Gain but do not recall why. Should this be ReplayGain?
After clicking on Track and Album Gain, clicked on the Advanced option. This opens a dialog box which shows Gain Calculation by EBU R128. What is this? The two small boxes below the EBU box then contain -18 and 25 dB. Does this all seem correct? Did not click on the box for disable clip prevention.

Your replaygain settings are correct and exactly what I use. Album Gain and Track Gain *are* the ReplayGain values that are being saved in the tags for use by your player. ALBUM GAIN keeps "intraCD" volume differences intact (quiet vs loud songs that were meant to be this way in the context of an album). TRACK GAIN used to be called RADIO GAIN, because it is like a radio station, where every song played from any album is trying to have the same target loudness. This is good when you are playing a playlist of tracks from different albums. I like my servers/players as I can set them to use RG, by automatically using ALBUM gain when I'm playing songs from same album or TRACK gain when I'm playing a mix of tracks from different albums. EBUR128 method is the more modern method of calculating ReplayGain. -18 is the default, and what I use. This creates, I recall, about a common loudness of the playback to 89db. And this matches the loudness of files that had RG tags added under the older method of calculating RG before the EBU R128 method.

[garym]

Re: New CD Ripper user, setup questions

By the way, this is the naming string I use. It automatically handles compilation CDs (multiple artists), and single or multiple disk CDs. If you want help on making it do something different (track numbers of 1.01, 2.01 instead of disc number subfolders, etc. just let me know). This is for windows. If you use a Mac, the backslashes should all be changed to "/".

[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][][]

[vilsen]

Re: New CD Ripper user, setup questions

I have updated my ripping settings to include track and album replay gain and that may have tamed some of the "glare", again subjective listening.

Setting the replay gain feature may have helped a couple of the FLAC files that had a bit of "glare" sound, or I have convinced myself that it helped.

Your 851N does not support Replay Gain, so that couldn't have helped fixing the "glare". It seems to be subjective listening like you pointed out yourself.

Replay Gain is nice to have though. You could make a feature request to Cambridge. They (more or less) frequently update the firmware for their models using the StreamMagic platform.

As an alternative, Asset UPnP supports Replay Gain and can transcode your files on the fly whilst streaming to 851N. But there is no automatic selection of gain type (like garym mentioned above for his server/player combo). So if you go this route I'd suggest creating separate instances in Asset - one for Album Gain and another for Track Gain. That way you wouldn't need to change the setting in Asset itself when switching between gain types, instead you would merely select the proper instance in your CP.

Also, IIRC there is a setting in BubbleUPnP for Replay Gain. Not sure of that or how it would work though.

[bettersound99]

Re: New CD Ripper user, setup questions

Your 851N does not support Replay Gain, so that couldn't have helped fixing the "glare". It seems to be subjective listening like you pointed out yourself.

Replay Gain is nice to have though. You could make a feature request to Cambridge. They (more or less) frequently update the firmware for their models using the StreamMagic platform.

As an alternative, Asset UPnP supports Replay Gain and can transcode your files on the fly whilst streaming to 851N. But there is no automatic selection of gain type (like garym mentioned above for his server/player combo). So if you go this route I'd suggest creating separate instances in Asset - one for Album Gain and another for Track Gain. That way you wouldn't need to change the setting in Asset itself when switching between gain types, instead you would merely select the proper instance in your CP.

Also, IIRC there is a setting in BubbleUPnP for Replay Gain. Not sure of that or how it would work though.

Hmmm, thought about researching 851N support of Replay Gain but forgot to follow thru, thanks for the data point. I'll probably leave it as I described, sounds like it will neither help nor hurt.

I have not delved into how Asset works, when you say creating separate instances in Asset, what does that mean? Are there options for how Asset performs for a single listening session based upon inputs entered on the CP (i.e., tablet) for that session? Or, does an instance allow the user to setup various configurations of how to apply FLAC file tags?

[vilsen]

Re: New CD Ripper user, setup questions

when you say creating separate instances in Asset, what does that mean?
Are there options for how Asset performs for a single listening session based upon inputs entered on the CP (i.e., tablet) for that session?

In the CP you can see the servers on your network. For example, you could have Asset and Minimserver active on the network at the same time, and you would then pick one of them to browse & play your music.

If you setup additional instances of Asset, they would show up as additional servers in the CP and you could label them as "Asset Rock", "Asset Christmas", "Asset Linda" or whatever.

Each instance has its own settings page in Asset, so you can configure instances separately for various purposes. So you can setup different libraries, browse trees, streaming settings etc. See here: http://www.dbpoweramp.com/Help/AssetUPnP/advanced.html

does an instance allow the user to setup various configurations of how to apply FLAC file tags?

Tags can be seen as "standard" or "custom". What's included in "standard" differs somewhat between servers/players, but Asset supports most common tags out of the box. Custom tags have to be configured by the user. And yes, you can/must set this up for each instance separately.