This is the answer. I’ve been ripping CDs to whole house audio system for 20+ years. Many homebrewed before current offerings existed. Anyone remember Turtle Beach AudioTron?
Beets:
One ring organizer to rule them all
Everything else is a partial solution…but “everything else” is probably fine for 90% of the use cases out there.
Good luck @Richard_Hall
I do like dbPoweramp because it allows you to see the metadata from multiple sources side by side and allows you to choose which.
Can I ask what type of Drive you are using to rip the CDs? I have never found that any of them rip anywhere near the stated 24x (to FLAC)
Therefore each CD tends to take ages and I give up. Is a slower speed the best I can hope for or is there an external drive out there that performs much faster?
I use some generic USB CD/DVD reader/writer and while 24 is rare, I routinely rip a CD in about 5 minutes.
It depends on the software and its settings. dbPoweramp, if configured correctly, does a very fast pass and then checks the AccurateRip data. If it matches, all is good and there is no need to perform a slow pass.
Other rippers (in particular if based on CD Paranoia like the one in Nucleus/ROCK), perform super slow rips with many repetitions because they have no AccurateRip reference to compare to. (Which also wears out the drive)
This is my experience as well. If you have your software setup for slow passes then it can take a long time. Or, if the CD is damaged. But generally, it is about 5 minutes a disk for me.
Yes, it is nice at that. Of course if neither of the sources it finds is quite correct, editing it is not quite as easy as it should.
The speed you get depends not only on the drive, but also on the condition of the disk, settings used etc. I believbe dbPoweramp’s developers do have a list of drives known to work well. Or maybe HydrogenAudio.
I’ve had good luck ripping pristine disks with LG blu-ray burner drives, as well as some no-name external boxes. When disks are not in an excellent condition, and you configure ripping software to try to extract as accurate data as possible, it does get slower. Cleaning the disk before ripping does help.
True, if it comes down to editing, I just rip it and then edit in mp3tag. It is with Operas that I the ability to compare different sources helps, the metadata on them is usually…horrible.
Over the years, I had good luck with Plextor, Samsung external, Asus (which I think uses the actual Panasonic drives). I have several new internal DVD drives which I just get an external housing. Works great.
When I ripped my large collection years ago, I burned through 6 drives.
That’s exactly what I was saying 
If dbPoweramp picks up good metadata (or requires only minor changes) it’s quite sufficient. But even adding a new quite standard tag (say, Conductor) requires too many clicks IMHO. And it does not show any of those extra tags in the metsadata comparison window, so you don’t really know until you select one of the options from there if it will require more or less fixing up than any other option. At that point MP3Tag becomes quite useful.
I think Plextort today isn’t quite the same Plextor it used to be… I’ve ripped something like 3000 disks somewhat recently, and all my drives survived it, even though some disks took a day to go through all the error correction steps.
I don’t think there are that many actual drive mechanism OEMs left at this point.
No, you are right, I was talking about my SCSI Plextor Plexwriter drive.
Note: Which I think I still have, as well as a SCSI card. I should find out if it still works.
Is it the one with a caddy for the disk? I used to have one of those. With an Adaptec SCSI card, too.
Yes. Those were great drives, imho. I’m old, lol, so I’ve been ripping stuff for well over 20 years. At the time, I was ripping to WAV.
To rip my CD collection, I installed four Asus DVD drives in my computer (lucky if you have an old school tower PC) and used DBpoweramp batch ripper. Worked like a charm, it was difficult to keep up with writing the Excel list I used to record the CDs I completed ripping.
I’ve asked this before, but maybe with the passage of time there’s an answer. Does anyone know on a program, or a service, that can rip surround sound SACDs (or blu rays)?
I remember ripping things in early 2000s
Not in any easy way. Any such service would likely be of questionable legality…
I would think if you already purchased the SACD, it would be no more illegal than ripping a regular CD that you purchased But I’m no expert.
Breaking existing encryption / DRM is treated differently from just reading openly available data, at least in some jurisdictions. That’s why CD rippers are readily available and SACD / BR rippers require jumping through hoops to install the decryption module or special drive firmware, because the makers of the software can’t simply include it for fear of lawsuits.
That said, a Google search easily finds answers.
Edit: To add, what you bought was only the physical medium. The content was only licensed to you, and the license extends only to accessing and decoding the encrypted data in approved players, not to decrypting and copying it.
I am a happy user of dBpoweramp and also use a Nucleus One with internal SSD.
Below is a rough description of my workflow to digitize my large CD collection and place it on my Nucleus One server.
First, I rip the album to the local drive on my workstation (mine is Windows, yours is a Mac). Any necessary manipulations of the ripped albums is completed there before copying them to the Roon monitored directories/folders on the Nucleus One (N1). Any necessary manipulations of the ripped albums is completed there before copying them to the Roon monitored directories/folders on the Nucleus One (N1). That N1 SSD is network mounted to my workstation.
I keep the same folder hierarchy on the N1 as I used on my workstation. dBpoweramp has its own rules for how is creates the folder hierarchy (including the names of folders and digital music folders), but you can modify the root directory of the relative paths & the naming convention.
Even if I think my rip, folder/file names, and metadata tagging is good, I keep these files on my workstation until I verify that Roon displays them properly. If I need to make adjustments to my digitized files, I make these on my workstation. Then, before re-copying them over to the N1 SSD, I delete those files on the N1 SSD and execute a “cleanup library” to eliminate any residual information. Then I re-copy them over, check the results, & repeat until everything is good. (Most of the time the initial files copied over are good).
Sometimes a tweak is need to the Roon representation of the new album which does not require corrections to the source files.
If I have a clean addition of the digital files to the N1 SSD, I then copy the same files to an external drive, as my backup of the data. I use a USB attached external drive for that. If paranoid, there would be a periodic copy of that backup collection to another external drive that is stored off-site in a safe place (such as bank safe deposit box).
Finally, I delete those files from the workstation.
dBpoweramp verifies the rip against an accurate rip database of many rips of the identified album and identifies any tracks that do not match (usually due to imperfections or difficulty reading the ripped disk. There are also rare situations where the album is not in the accuraterip database & thus is unable to identify your rip as verified. When either situation occurs, dbPoweramp has a “secure rip” mode that does multiple rips, identifies the questionable frames and then does very careful re-rips of those frames. When a track is good, secure mode only take twice the time as a normal rip at the same speed. At the other extreme, a very bad CD track can take 24 hours and still not declared the rip as being good (then you may choose to listen to the digitized file and see if it sounds acceptable). I have many tracks & entire albums) which are not “accurate-rips” but were announces as being “secure rips”.
The other essential dBpoweramp service (after reading the disc, but before the rip) is collecting metadata values to store in the digital file’s tags. It accesses multiple databases, suggests tag values by looking for agreements, and lets you examine what values each database suggested. It is not uncommon for me to override the dBpoweramp’s chose of values and click a different value from one of the providers. Rarely, I feel a need to manually type in a value (song name, artist) from the CD insert. I sometime chose different Album Artwork.
If I later want to adjust the metadata tags in the post-rip digitized files, I use the free mp3tag software [I donate money to the developer] to make those changes. While the name reflects it’s origins, it works with several file format including the FLAC format that I prefer.
I see you have plenty of suggestions from people Richard, but it really depends on your hardware/audio devices. I’ve just moved to ssd portable hard drive and love it. It’s so instant as you’ll find out. It especially is for my Plex library of movies. I myself rip musics cds from my Eversolo DMP-a6 streamer in FLAC format with attached usb Apple SuperDrive. It’s very easy as the streamer has its own cd ripping software that rips direct to my Apple Mac Mini external ssd on my home network. So no file copying required. Roon picks it up no problems and it’s then available. I just did it for Motley Crue - Decade of Decadence cd which isn’t available on streaming. Now I can listen with cd quality 44k anywhere with Roon ARC or at home with Roon itself. Bit perfect mate (if you don’t use too much dsp) Can’t go wrong, but as I said it depends on your hardware. Your streamer may not rip cds and you might have to install software on your computer…. It will all work anyway. My advice, make it easy for yourself. Don’t’ make it complicated and just do a few including double cds to make sure your process works before doing your whole library. As per @Suedkiez as he knows his stuff and is a fan of Sonic Youth. Haha. hope that helps mate. Reach out in personal chat if you have any questions as I’d be happy to pass on what I’ve learned.
Sorry, it @Mike_O_Neill who suggested doing 10 at a time. Strongly agree. Time is money and your sanity. 
Time saving tip that is working for me, ymmv: I have a Qobuz subscription, so when I ripped my CDs, I just ripped the ones that weren’t available in Qobuz and added the others to Roon from Qobuz. Saved me a bunch of time as a large portion of my CDs were on Qobuz. If the album disappears from Qobuz or I don’t like a re-master I just go rip that CD (happens very infrequently for me).