dBpoweramp appears only to have a Windows add-on that claims to allow actual batch (load-rip-tag-save) ripping. Nor is the interface of XLD particularly intuitive. Although I am prepared to put in the effort.
I’m also looking for hardware to make things even more streamlined. I have four USB CD/DVD drives of various ages, all of which work well with my ‘Late 2017’ iMac running 13.6.1.
Does anyone have any suggestions, please, about both hardware and software which will make a gigantic ripping project even vaguely manageable… hundreds and hundreds (a lifetime’s worth) of CDs, many box sets?
I’m an old Mac user and while I admire your wishes very much, in my mind, highest quality ripping is a bit like driving a car. It involves some engagement and review, and automation isn’t ready for prime time. I love/strongly prefer dBpoweramp, and have used it for years. But proper ripping involves reviewing and engaging with the software’s metadata interface and selection of good album artwork (which is typically best sourced from albumartexchange or Google image search), making interactivity worth the effort. I am sure this is not the answer you desire, and I am sorry for that.
The worst issues happen when you have double (or more) albums where each disc’s default metadata is inconsistent. Ick. And while Roon may be able to sort this out, it doesn’t always, and it will not make your music collection work well in other ecosystems like many of us like to use in parallel.
I have gone through the same process myself recently. At first was going to rip to a SSD on my Eversolo but the interface is terrible compared to room. So added the SSD to my Synology 923+ to run Roon Server and ripped from Mac to Synology using an external CD:DVD player. It’s pretty fast.
Even though the task seems huge I actually found it quite therapeutic to interact with the collection. I found a few albums I had forgotten I had for one.
And Synology as the server has worked flawlessly. as has ARC. Not sure I get the reason for ROCK or Nucleus…
You really can’t trust automated ripping to get it right as adding the correct metadata is key. There are often multiple versions to choose from and it really won’t know which is the exact one. Dbpoweamp when left to do it automatically gets it wrong especially with multidisc albums and box sets. Just do them in small batches when you have spare time and get them right or you’ll end up fixing them anyway. There are no shortcuts to getting a library ripped and metadata added correctly.
I did see that you wanted a Mac solution, which XLD will assist with.
But like some wise dudes said, it’s not a fully automated solution.
There will be some fixes and polishing to sequre quality metadata assignment, primarily.
But, i’d like to recommend a good look at a Linux based solution called Vortexbox. It might be a litlle bit fiddly to set up, but once there you have a pretty much automated solution. It will rip a disc, assign metadata, store in a folder accessible by the network, and then eject the ripped disc. All you do is replace the disc when passing by.
I have set up two of these devices for some friends, on small(-ish) cheap office computers that simply run without screens, keyboard or mouse. They have ripped some thousand CD’s each.
And while your Vortexbox is up and running you have a Roon backup plan should your internet go down!
I used Vortexbox back in the day as an LMS streamer. But didn’t use its ripping capabilities. This was because its ripper didn’t have the capability of checking a rip against the AccurateRip database (to me the gold standard in confirming a bit perfect rip).
I have used dbpoweramp (windows) to rip about 5,000 CDs. I agree about the automation problem. Yes, you can automate ripping with a batch ripper, but the ripping is the easy part. The metadata management is the hard part, and I find it best to do that one CD at a time and even double checking things before adding to my library.
Do keep in mind that even without “batch” ripping in dbpa, one can still rip more than one disk at a time. I had a setup with 4 attached CD drives, and could simply start 4 instances of dbpa running. Then I could have 4 CDs being ripped at one time. I assume one could do the same thing with dbpa on a Mac.
As others have said, it wasn’t that hard to rip once I had everything setup. I could easily rip 50 to 100 CDs in one day, just dealing with it while I was otherwise working on my computer doing other things.
One in burst mode to rip amazingly fast, but be sure to configure AccurateRip
Another one with much more secure ripping (multiple reads and compare them to be sure all reads have the same value) - only when AccurateRip shows errors in burst mode or when the CD is not present in the AccurateRip database you fall back to this profile.
I am ready to attend to renaming and tagging etc as separate process afterwards. I know that’s (almost?) unavoidable.
For that I use Yate. Although with a single test I made yesterday using XLD, I selected the right CD and watched what Roon itself did to amend the metadata. It came through 100% error free.
No, my real roadblock in this is the one which you address, @garym:
It’s mostly about the time. I’m thinking of a ‘jukebox’ solution: load 'em up; go and have a cup of something; come back and attend to the metatags. Perhaps I’m asking for the impossible.
the hardware you link to seems like a bulk disc COPIER rather than a batch ripper. You need something like a Nimbie, connected to a batch ripper program. Of course this will work with dbpa, but only the windows version. (maybe buy a cheap windows computer then resell later…doesn’t need to be that powerful to rip CDs)
How many CDs do you need to rip? It could always be worse…way back in the day when I got one of the original ipods, I ripped about 3,000 CDs to 192kbps mp3 files with musicmatch software. I knew nothing about digital music back then (obviously), just that I wanted my CDs on my computer so I could load them on my ipod. I ultimately reripped all those to FLAC with dbpa.
Oh yeah I did around 1,500 CD’s at 192KB MP3 and then again about 2,000 CDS at 320KB a few years later (which was a big step up) and finally I saw the light and bought dbPoweramp and did it all again this time as FLAC.
Been doing that for the last 12 years or so.
Now I do between 75 and 150 CDs a year depending on how many I buy.
Yeah, switched to dbpa in 2007 and in addition to reripping all CDs to that point, since then I have always immediately ripped every CD that I acquired immediately upon opening!
I knew nothing about digital music back then (obviously), just that I wanted my CDs on my computer so I could load them on my ipod. I ultimately reripped all those to FLAC with dbpa.