Looking for some gear advice for CD ripping that will work well with Roon, if anyone can recommend would be most grateful for any suggestions.
I have a decent-sized CD collection (500 CDs or so) that I’d like to rip and include with my Roon library.
I’ve started to manually rip my CDs and organize them in folders, using a tagging software (dBpoweramp) to control their meta data, which works great - BUT, the process is too slow and laborious… rather than enjoy my music, I find myself many weeks later only having ripped and organized a very small section of my CD library.
I would love to find a good hardware solution that will let me just pop my CDs in, get them ripped, recognized, and tagged in a way that would be super friendly to Roon (and that will let me have control over the files and their data in case of need).
I just started doing similar.
I bought a Pioneer Slim BDRW/DVDRW BDR-XD07UHD 6x USB3 from ebay and have been using EAC. https://www.exactaudiocopy.de/
It reads at 1x-3x speed. I paid the few dollars for the db lookup.
Answer the questions during the software setup and add the FLAC support when asked.
It really isn’t fast. It is better than any solution I’ve used over the years for ease/speed/accuracy and the cue/logs are a tool I like.
There are a lot of options though, so hopefully you will hear from others.
There are several companies that will bulk rip your CD collection for you, can’t recommend a company in particular and it soon adds up, but I guess it depends how much your time is worth / how much of a pain you find it to rip them yourself.
Was hoping to find a hardware piece I could use to put the CDs into and get them all stored and tagged automatically well for Roon (rather than ship my CDs out), but it’s good to have this option in my back pocket… thanks again!
Although at around $1000 for the machine you’d need to rip a lot of CDs to break even, against just using a service/company. I guess you could buy an autoloader (new or used) and then sell it on used. May even be worth researching if you can hire one for a week.
I used the Batch Ripper (part of dbpowramp) with 4 cd drives in my PC and was processing 15-20 cds an hour, but it does partly depend on how precise you want to be regarding the file tags (that is another subject all together and everyone has their own preferences.!)
This exercise pre-dated Roon, but I wanted to make sure that I could use these files regardless of the playback mechanism. For example, I could have used Naim equipment to rip and play Cds, but the files would have been useless elsewhere.
@Stampie that’s exactly what on my mind - finding something like Naim that will automatically rip and tag it for me, but in a way that will allow me to use the files and/or edit the tagging later on so I’m not stuck in an ecosystem
What you offer is an improvement to my process, but still hoping for an even easier solution. It may not exists…
Depending on where you’re based I expect they’d be a market for a used autoloader in the sales & trades section here. Although by the time your factored in depreciation and postage costs it’s probably just easier to hire one.
Edit: just noticed this in the small print. “Rental Terms: The Nimbie USB Plus is available to Moon Audio customers who have purchased the Aurender ACS10 Music Server and CD Ripper”. But I expect you could find a production/dry-hire company that has one to rent. Then just use it with the dbPoweramp BatchRipper extension.
The time to rip a cd is less than the time to listen to one. So you will have your 500 cds ripped using dbpoweramp long before you have listened to all 500 cds.
Hi, I use dbPoweramp (professional version) and other rip tagging tools for my CD ripping service. Most of the customers come to me for the same reason as you mention, ripping takes a lot of time and certainly if you want to get the structure, metadata and covers in order. BTW, Roon is my final check before delivery in addition to normal use
dBpoweramp for me was nearer 5 min a cd, and that was with a by now ancient Windows laptop. It uses all the cores available, so is fast. Only thing I found slowed it down was to rip to a network drive via wifi rather than to a local drive. Better to rip locally, then if you need to transfer across your network when a batch is done,
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SukieInTheGraveyard
(This one time, at Bandcamp... I spent too much money!)
18
Just ripping 4 second hand CDs that arrived this morning, using dBpoweramp. Each one has taken less than 2 minutes to rip. I previously ripped my entire CD collection with similar results. Occasional slow reading CD, but that was the exception rather than the rule.
It sounds like there might be a problem with your existing hardware. Is your CD unit particularly old?
Buy an old used office computer, such as an Dell Optiplex 7100 or similar. Replace its harddrive with an cheap SSD, such as a 500Gb Samsung.
Install Vortexbox and you are ready to go.
You put a cd in the tray and close it. After 5-10 minutes the rip is done, verified and stored and the tray pops out. Insert next CD, rinse and repeat…
Every once in a while you connect this pc to your network and use whatever other PC you have to transfer the rips to your Roon core (or set up an RSync script on the Vortexbox to move them regularly).
Yes there are other solutions but this one is one of the smoothest. Just having this can in a corner of an office with two trays of CDs next to it, one “to rip” and one “done”-pile, will see you through this process with minimum effort.
