I understand everyone’s needs and views are different re just streaming or ripping your collection.
I want to rip my collection as I travel extensively with work and I like to use ARC. The only issue with ARC is it can’t link the Tidal/Qobuz downloads so when on a plane I have no access to Roon and my music.
Rather than trying to mange the streaming services , I’m using Roon, that’s essentially what it’s there for right.
That’s my thoughts , I will be doing this over the next few weeks. Setup next to my second system so I can listen whilst ripping with a nice glass of red.
I use an old alienware desktop with 2 different optical drives. I can rip with 2 instances of dbPoweramp at the same time, this saves some time.
MP3tag for extra tagging or corrections and ViceVersa for backup is an excellent choice.
I use a newer alienware for roon. I have master copies of all flac files on 2 drives and a dedicated drive for roon libraries for my music I want in roon. So I can delete albums in roon whenever I want without worrying about losing the source. An offline copy and an offsite copy makes it complete.
Whatever workflow you choose, rip a dozen disks, check/correct metadata, copy to Roon - and check that it does what you want. 400 disks might be ‘not many’ compared to some collections, but you don’t want to do it twice if you don’t have to!
Ripping fast is not necessarily what you want. Take the time to read the manual and configure the software to a comfortable level of accuracy/paranoia.
I have used dbpa to rip all mine. Average per CD is about 4-5 Mins so i believe it should take you about 33-35 Hours of total work to rip your 400. If you are not watching thru all the rip, just be aware that the program will not automatically spit out your CD if there is a inaccurate track returned.
You have to hit the eject button for that. I have found that in 99.9% of those inaccurate messages, the ripped FLAC still plays well. Good luck with it all.
For years and years, I’ve used my laptop and JRiver’s Media Center (version 30 now) to rip music. It does a great job with organizing music.
My laptop copy of the music is the “master”. I then copy that to my Synology NAS and 3 different SSD’s and a portable drive attached to my Oppo. I turn off the Nucleus, plug that eternal SSD into my laptop and copy any updated playlist and music to the drive. Unplug from the laptop, plug the SSD back into the Nucleus and start it up.
I only have about 32,000 songs, with a lot of those high rez files, so it takes up about 690 GB of space. I use a program called TreeComp to sync the different copies from the master.
Mapped drives from the ROCK can be a bit flakey. Sometimes they need to be remapped for no particular reason. As mentioned, there can be issues with the ROCK sensing file updates automatically when pointing to a NAS. I also find that the ROCK performs a bit smoother with locally stored files. It will certainly work pointing to a NAS (I’ve done that), but it just works better with local storage.
Not had that problem but I’m using windows 11 on a nuc. I map a nas share as a windows drive and point Roon at that. As far as Roon is concerned it’s a local drive
There are already some threads on this that you can follow but you will need to buy a Blue-ray player (mine was about £45)
PM me and I will share some documents that were shared with me.
Thank you Michael, and Steve,
I could indeed have done some research before asking the question
I found plenty of answers and useful links on the forum.
I must have an old PS lying around somewhere or I’ll try the Blu-ray method…
Cheers
It does depend a bit on the used hardware I guess.
I have a Verbatim slimline Blu-ray writer which I can hook up through USB-C to my MacBook Pro. And dbPoweramp failed to rip a single disc with it. Continuous line of read errors, while the drive works perfectly fine otherwise.
I’ve ended up using my old Apple Superdrive (DVD writer) and it ripped without an issue.
Over a period of several years I have built a large digital collection using Exact Audio Copy (EAC) and a nifty little program developed by a guy in Germany to edit metadata called MP3Tag.
I rip everything to a temporary location before using JRiver to check tagging and then I use the batch MOVE/Rename feature to move them to the ultimate location on my NAS (I have a particular folder structure I adhere to).
An external USB drive is connected to my NAS to back up the music files (it’s not as reliable, so I expect to replace it every few years.
Playback happens from the files on the NAS to a Roon server elsewhere in the house.
