Greetings, just updated my music server to a Musica Pristina A Cappella unit (Roon-ready). Formerly I was using Foobar and my prior music server had an imbedded CD burner built in.
I will be installing Roon on a Windors10 laptop as the core, and due to the less than stellar CD ripping capabilities of Win10, I have been looking at 3rd party ripping applications. I save everything to FLAC.
My question is this… most of my short list ripping choices such as dBpoweramp and Exact Audio Copy want to imbed metadata into the files. It seems Roon deals with metadata in a much more robust way, so I am wondering if I need to allow those ripping programs to add metadata, and how does that impact what Roon does. If I could rip without id tags, would Roon still be able to retrieve metadata? Please advise…
I continue to use dBpoweramp even though I now have Roon. I’m a believer in the adage “the truth is in the file”; in other words, the value of having metadata embedded in the track.
If ever Roon goes away, I’ll be able to move my collection over to another player that will understand metadata…
Geoff, so as I understand it, your dbpoweramp ripped CD’s DO have that metadata also, and apparently there is no conflict with what Roon does with it’s metadata searches, correct? So essentially Roon ignores any imbedded metadata and uses it’s own?
Not quite. If Roon can’t identify an album from its own sources, it will use the track metadata to construct the album/track list. You can also tell Roon to preferentially use your own metadata for fields if you so wish.
XLD does a great job ripping CDs for me. 98% of the time the metadata info it provides is good enough. Sometimes I have to tweak a multi-disk album’s tags. Can’t beat the price either.
That’s correct. You can (via Roon) determine file by file if you want to use your file metadata or Roon’s. The default is to use Roon’s, which is good for me. All my EAC fed metadata remains in my file.
I still use foobar2k to rip my few new CDs.
It offers acourate rip and is free.
If I would have to start from scratch with a huge CD collection, I would buy dbpoweramp.
[quote=“Christoph, post:11, topic:13243”]
with a huge CD collection, I would buy dbpoweramp.
[/quote]definitely, set up a pc with 4 or 5 cd/dvd drives an use dbpoweramp’s batch ripper to rip concurrently. No way I’d have churned through my collection otherwise…
These days I rip so little I just issue a cdparaoia -B from a Linux terminal and tag afterward using puddletag.