Greetings. I wasn’t sure where to post this but my issue is that I love Roon and would like to transfer all my CDs to a hard drive which I can then access via Roon.
Does anyone know of a reliable company that does this for a reasonable price?
I found one about a year ago that would take my CDs and for about .75 each would put them onto a portable drive which I would provide, claiming to preserve high definition and metadata of some kind, at least the album title.
I’ve ripped my own CD’s myself with Dbpoweramp. Small investment but it with the correct settings it converted my music into uncompressed FLAC files while also managing the tags from the discs it recognized.
Stewart – This a a great question; good luck with your project. I rip my own CDs with dBPoweramp, as the process is simple enough and I can control some of my metadata, archiving, and other settings. But I have yet to rip my SACDs, DVD-As, and Blu-ray music discs. I really wanted to use Ari’s Golden Ear Digital service, but as you all may know, he discontinued it before I got a chance to send my media in for ripping. Although the process seems to have become easier for SACDs, I’m not sure that I still want to attempt the task on my own. Does anyone know of any services that are as reliable and quality-oriented as Golden Ear Digital was? Alternatively, does anyone know of a comprehensive guide to ripping SACDs that employs the latest and best (and easiest) techniques and software? I am located in Dallas, Texas.
John I followed one of the SACD ripping documents linked on the forum here (or at least linked out from it to another website).
It does require a specific range of SACD/BD player’s though and I bought one on eBay for less than $60 delivered.
Now if only finding SACDs at a reasonable price was so easy
I am away for another week or so, but if you can’t find anything drop me a PM as I am pretty sure I kept everything safely downloaded and will be happy to share the process with you.
good and up to date instructions here with links to other sites if you want to get more detail. I’ve been doing this since the PS3 days and this approach using BluRay players is much easier and more reliable. I happened to have an Oppo 105 sitting around, so use that for my SACD ripping. Down the Rabbit Hole of SACD Ripping and DSD Extraction – PS Audio
Ripping BluRays is another story and for that I use MakeMKV and the same disc player that I bought to rip 4K UHD BluRay disks.
I second using dBpoweramp, I have ripped over 1000 CDs, and it does take time. However, dBpoweramp supports multiple drives for ripping CDs which can drastically reduce the amount of time you spend sitting at the computer.
I’ve used Golden Ear on numerous SACDs, blu-rays, etc. and I too am seeking an alternative, preferably another 3rd party rather than DIY. I’m really only interested in how to rip multi-channel SACDs or blu-rays. I’ve ripped my 2-channel CD collection on my Mac. Does anyone know if the CD ripping service NYC or Dbpoweramp allow you to rip multi-channel media?
I did all mine with dBPoweramp. Easy and you have full control of what your end product will be. If you have the suite, you can get all the correct metadata as well.
I used one of these - Nimbie USB Plus - Buy Now (acronova.com) and dbPoweramp batch ripper to do all of my CDs, approximately 6500 discs. I reviewed all of the metadata using mp3tag. Not too painful to be honest and by far the cheapest way of doing it. I also ripped around 1000 DVDs and 150 blu ray discs. From memory it worked out at around £0.15p per disc. I kept the Nimbie but I guess if I sold it on then my costs would reduce to less than £0.10 per disc…
Two of the biggest commercial ripping services are:
* MusicShifter
* dmp3digital
It does take some effort to remove each CD from its jewel case and place it on the provided spindle and then do the reverse when then returned. So farming this out is not an effortless solution.
I also run the provided files through software that validates the accuracy of the rip. Sometimes, though rarely, a service has errors in the rip; almost always due to blemishes on the discs, that require extra cleaning, GIGO.
But whatever service you use, the meta-tagging that they provide are primarily designed for standard pop/rock/country albums that fit nicely into the artist/albums/track hierarchy and are easily categorized.
The meta-tagging of Classical music albums and musicals (original cast vs soundtrack) are generally not handled properly (imho).
As a result, if you have the service rip these more difficult categories, you can expect to do a bit of re-tagging yourself with the software of your choice for these albums.
If these are a smaller subset of your collection, you may wish to rip them yourself using a premium ripping software package and not pay a service to rip them. Just have the service rip the more standard part of your collection.
On the other hand, if you are pleased with the Roon metadata labeling (allow it it to override the tagging on the provided digital music files) then the ripping service tagging errors are of less concern.
If you use a Mac as your core, just attach a cd drive, set the format to lossless and off you go, no special program required, though patience is required!
I really loathe ripping and then trying to fix the tags. It seems to go well for a while then I hit a wall and get frustrated. So getting all of my CD’s done in my remaining lifetime is probably out–in fact lately I’m buying them faster than ripping them. Tags for downloaded files also frequently need to be fixed. My collection is 90% classical, so the artist/album/song Procrustean bed does not work well. I think the OP is similarly disinclined, not looking for recommendation for ripping software or ripping SACD’s.
So yeah, I occasionally think about a paid service. But thanks for the heads up about unpackaging and repackaging (I most definitely would still want to keep them) and that classical titles are most likely not going to get done right. I’ll keep on keeping on. I did get dB Power Amp and am pretty happy with it, though I still prefer JRiver for editing tags (though it has an annoying habit of wanting to play things that I’m only trying to tag). But if anyone knows of a classical specific ripping service that won’t break the bank I am definitely interested.
I recently used Progressive Labs in New York to rip 400-plus CDs. They were a mix of pop, classical, obscure and weird. $1 per CD, 3-4 day turnaround, reasonably good metadata (including classical) and excellent customer service. I researched and communicated with a number of other services before choosing Progressive.
This was after several years of planning to rip my own CDs “real soon now.” I also wasn’t looking forward to getting “CD elbow” from handling all those CDs and having to review and possibly clean up my own metadata for each CD. (Roon’s metadata was another reason for choosing Roon as my playback platform.)
If requested, Progressive will keep the CDs in the order in which they were submitted (except for CDs requiring manual intervention), making it easier to put the CDs back in the jewel cases if you are planning to do so.
Just a reminder - It is a copyright violation and a ripoff of the artists to sell the CDs after having them ripped.
of older equipment. I’ll search for the link. Thanks!