I dumped my entire iTunes library 3 years ago and decided to rebuild my library from scratch. No MP3, AAC and CD rips allowed only when there was no alternative. I’ve tried to keep it as much 24 bit FLAC as possible.
Originally I found music on torrents (not recommended) but then found
Ripping SACD’s to DSD
and other ways to find music.
Where do you source High Res music?
I never ripped music to mp3’s as I never saw the logic of archiving a lifetime of music in a lossy format. I have all my music ripped to FLAC and have used a number of different means from Media Monkey to Foobar to a few other free ones. Probably used Media Monkey more than others.
There are apparently ways to rip DVD- Audio and Bluray Audio available. Do not know of any SACD ripping available. There are services you can mail your SACD’s off who will rip them for you.
For listening I use NAS with ROON and Qobuz.
Ripping DVD-Audio and Bluray seem somewhat pointless with all those albums streaming at high resolution.
With Qobuz you can buy albums if you have the Sublime membership for very little, most under $12 and many well under $10. I still buy a few albums a month. I like owning music. With Qobuz you can download it as often as you wish if you purchase it, giving you a back up to be downloaded with hard drive failure etc.
Prior to Qobuz I had downloaded from HDTracks and Prostudiomasters. They have some DSD downloads which sound excellent. The Bridge from Sonny Rollins sounds exceptional
On a Mac, you can rip Blue Ray audio to FLAC using an app called “DVD Audio Extractor”
Hi Blair
I buy a lot of albums on this site:
But I think you have to live in Germany - but I am not sure.
Torben
Not sure how well it’s going to go down here with ‘you’ speaking about ‘warez’. However, ‘Google’ is your friend… Should you wish to find music…
I’ve started raiding the charity shops. 25p/50p a disk and £1 for compilations. Obviously, this varies a lot in the places you visit. But, I’ve found quite a few albums that cannot be found on streaming services.
Edit: Not sure why I got flagged, when I was talking about the OP.
Hi Torben I have made a number of purchases from this site from the UK
Also Qobuz is good especially if you are a Sublime subscriber and offer great discounts and Sales.
Ditching music due to format is just daft especially tat cd quality. Hires doesn’t necessarily mean better especially in the world of remasters.
Most my stuff if it is hires it’s not a prerequisite is purchased directly from Bandcamp, Qobuz occasionally a few other sites but these cover all my needs. Never downloaded music for free.
I won’t pick on hi-res here. I will however say that preferring AAC over MP3 is [also] quite pointless. Yes, AAC is more efficient and beats MP3 in terms of quality at the same bit rate. But this only matters at lower bit rates. Once you get to 256kpbs, they are virtually indistinguishable from one another - and from the original. At 320kbps, MP3 is already past the point of transparency.
You would be surprised how many people have illegal downloads as flac that are just upsampled Mp3s.
Someone recently showed off his 20terrabyte (easily 200k tracks) of flacs . I analysed a bunch of them and a good chunk turned out to be MP3 files in a flac container. Or cd rips that where done without accurate rip.
Even most SACD rips out there are done with a PS3 and went through a pcm 88khz conversation.
So my only source are legit sites like highresaudio, qobuz store, Bandcamp, ototoy, mora (Japan) .
Or my own rips.
For the record, that is not true. The PlayStation 3 and various other Blu-ray player SACD ripping method outputs an ISO file. It is a clone of the SACD. With the right equipment, the ISO even can be burned to blank disc and played as SACD-R.
You have posted this PCM conversion misinformation twice here recently. It makes no sense because of the internal processing gymnastics required to go from SACD → DSD → PCM → DSD → ISO. Provide amazing evidence to the contrary, or stop posting your incorrect assertions.
AJ
I never said it’s not possible with a PS3 to dumb SACD iso files over Lan.
But there are plenty of SACD PS3 rips out there with log Files that mention 88khz pcm conversation back to Dsf
People used to do rips with spidf also.
Jriver also does SACD iso - pcm to Dsf conversation.
You got to read everything before you post a response and not just assume something.
Actually, you did.
You need to be more precise with your language. You have posted multiple times now implying or flat out asserting that PlayStation 3 SACD rips go through some sort of convoluted DSD → PCM → DSD conversion. Using the well established method, the rips themselves are just raw data from SACDs. Any post processing applied to the rips, however, may entail PCM conversions.
The gist is that any SACD rip in ISO form is DSD directly off of the disc. Further evidence of this, the ISO may be even DST compressed DSD, and that lossless compression would be ridiculous to reapply after any PCM conversion.
But any random DSF file could be produced from any source or format. SACD, CD, MP3. All bets are off.
AJ
AJ, you’re so right. I have made DSD from 32bit AIFF myself. Could have been an mp3 … there’s no guarantees of quality just because it’s high res.
I have heard 24 bit 96kHz FLAC rips from Vinyl sound better than DSD from iso.
I’m surprised no one mentioned https://www.hdtracks.com
I forgot that one. Msg me on youtube to learn more ways.https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh6jjzM9F_ivBK65wk4Pxqw
i did mention HDTracks.com
since I got Qobuz Sublime I haven’t used the other services.
HDTracks is great though
Only just seen this , eliminating 44.1/16 seems a bit odd and a massive waste of HDD space
I wouldn’t be surprised is some of the HR files are in fact upscales of CD’s to 96/24
Yes, but Hard Drives (even SSD’s) are not that expensive with respect to some high end audio gear. I can HEAR the difference, so for me it was worthwhile.
I haven’t seen many references to Media Monkey here on the Roon site. Prior to using Roon, I used Media Monkey to manage metadata and to rip CDs. With the custom metadata fields for managing classical music that I had added to Media Monkey, it was fairly easy to import all my metadata into Roon. For ripping SACDs I use an OPPO BDP-103 running custom microcode you can find on the internet. The code allows the BDP-103 to act as a server for ripping SACDs.
I used it for a while to sort out my library. Before that it was iTunes briefly. Was disappointed to find nor real alternative for MacOS so I gave it up.
I rip CD’s to FLAC using dbPoweramp music converter (mac) and Meta (Mac app) to apply Metadata. Hope that helps.
