I’ve been posting (hopefully helpful) error reports and criticism; thought I’d add something positive. I’ve been ripping LOTS of CDs lately. Ripping them in iTunes, tossing them in Roon via the interface on a remote. iTunes has found art for maybe 25% of the (mostly classical) CDs I’ve ripped so far, and has totally failed to identify quite a few. Most of the time, Roon fixes things up when I drop them in.
This is the kind of thing I’d expect iTunes to be better at, just because they (presumably) have more resources. But they suck, and you guys are doing great on this. Thanks.
Hi Jim, I am interested in the process of tossing them into Roon. I also rip to iTunes and use iTunes to sync music to my iPhone. After adding albums to iTunes, I do nothing and Roon finds them itself. How have you arranged Roon wrt iTunes.
Jeff
I have RoonServer running on a NUC feeding my DAC. No monitor there and no disk drive, so I rip on my laptop. (No disk drive there, either, but easier to connect one.) So: Different computers. Easiest way to transfer is to dump the files (maybe after a bit of prepping) onto the Roon Remote window. Files are automatically imported to Roon Server. The only caveat is, you need a good, fast connection. Here in my house, which has thick walls and a wifi router pretty far away, hard-wired is the way to go.
Andrew, thanks for this. Downloaded dBpoweramp yesterday and used the ripper all day. I found it much more transparent than iTunes, which is good, but I do think I should be able to tweak things post-rip without starting up yet another program. And if I can’t save metadata changes post-rip, why allow me to make them?
Also, I found it to be about the same speed as iTunes–certainly not faster. Presumably that’s because I haven’t paid for it yet. Bit of an odd marketing strategy, that.
Hi Jim,
I havent used iTunes for ripping so can’t compare speed there. It may be that dBpoweramp has better speed when purchased but I can’t remember that. It’s quite possible that my previous ripper, Exact Audio Copy, was juat very slow.
Here is what I determined after ripping ~ 4,000 CDs from my collection.
Use dBpoweramp’s batch ripper - can support multiple optical drives. I built an 8-bay optical tower and was able to rip ~100 CDs per hour.
I let dBpoweramp rip and found it was able to identify most of the CDs I fed it, including classical. Those it couldn’t identify were placed in a to-rip-later pile.
For the most part, dBpoweramp did a decent job on the CD metadata, but wasn’t without error. This was especially true for multi-disc sets.
The to-rip-later pile was re-ripped using XLD on a Mac - I set it up to tap into Amazon’s CD database so it had a higher success rate than dBpoweramp on properly identifying CDs and getting the metadata correct.
a) When XLD failed i.e., no metadata, I resorted to iTunes to rip the media as it was almost without exception able to properly ID the CD and get the metadata correct. I ripped my entire collection to FLAC, so using iTunes meant ALAC which was fine.
In the end, I still had to do quite a bit of clean-up work in Roon to get things right - it would on occasion get the CD wrong, and was especially weak in multi-disc sets which wasn’t entirely Roon’s fault but mostly a failing of the metadata with each CD.
I was happy to do the quick bulk rip and deal with the problems thereafter. Now, adding additional albums I am using a separate workflow. Each CD is ripped to the local machine typically using XLD. Once the CD is ripped, I look at the track metadata using Kid3 - this allows me to catch any errors immediately, especially for multi-CD sets. I’m also able to fix those rips that place tracks in separate folders when you’re ripping a various artists title. Roon really wants each track from one album to be in the same folder.
If XLD failed to ID the CD, I would use iTunes, ripped locally, checked the metadata with Kid3, then moved the CD to the library on my server.
System is now a well oiled machine.
Hope this helps for those facing a large ripping challenge. Ask questions - I’m happy to share what I’ve learned.