Hi, I’m fairly new to Roon, and so far I’m very happy with it. I have the software installed on a dedicated NUC, which also contains an SSD on which I put albums I buy from Bandcamp or Qobuz. I would like to rip some of my CDs to this SSD.
I attached a cd drive to this NUC a couple of months ago, and could rip one cd. It stopped working after that, but I was told this was a known issue, and might be resolved when version 8 came out. This version has now been released, but the ripping still does not work.
I have two questions:
Is ripping working for some people? If so, how?
I did use EAC on my PC to convert a CD to FLAC, which I then copied to the SSD in the NUC. That worked, but it took about an hour for EAC to do its thing. Is it necessary to convert to FLAC or are there more efficient ways of putting the occasional album on the SSD?
Many thanks
AceRimmer
(Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast!)
2
Dbpoweramp seems to be the ripping software of choice around here.
Not sure why EAC taking so long.
On average about 6 minutes to rip an album to flac through Dbpoweramp and then 10 seconds or so to transfer it to the SSD inside my nuc.
I think they do a 30 day free trial so you can get a feel for it before paying.
I am currently using EAC with accruate rip + test run and I am very happy. I don’t care if it takes 5min or 1 hour. If proper setup and settings you only do it once
Did you follow a guide to setup EAC? My rips take over an hour also, but my configuration is quite extreme to guarantee a perfect rip. If you’re doing test & copy etc it will take a while for sure.
I was hoping it might be possible to rip straight to the NUC’s SSD using a CD drive plugged into its USB socket. That would not seem to be the case then.
As I am not aiming to rip hundreds of CDs it’s not a major problem.
Mp3tag is the other tool in my library as well.
Great bit of free software, though I have thrown the author a few contributions over the years.
Not so much needed for CD rips as dbPoweramp does such a good job, but it gets used on every download I purchase to rename the files etc
It’s good to get a workflow going with ripping to make it painless. There have been a lot of issues reported with Ripping within Roon and there are a couple of active thread’s at the moment.
Better to get a quick process that you can use and repeat with ease and have the music in multiple places so you don’t have to worry about the backups
Indeed. As I have recently changed my streaming gear, that is exactly what I am attempting to do. Bit of a learning curve. While the current setup is in many ways much superior to what I had, ripping to my old Melco was pretty effortless. As ripping seems to be a bit of an afterthought for Roon, other software seems to be the way to go.
Thanks for your help.
It is if you have ROCK as the operating system for Roon as it has a cd ripper. However it comes with caveats. It does not embed metadata in the files on ripping it just links to Roons metadata services so if you want to use the files in other apps they won’t likely show up. It’s buggy often crashes after a few rips and only a reboot unsticks it.
Based on some other thread’s it looks like the cd ripper has been getting worse not better, but having never used it having read about issues and I am happy with my current workflow and it works perfectly for me
1 Like
AceRimmer
(Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast!)
14
I second mp3tag
Not needed it so much with dbpoweramp but when I had a Bluesound Vault, whoo boy, it seemed I was having to fix stuff every other rip!
I use EAC and have ripped 1000+ albums by now.
I also had issues with slow ripping speeds in the beginning. It was painfully slow and sometimes the speed was below x1.
Not sure about your setup, but I use an external CD-drive that requiers a connection with 2 USBs and when I connected both of them to USB connectors with capability to have constant power on them, BAAM - ripping was flying!
This was the solution for me. The external CD drive didn´t get the power it needed - therefore slow speed.
I have not checked any specs, but it might have something to do with different USB standards.
Thanks, that’s useful information. I have a Bufallo BR XL U3 drive which was recommended by Melco and indeed, it worked very well when plugged into that. It’s a rather hefty device which can read and burn all manner of discs. It does, however, only have one USB connection. My PC is a fairly new, run of the mill, device and it does not have an optical drive.
I have only used EAC once, and was somewhat mystified to begin with. I’ll give it another go and see how it works with other discs. Looking for a fairly cheap 2 USB drive might well be an option if it keeps on being really slow.
Additional experience: My laptop is a couple of years old and I have 2 different standards on USB ports (marked yellow and blue). And it was quite a difference on performance of the external drive depending of what port I choose to connect it to.
