It’s time to start ripping my cds I have aprox. 3k give or take. I’m using a Nucleus One for starters It’s been great for streaming from the usual suspects, no problems at all.
My first round of questions are as follows.
1: I should get a copy of DBpoweramp (right)?
2: I need two hard drives one for ripping from MacBook air via supper drive and one for the Nucleus internal drive bay. I plan on buying ssd drives, any recommendations on brands or models?
I think 2tb should be sufficient yes/no? I’ll rip to flac no compression. All but a few hundred cds are on all streaming platforms. I’m lazy so I don’t think all of the collection will ever get ripped.
These are my questions for now, spending the money is the easy part I’ll have more questions when it comes to actually getting the job done.
Not sure where the recommendation comes from. I have FLACs compressed at maximum (level 8) and decoding is around 2000x faster than real time playback. Even if your server is 10x slower than mine, it’s not going to affect anything. The space savings on the other hand can be significant. If compression ratio is only 0.7, you save about 1TB of storage every 3TB of music.
Indeed, the compression speed decreases with the compression level by FLAC’s design, but with modern CPUs this is practically irrelevant as you say.
Decompression speed is nearly constant in FLAC, regardless of compression level. (It’s a design principle of the format.)
However, the size difference between level 7 and level 5 is minimal. In summary, it’s a waste of time and an unnecessary complication to mess with this. 5 is just fine.
It most probably depends on the contents, so it may or may not be important. Considering that compression time is but a small fraction of the ripping time, I don’t see it as a waste of time.
Agree with all of the above and had some great results- I find the biggest issue is the speed of the CD ripping is often slow- very rarely 24 speed- I think this may be because I am using USB powered cd drives?
For the “Method”, choose Secure. This tries a fast rip first and only falls back to slow reading and re-trying individual sectors if it encounters errors.
Even then, rips can be slower than maximum speed, and this depends on the CD quality.
Some CDs rip faster, some slower. Cleaning the CD with water & a drop of dishwashing liquid can help if its dirty, but scratches (even very small ones) can require slower ripping speed. It’s nothing to do with USB, I think - after all, some CDs rip at max. speeds even with USB drives. Audio CDs have less error correction than computer data disks, so this probably has a an influence on achieveable speeds; the specs given for the drive are for data disks. Let dbPoweramp do its thing, it’s very good at it.
i ordered two Samsung hard drives today one external and one internal. Both 2tb ssd. Does it make sense to pick up a third drive to back up the Nucleus?
I just went to the DB site. They have a handful of different programs up for sale. It seems like the basic is dBpoweramp Music Converter & CD Ripper $48usd and a hand full of other items. Is all I need is this basic program to do the job well? Sorry for the stupidity.
You should always have at least one backup of the music files and one backup of the Roon database, ideally more than one on different drives and in different places
DB Poweramp… absolutely the best. Easy to use. The I use a Mac mini to rip to a dedicated 18tb hard drive and then copy to a Synology NAS. That way I have a backup and a NAS. Why use SSD. Very expensive per TB and uncertain backup life. Large HDs are cheap and probably better long term storage. The rip ID on the Roon Nuc is somewhat primitive. Further there are size limitations with internal drive. I now have 17000 albums on my NAS with no issues if you use a ssd. I have the NAS remotely placed so noise is not an issue.
AIFF doesn’t have an embedded checksum, so that’s a bit of a disadvantage compared to FLAC. (Can be solved by writing a script that generates and compares hashes separately, but FLAC is more convenient in this regard)
