Hello - I’ve been away from Roon for a while for various reasons, but I’m returning to pick where I’d left off. I had ripped 20% - 30% of my CD collection using dbPowerAmp, but now I see that we have the option of using Roon’s own CDROM ripping capability (I’m running ROCK on a NUC, so I could potentially hook a couple of CD drives directly to it).
I’m curious to know this community’s experience with the Roon OS CDROM. Does it have significant advantages or disadvantages compared to dbPowerAmp? I was surprised to see that it doesn’t let you set the folder or file names, but maybe that’s not important as long as the music is correctly identified in the database (??).
I think that the general consensus is that you are better off ripping on a separate computer using dbPowerAmp. Doing it that way:
Gives you a chance to review and correct meta data tags
Is more likely to let you know if a rip is not accurate because of, for example, a scratched disk.
Allows you to control the folder structure on the Roon Server storage
If you have used dbPowerAmp before, then it obviously holds no fears for you. I would stick with it.
If you use the RoonOS facility, you don’t get a chance to review metadata (I’m not even sure if metadata is embedded in the file) and you don’t get to control the folder structure.
I’ve tried it once or twice, but ended up not using it due to the issues you stated and the fact that I had to redo the work in DBpoweramp anyway in order to get the format, compression level, and folder structure I wanted. As well as to fix metadata and names and get the album art I wanted.
The cd ripper in Roon OS might be good for ripping a single CD that you are going to listen right away for a party or something like that. Like someone brought it to the party of gifted it to you for a party. But for long term library usage and for lots of CDs it just does not have the features I need for customization. YMMV
I’ve used both options, but much prefer dBpoweramp for all the reasons that have been stated. In addition, the RoonOS ripping option does not handle boxsets at all well; at least in dBpoweramp you get the opportunity to massage the metadata and folder structure to follow Roon’s guidelines.
Thanks, Wade. That doesn’t surprise me, but it’s good to get my suspicions confirmed.
Re: metadata, here’s what’s on the Knowledge Base page:
If the rip was successful, Roon should automatically import it and find rich metadata. This requires your storage location is set up to find the CD-Rips folder. If the CD metadata was not found, you will need to edit it by hand. Note: tags will not be written to the FLAC files.
Roon finds the meta data and associates it with the ripped CD. However, I believe that it is stored in the Database. Not in the files themselves. I could be wrong on this. I have never used the RoonOS ripping feature.
You are not wrong, though you can export information to the files manually, but they are not stored by default, which has always seemed a strange choice.
The dbPoweramp amp solution as stated by you and other’s is a much better solution as someone that has ripped several thousand CD’s
I used EAC many years ago but found it to be painfully slow. It was very good once setup but the slowness made me look elsewhere for a ripper. Have they made it faster now? Or maybe it was my setup that caused it to be slow?
I always read that EAC was slow, so it wasn’t just you, but I don’t know if they have sped it up. May well be, because they are now using AccurateRip, which makes it possible to do a fast rip. If the checksum matches the AccurateRip database, it’s proven OK. (And you only have to fall back to slow ripping if there is an error).
I may be wrong but I think in the past EAC relied on CD Paranoia, which makes rips slower because it has to try hard to rip correctly (with re-reads etc) as there is no online database to check against.
I’ve never used DbPowerAmp so I can’t compare speeds.
I can say that the rip speed with EAC was acceptable and not unduly slow except on one or two discs where scratches meant that a number of retires were performed for some sectors.
By far the majority of CD’s went through with no retires and no unnecessary laser head seeking.
Same with the free Cuetools ripper, I set it to rip at full speed and only revert to a slower speed should there be an accuraterip ambiguity or problem reading the disc.
Most discs are read at full speed.
If I am not mistaken even the track files are not “named” they all refer (with a reference no of some sort) back to the Roon db so visually not too good.
You have to use Export to another external folder if you want Roon to rename folders and tracks to the Album Title/[disc no - track no]Track Title convention and insert basic metadata to the tracks
Yeah I used to use it. Slow and metadata I found was hit and miss. dbpoweramp has a wider choice of metadata. I always then run them through MusicBrainz Picard after ripping to add more metatdata it pulls from MusicBrainz and add some of my own such as ROONALBUM tags, as welll as to add any albums to its database if not already in.
Another advantage of dbPoweramp is that you can start 2 instances of dbPoweramp and rip simultaneous with 2 optical drives in your computer. It´s not twice as fast, when you start the first rip you can check the metadata for the second. I use an old windows pc with a pioneer blueray drive and a plextor dvd drive. The maximum rip speed is 42x at the end of the CD with no errors and available in AccurateRip. When I encounter errors I can always rerip tracks with the other drive and most of the time does that solve the error. I tried it a few times with an external drive added but dbPoweramp and or Windows loses that connection.
