Now that we’ve got Roon up and running, my wife and I are ready to start the project of ripping our CD library (and later, vinyl LPs) to FLAC files for Roon to digest. It looks like it’s possible to attach a USB CD drive directly to the NUC that’s running ROCK and have it rip directly to the attached HD with our music library. I’ve searched for the best way to do this, but some of the answers are a few years old, so I wanted to check, in case there is better advice today.
I came across the RoonOS CD Ripper, which looks great (especially its ability to worked with damaged or imperfect CDs), but since that page falls under the Nucleus documentation, I don’t expect that it applies to ROCK (??).
If the RoonOS CD Ripper doesn’t apply, then is the Roon Extension CD Ripper still a good way to go?
If either of these will work, is it possible to use multiple CD drives to rip several discs simultaneously? There are at least three good-quality USB CD/DVD drives at work that I can borrow, so if it’s possible, I would consider doing that. On the other hand, if ripping 3 CDs at once means that each one takes 3 times as long, then it might not save much or any time, in which case I would just keep it simple to reduce the chances of errors.
I’ve never used a ROCK attached CD ripper or Roon Extension Ripper.
Most (many) people use dbpoweramp running on another machine from ROCK and then copy the resulting files to whatever storage is defined to Roon. dbpoweramp lets one use multiple drives.
This is what we did, finishing last weekend. The machine doesn’t even have to be fancy. I actually set up a 16-year-old laptop as a ripping station and it worked just fine. Its core 2 Duo processor (remember those?) is just fast enough to do simultaneous FLAC and MP3 V0 encoding simultaneously at the drive’s native read speed.
It does, but don’t do it unless you are never intending to use your files with any other software. As recommended above, use something like dbpoweramp. Rip to FLAC, do it right, do it once!
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SukieInTheGraveyard
(This one time, at Bandcamp... I spent too much money!)
6
The advantage of using a separate PC with something like dBpoweramp is that it includes AccurateRip. This gives extra confidence that the disc is reading correctly.
Why do you say this (“unless you are never intending to use your files with any other software”)? Does the ROCK CD Ripper apply some kind of proprietary encoding or formatting? I’d definitely want to have the freedom to use the files however I want down the road, so this would be a definite disadvantage.
dbpoweramp sounds like a good option to look into. I hadn’t been aware of it, so I’ll definitely give it a look.
It rips to flac. The intitial files that it imports are indeed funky and only readable by roon BUT if you then export them (from within roon)you end up with perfectly readable files for any other software using standard artist-album-trackname
Reimport into into roon and delete the original roon rip.
My understanding is it does NO tagging whatsoever to the files themselves–relying instead on metadata provided by Roon directly in its own app. So if you copy them elsewhere, you have to do all that tagging yourself.
Roon rips to an internal storage location called CD-Rips. The CDs are ripped to a folder entitled with the Date_Time, Inside the folder the tracks are called Track01.flac, Track02.flac, etc. (See Below)
So, copied from the file system, the files will play in other players, just with no meta-data. To get the meta-data IN the files, you have to export the CDs.
Roon’s CDRipper rips to folders named like so, rather than the name of the album / tracks.
In the drive chosen, a folder will be created at its root, called CD-Rips. Inside that directory, we will create a folder called CD-Ripped-YYYY-MM-DD--HH-MM-SS, using the time that you started the rip, in UTC timezone. Inside this directory will be your files named trackNN.flac.
Which might be fine for the occasional rip, but is far from ideal should you ever want to migrate to another platform or move your rips around manually.
If your going to be ripping any quantity of CD’s, as others have already said, get a copy of dbPoweramp.
Ripping a CD library is a job you only want to do once, so do it correctly the first time.
Plenty of guides on the forums if you do a search.
Hi Bruce!
Reading through your issues regarding looking at your interest for planned ripping of your current CD library to FLAC files,…I would be very happy to go back and forth to aid in some of your questions as I was where you were at several months back.
I currently use DBpoweramp and it works very well with Roon,not currently on a Unix based system,(but Windows 10 64 bit) there are some steps to adequately getting underway,but all good. Best I can comunicate back to you,or answer any additional questions if I can this coming Saturday if fine,and Happy to help!
Cheers!
Kim
I used Exact Audio Copy for mine formerly saving to 320kbs MP3 for portable (iPhone) and FLAC for system - I’ve more recently gone to AIFF which is essentially WAV but with good metadata
I also had two grunty PCs with two drives each - I felt like a plate spinner
I rip directly to the internal storage drive on my Nucleus using dBpoweramp over the network. It works fine for me. Others may disagree with this approach. Ripping CDs is one thing. I would think long and hard about digitizing LPs. Unless you have some that are unobtainable, the time and effort required to digitize albums is simply not worth it. I’m speaking from experience.
This is by no means an official endorsement or otherwise sanctioned by Roon. Just me personally trying to save someone from the pain of CD ripping
In the past I have personally referred several people to Ari at Golden Ear Digital for CD and SACD ripping. I have seen the files that he returned and they were high quality rips with sensible metadata. It’s been a few years since I’ve spoken with him, but if he’s still up and running I wouldn’t hesitate to use his services.
I’ve done thousands of discs using a Nimbe autoloader driven by dbpoweamp. That worked well, but it was still a slightly painful process (especially when it broke – like two discs getting dropped into the drive’s tray).
