A buck twenty-five a disc. Damn!
Shipping there on buyer and shipping back on who? To say nothing of the risk of sending your whole CD catalog thru the mail.
Such a deal.
Depends on what your time is worth. I ripped a thousand CDs over several months and sometimes wondered if paying 1.5K wouldn’t have been better. My life time is short.
Shipping costs obviously depend on where you are but here in Germany would be a pittance even fully insured
Although Roon may claim to provide a one stop solution to CD ripping with the RoonOS CD Ripper, in the real world building and maintaining a digital music library actually requires several different programs, which are needed for very specific tasks. The list below refer to Windows based computers.
For CD Ripping: dbPowerAmp, the best money you will spend for a piece of software.
Digital audio files conversions (yes there will be times one may need to convert from one digital audio format to another): once again dbPoweramp
Digital audio file tagging: I use MP3Tag but there are many very good programs available. Although dbPowerAmp does a very good job of tagging the files there will be times that one may need to make some changes to the tags.
A good batch file renaming program. Yes one will need to use this program from time to time.
A good image editing and capture program because high quality cover and other album art is essential.
Once one has all of the above programs the next thing to do is to establish a CD ripping / digital audio file work flow. For example when I rip a CD the work flow looks something like this:
Rip CD using dbPowerAmp (with AccuRip and file tagging properly set up) → use MP3Tag to double check and correct (if needed) tags → scan cover art and booklet use image editing software
On ocassion use file renaming to rename or renumber files.
Another good thing to do before building a digital audio music library is to set up a directory (folder) structure that works for you so that you can quickly find any audio file. People use many different structures but whatever you use try to be consistent.
For example, I use:
Drive/Jazz M/Monty Alexander - Monty Plays
Drive/Jazz M/Monty Alexander - Monty Swings
ETC
However there are many different ways to set up the directory structure and they are all valid, just pick one and stick with it.
All the above advice and recommendations come from my over 15 years of experience of building and maintaining a digital audio library. I started out using Squeezeboxes and Logitech Media Server and switched over to Roon in 2017 and while the switch over was not without some hiccups, because I tried to maintain a well organized and high quality music library the switch over was not the complete disaster that I often read about so many times on this forum. In fact, Roon recognized the vast majority of my existing music library and what was not recognized was corrected using many of the tools and methods I outlined above.
Good luck with CD ripping and library building!
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CD ripping is a time-consuming process. Just as a suggestion, if $20/month isnt an issue for you, sign up for Tidal or Qobuz, search for the albums you have on CD and add them to your Roon library Then rip the ones that aren’t available on streaming and store these locally.
Obviously, vinyl is a different issue if you like the different sound quality of vinyl
Most of it is done and I’m signed up anyway, but I have lots of CDs that are not available on any streaming. People often don’t realize how many local small music scenes there are (or were in the past) on labels without distribution deals. The streaming catalog on Austrian punk and indie music from the 80ies and 90ies is patchy 
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Yeah I know. I have about 7000 CDs and about 2500 weren’t available on streaming. But it still saved me ripping 4500 CDs. With a.single CD drive, that’s still a big time saving
I’m not into Austrian punk (although if you have recommendations, I’d be happy to listen). But it’s the same story with a lot of classical music (especially early stuff and things like Gregorian chant).
Happy listening!
I would recommend ripping everything you have. It’s not only for listening, but also for backup. Physical media is perishable. Besides, searching and making sure it’s the same recording is time consuming too - and error-prone.
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Fair enough. One comment though. All physical media is perishable, and in all honesty, hard drives are more perishable than commercial CDs and are susceptible to things like bit rot.
If you’re going to back up, make sure you have a real backup. Personally, I have two physically isolated RAID arrays and a cloud backup. But that is quite expensive - I do it because I have a lot of other digital assets I can’t afford to lose
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You could have had those professionally ripped for only $3125 plus shipping and insurance. 
But I would have missed the satisfaction and joy of hand-ripping. 
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Same here. I have a local backup and a cloud backup. I also have bit rot detection running on the local backup every 4 months. I’m not saying you should get rid of your physical media after ripping BTW.
You shouldn’t rely on a single local backup. RAID isn’t a backup technology, although it does allow you to detect bit rot. It’s designed for fast recovery in the event of a hard drive failure. A power surge can take out all the drives in a RAID array. I have my my RAID arrays in two different premises, along with my cloud backup. But then I’m paranoid.
Seriously, losing the other digital assets I have could cost me a bomb.
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I do have two local copies, but I only consider one of them ‘backup’. Both copies are RAID0, not RAID1.
Will those rips “professionally” ensure an AccurateRip or CUETools database verified bit for bit match as well as correct metadata per artwork, label, catalog number, and/or barcode version? Color me skeptical.
AJ
Or spend much of the free time of one year on it. Priorities
RAID 0 is fine, but I’m not sure how you can do bit rot detection with that.
If you’re using RAID 0, you’d probably be better to use JBOD unless you need the speed. If a disk fails in a JBOD, you only lose half your data, whereas with RAID ypu lose everything and need to restore it all.
Of course there’s alway this and when you’re done you can resell it -
Helpful, but the ripping itself isn’t the most time consuming, the tagging, checking, and correcting is. Anyway, good that there are choices, I’m just saying that for the price of a vacation or so you can save a lot of life time and that’s a valid choice
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I need the speed for backups and bit rot detection. Since I have 3 copies total, I won’t lose sleep. I do ‘external’ bit rot detection, using a basic SHA512 database.
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