Software to rip CD's for Roon

Audio Gear Talk
21

Or you can deactivate the AccurateRip check and let dBp rip whatever it can get off the CD with repeated re-ripping. It may be listenable if one is lucky, depending on the damage. But you are right that dBp does not invent data to fill the gap - which would at best only work for very short blips, anyway.

It’s probably not worth it to invest more effort. Out of nearly 1000 ripped CDs, I had less than 5 not pass the tests. If important, it’s easy to buy new copies for nearly everything. And if it happens to be the odd cherished and irreplaceable CD, there are probably dedicated external programs that can work on the ripped files and achieve better results.

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22

dBpoweramp does have an option to “interpolate unrecoverable errors,” though it is hardly ever required. I find that changing drives almost always cures bad rips, even without cleaning the disk or slowing the rip.

-SK

23

Then I must be the odd one out!

I like it, easy to tag and add artwork to fresh files. :sunglasses::+1:t2:

24

You can always export them later from within Roon, of course, then it will add the tags and I suppose legible file names. I think the biggest problem is that apparently it fails often and the core must be restarted

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25

How do you know if it doesn’t pass?

26

Maybe worth a separate thread “What is your Ripping/Tagging Toolkit”

JRiver

Ripping & Tagging with basic db lookup It has many library management tools , file renaming, bulk tag adjustment , . This is my main tool for tagging anything prior to dropping into Roon. And of course playback

Tag & Rename

Standardization of tags , filenames , folder names .The ReName tool is highly configurable based on Tag Names . It was the only software I could find to resize album art to 500x500 which is what I wanted at the time. Its stuck, its so useful

It even filters Long Filenames that will trip up Windows and allows you to edit shorten and save

MusiCHI Tagger

Part of a bigger suite for playback which I don’t use
MusiClean is a lookup tool for Classical works (and Jazz I believe),
Text Processing allows splitting across a Delimiter say “;:” so you can split off Movement easily
Text Processing in general is great, find and replace, insert , even Movement Numbering to I … IV etc
Its still available but only just.

Only real drawback is the created Composition doesn’t match AllMusic or MusicBrainz but at least is standard across all recording. You could bulk rename in JRiver to match if needs be

eg

Piano Sonata No.4 in E flat Major K.282

but every time !!

CUETools

Splitting FLAC/CUE to tracks with Accurip confirmation
Stand alone Accurip checking

SongKong

This is a great lookup tool , accessing MusicBrainz and Discogs. It works fine for rock but sometimes gets tripped up by classical.

eg If a track is on several different albums with multiple re-releases, think original, small box, big box , SongKong has no way to differentiate and can assign the album to a mix of all 3

That snag aside the lookup is comprehensive including credits etc (not sure about lyrics)

My workflow (for Classical omit MusiCHI for Rock)

  • Split if needs be to tracks
  • Drop into MusiCHI get Composition and Movement standardize Composer
  • Drop into JRiver for final clean up

Drop into Roon Watched Folder - DONE

In my experience tagging is not a one stop shop :sunglasses:

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27

dBp shows a message and highlights the affected tracks in the list. You can also make it write a log file for every rip with details

28

If you’re unable to achieve an accurate rip on a track and it plays glitch free then try to forget and just enjoy it, which I find almost impossible to do!

Not relevant here but also consider album art particularly if you have a lot of older classical CDs as the quality available can often be shockingly bad.

29

I use dbPoweramp and it works great. Rips fast, error free, picks album art correctly, easy to use.

30

Careful with categories. Pop/rock seems to be default for everything not classical in dbp.

31

dBpoweramp uses third-party sources for its metadata. So, if you find genres are not accurately reflected in dBpoweramp, blame the metadata sources, not dBpoweramp.

33

Better still IMO is XLD, X Lossless Decoder supports various formats and ripping methods.

https://tmkk.undo.jp/xld/index_e.html

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DBPower amp. Also if you have two optical drives in your PC you can run two instances and rip from both drives at the same time.

35

Can’t beat ease of use and functionality. Have used for at least 10 years and would not go anywhere else.

36

Same as most. DbPoweramp. It’s a bit antiquated as an interface but works really well, especially grabbing artwork too.
It’s ready for an upgrade but works flawlessly.
I did try to upgrade to the latest version and my hard drive got trashed, coincidence? Not sure, but installed the original version once HD was replaced and all is good in the world as peace and order are restored. So maybe check which version you install. Might be windows 11 compatibility thing as mine is windows 10?

37

I use XLD on the Mac. This software is also recommended by Linn - besides dBpoweramp.

38

Just a a quick note about this Mike, this was only a problem with Multi-disc releases in multiple folders, it wasnt specifically related to Classical. If you have your tracks representing an album within a single folder SongKong will only a match to album if all songs in folder match to album, cannot be matched over multiple albums. But if we had big box set with songs from each disc in different folders then because of the computation effort required with original algorithm we matched folder at a time and could have different folders from same boxset matching to different albums, but this issue has now been resolved.

Also worth noting for Classical users that SongKong does automtically add Work/Movement fields and has various other Classical options

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39

I took the liberty of fixing the typo in the thread’s title for the benefit of people who search for “software” and not “sotware” in the future

40

I get flags on tracks saying they are inaccurate quite often. Even on discs that look clean. Does this mean they are all imported to my folder but they will still play glitches? I wish there was a way to not complete the rip if the quality is compromised that badly.

41

What exactly is it saying, do you have a screenshot? For instance, it might not find a matching AccurateRip result simply because nobody else ripped the disk, or one other person ripped it and their rip had errors and therefore does not match yours, though yours is confirmed as OK after all the checks that dBp performs.

Sometimes, a CD may not rip correctly because of internal degradation, even if it looks clean and has no scratches. I have two that have actual holes in the aluminium layer. A few others without obvious damage but where a track or two still won’t rip. But I ripped a thousand CDs or so.

It depends on your dBp settings where they are saved. I don’t have the output folder set to be Roon’s folder, so nothing gets imported to Roon unless I copy them to Roon. (I usually make additional metadata edits after ripping and before copying to Roon).

dBp also has several settings to control what it should do in the event of ripping errors.

Choose Secure mode with error correction and adjust the settings. These are some of mine:

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As you can see, I don’t accept a rip if it has even a single frame that cannot be corrected after trying for 10 minutes. Then the track is marked as error, but I don’t cancel the rip. If it’s all I can get, I will listen to it and then decide. I have quite a few CDs that I can’t re-buy at all, and some of those didn’t rip without error, so what can you do. And it’s entirely possible that a few bits can’t be read correctly but you don’t hear it. (But as I said, it was very rare among the CDs that I ripped)

If you prefer, simply set it to “cancel disc ripping after any insecure track”. You can also have dBp write a log file for every rip, where it tells you exactly what it did, where the error occurred, etc.

You should read the dBp setup guide and the instructions for secure ripping:
https://dbpoweramp.com/cd-ripper-setup-guide.htm

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