Trying to get a friend with 10K CDs into Roon

Reminds me, when operating a cloud service where availability is a contractual QoS issue, but cost matters too, we thought about resilience to different scopes of loss:

  • Loss of a drive
  • Loss of a server
  • Loss of a rack (e.g. due to power or network failure)
  • Loss of a section of a data center
  • Loss of a building (e.g. fire)
  • Loss of a campus (terrorism)
  • Loss of a city or state or region (earthquake, hurricane)

Protecting against earthquake involves replication cross-continent, which causes latency due to this pesky speed-of-light problem, working on that.

But two hours away, @miguelito is pretty safe.

EDIT Although now we are pretty far away from the OP question.

Real back-up is important. This week my NAS HDD had an error then copied that RAID error to the other disk. All data lost on both drives.

I have 2# USB HDD as back-ups. so all is recovered now. The USB HDD + NUC + NAS + dbpoweramp copies on a PC HDD keep things safe. As well as one of those HDD in a fire proof box at a friends house. Cloud storage still to expensive p.a. for me.

May seem overkill but this week l was glad of that as it made for a no sweat recovery.

As for ripping, Yup 5# a day over time got 1,500 FLAC rips years ago. For travel I use a DAP where I use converted files to MP3 (more files, longer battery Time, 320 is fine).

Agree, just rip new / cheap CDs as and when.

If I am honest I probably only use 500 CDs that I regularly listen too and that 500 drifts in its edges.

The consensus here seems to be “Don’t rip” which is ironic when the reason Enno Vandermeer co-invented Roon was for ripping and managing his large CD collection!

(Here’s Enno talking at my local HiFi store: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqra5vy2yJA)

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I see a conscencus for (start) ripping (only) the CD’s that:
a) are not available not availble on stream services
b) Cd’s made of specific masters
c) Cd’s you care so much about, that you defintely do want a backup
d) as much as you care to rip

And really, if you look at the latest developments in Roon, they are al about using streaming services to play new music.
Now, with 10000 CD’s, I personally believe there is a lot of new music in there (and even more ‘old’ new music).
Just as an example: I have 3700 albums in My Library ( 2194 ripped or digital download ) of which I played 875 during the last year.
Just checked how many Qobuz albums added to My Library habe not been played yet.
I am honestly too ashamed to show the numbers here. Some catching/cleaning up to do!
Dirk

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Yep, me too.

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Use an Acronova Nimbie with dbpoweramp to rip in bulk. I paid about $500 for a used Nimbie. Ripped right at 2000 cds in just over 3 weeks, 100 at a time.

Best investment for someone with a large collection.

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For somebody in Europe, I have a Nimbie for sale.
If interested, please send PM

Dirk

You can also rent a nimbie for $100 for 30 days in the US.

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I used dBpoweramp’s CD Batch Ripper, using two optical drives in my desktop computer. Since dBpoweramp can retrieve tags, and I manually touch them up (if I have the time), I can get through about 40-50 CDs per hour across the two drive. Adding a third drive didn’t help much, as I could just about keep up with 50 per hour. The Batch Ripper lets you unload and reload the CDs without having to click anything, which is why it goes faster. Optical drives are dirt cheap as well–I already had a spare on hand.

The big thing about someone owning 10k CDs, though, is that they are often very much determined to stick with physical media. I know someone who probably has at least double that amount of CDs, and he told me several years ago he will never rip them to a server. Well, whatever. Not my circus, not my monkeys. Some who are so stuck on physical media are not going to want to ever convert their collection to a set of files, no matter how much those of us try to hard sell them on the concept.

I love my CD collection (but only 2000), I always tried to get the best sounding version, a good source is the Steve Hoffman forum. Forget about many of the streaming versions, their mastering is so often worse than on some special CDs

I ripped my collection over several years and scanned the artwork, the disc and matrix.
Metadata was collected and tagged by Foobar, Musicbrainz and customized by Mp3Tag. Final step was correcting the DC Offset with Adobe Audition. Found out (in Discogs), that I have some very interesting and expensive goodies.

Imported it into Roon, corrected the Metadata and now… happiness :hugs::slightly_smiling_face::slightly_smiling_face: and I learned so many things and details…and listening is so much fun now.

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Hello Oliver - can you explain what you mean by “Correcting the DC offset” please ?

TIA
Z

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DC offset usually isn’t a killer problem, like a hard disk crash. In fact, usually there’s not enough to worry about. But every now and then, DC offset will rear its ugly head in a way that you do notice. And now, you know what to do about it.

Here are some explanations:
https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/dc_offset.html

DC offset is DC on an AC line. I use an isolation transformer on my AC line for a variety of reasons. One is to remove DC offset. I don’t think the place to address DC offset is in software.

Well recorded audio won’t have DC offset baked in…

There is a difference between DC offset in the audio files and the voltage offset in the power supply / audio chain.
And if the offset is in the files…
But as written above, it is not a big issue, just my personal approach.

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Thank you Oliver - Every day is a school day, and this was something new to me.

Z

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FWIW, if you’re in to collecting, CDs may not the best media because they do have a finite life. If I’m collecting, I’d far rather be doing so with things that will outlast me. CD life is most likely dependent upon how much they’re handled and how/where they’re stored, but it could also be related to how they were produced. CDs have a coating that can erode. I have seen CDs that had become almost transparent (and unreadable) with the silver wearing off… often referred to as CD rot.

So, IMHO, rip while you can if you want to preserve your own collection - or at least that part of your collection you value most.

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You may mention the superior organization using his collection with Roon would provide. A standard computer will be fine, I paid for a piece of software to rip my CD’s; dbpoweramp (highly recommended). Buy a few external hard drives to make multiple back ups. I had 1,000 CD collection and what drove me nuts was not even knowing what I had. With Roon it so much easier to find and be organized. Before Roon I would go a music day and it would like a party had occurred with CD cases strewn everywhere and I never would put them back in order, nor would I want to look at what I had. With Roon it took me awhle to rip my CD’s, but a little at a time. I also found that better remasters in high rez where on Roon of some of my favorite albums.

The other benefit of dBPowerAmp is the ability to detect HDCDs in your collection. You need to add the HDCD plugin.

FooBar2000 I think also does this with the right plug in.

If your DAC already handles HDCDs this is probably not necessary, but not all of us have these.

We did about 50,000 cds it took a good amount of time close to 2 years. We have been tuning up the metadata ever since. We ripped them as FLACKs we did get a robot after awhile and that had the advantage of speed but the need to clean up meta data increased. If you have a fairly new computer you can rip disc pretty fast. I would but 4 cd rippers at least if you do not want to invest in a robot and get the proper software, PC have more options than mac. If your buddy is not in a rush, getting 4+ usb CD drives becomes a mediation, if he does 30 a day he will be done in less than a year and that pretty easy time wise with the ripping speed of a new computer.

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Roon seems essential for a collection this large. I love the visual aesthetics of walls of CD’s, but for actually finding music and listening…not so much.

For my ripping project, I ended up attaching 8 drives to a decade old Windows PC (first gen i7) rescued from a throwaway pile. dbPowerAmp Batch Ripper handled it just fine. Throughput was close to 100/hr for clean disks that had online metadata. Keeping 8 drives full is meditative, there is not much down time.

For tracking down missing or lousy cover art manually, 2 great sources are AllMusic and Amazon. Find the release, then click on the small thumbnail image. Most of the time that will get you a higher res image that can be copy/pasted into dbPowerAmp.

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