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 and I learned so many things and details…and listening is so much fun now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
10K CDs is quite a lot of them. Your friend has a couple of options – the easier one is to pay someone to rip them for him. There are services that rip music onto the drive you provide and charge between $1.25 and $2.00 per disc. From what I have experienced, the copies are really well done (if you know what to look for). I know people who have paid teenagers to do the ripping for them.
10K would probably take some time to complete and then there would the issue of setting up folders for them. For my collection, I maintain folder system so that I can easily locate what I have, avoid duplication of purchases, and can move to a different platform in the future, if it becomes necessary.
Another option is what I call “progressive” ripping. To begin with, I would urge him to get the dBpoweramp software. There is a lot of discussion in this forum about it – I have used it for easily 10 years with thousands of discs. There are countless reasons I like it, one is the ability to set it up so that the filing system is automatically done the way I want it.
The “progressive” part of this plan is to sort the CDs into different “piles.” Although there are a lot of ways to do this, I would begin with prioritizing the CDs and beginning with the ones that he is currently enjoying the most. That way, he can pretty quickly get used to ripping and, more importantly, the value added by Roon.
He may find getting a new(er) computer with a fast CPU to be helpful. I just upgraded to the latest MacBook Pro from the 2013 version – the amount of time it takes to rip a CD is much improved. I would also suggest a really good CD player (or several). They can make the job much easier and if they wear out, replacing is much more economical.
I think that when he gets accustomed to the ease and quality of Roon, he will continue to work his way through his collection (at least as much of it as he is currently interested in listening to).
My teenagers spent a lot of time for a friend ripping his collection. This was delivered one case at a time and the files tagged and “foldered” as he wished them.
@Kevin_Owen - I did as well. I remember days scrounging the used CD bins and buying CDs for just a couple bucks. But what I found were more than a few CDs that would not play well… No signs of scratches - that I would have caught when buying - but they would either skip, or simply not play. On closer exam, I found a few where it looked like the finish was wearing or tarnished. I’m certainly not saying all CDs have this problem, but in my experience, some do. No idea where the term ‘CD rot’ came from, but it seemed to fit my experience.
Absolutely agree. The CD’s I was buying back then were not the bargain basement stuff but the CD’s put out by the Major studios and at an average of $27, I was very particular on my purchases.
“CD Rot” was the term that the naysayers came up with to counter the “Perfect Sound Forever” crowds.
@AndyR Yep!! Now that my 7000ish have all been ripped, I have them in bins (taking up way too much room) in my closet in my office at home. So low humidity and temperature controlled.
Could you amplify what you said about ripping SACDs? What is the device? Does it rip at the same resolution of the SACD? I have quite a few SACDs and an excellent player but having that option might be handy.
I’ve got nearly 2K cds that I started collecting in the '80s and more than one will no longer play. I don’t know if it’s technically CD rot, but they’ve become unreadable sitting in jewel cases in my back bedroom.
