Then either it correctly deals with CDs with pre-emphasis, or you didn’t rip any. There aren’t a great many, mostly very early CDs. But my question was really about Roons ripping engine and whether it handled HDCDs and CDs with pre-emphasis. HDCDs aren’t uncommon, I would expect a decent ripper to recognise them and rip the extra bits.
cdparanoia flags if a CD has pre-emphasis but not sure it removes it. Most solutions using it use it to rip to WAV/AIFF first and then transcode to FLAC as it does not natively rip to FLAC. So its feasible it could happen at this stage. Its the most mature and common ripper on Linux so I imagine its up to the job and its been used in a lot of commercial rippers.
I wonder if all the expensive ripping solutions, such as Innuos and Naims Uniti Core apply pre-emphasis?
This is quite timely for me. I’m about to re-rip my library as FLAC since when I last did it twenty years ago file size was a problem and I went with MP3. Between 100 - 200 CDs.
Would people recommend using the new built in ROON CD ripper, OR getting https://www.dbpoweramp.com/ which seems quite popular here too?
Thanks Ged,
If this is the extent of my families woes then I’ll count myself extremely lucky.
The way I see it is that life is a privilege not an entitlement.
As for library I ripped over 600 CD’s with iTunes (with the error correction option ticked), I had a few with ripping errors but that seemed to be an issue with the CD drive in my laptop. When I re-ripped them on my desktop they were fine. I just recently started using dbpoweramp, though I can’t hear any difference, why would I?
To rephrase, the OP (me) was asking whether CD Ripping would have been the next new Roon feature IF you had a say. I asked because this feature caught me completely by surprise. I thought that there were a number of other priorities that would come before a ripping feature.
I was trying to find out how meaningful ripping was to others here, and it seems several are quite happy. And only a few are distressed that this ripping feature has displaced or stalled their wants and needs.
I’m also very surprised by the reaction herein, both tenor and quantity.
Personally, I’d recommend dbpoweramp. I put off buying it for years, but it really does live up to its reputation. I would also recommend properly tagging your CD’s (which dbpoweramp does pretty much automatically, though sometimes some “fine-tuning” is necessary) before adding them to Roon, in case you ever want to play them with something else. And keep good backups!
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I’ll never cease to be amazed by Python’s elegance.
It’s really down to personal preference as to whether you go for ripping with Nucleus/ROCK or using a third party product such as dBpoweramp - do you want a “hands-off” approach, or do you want to be able to have direct access to, and be able to fine-tune, the metadata?
There are pros and cons for both:
Ripping via Nucleus/ROCK:
- pro: “hands-off” - just put the CD in the drive, and it will be imported into the Roon library.
- con: if the CD cannot be identified by Roon, then adding information for the album using Roon can be laborious (Roon’s Album/Track editors can be inefficient for bulk editing; e.g. for adding track titles)
Ripping via dBpoweramp:
- pro: full access to the metadata before ripping for fine-tuning
- pro: linked to several online metadata sources
- pro: uses Accuraterip as an additional check that the rips are bit-perfect.
- pro: metadata editing is more efficient and comprehensive than using Roon
- con: you need a computer for the ripping/editing.
In a way, the choice is rather like: do you prefer to drive a car/auto using a manual gearbox (dBpoweramp), or are you happy with a full automatic transmission (Roon)?
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I have never really used dbpoweramp, I tried the demo and was not that impressed. You cant automate ripping which for me is a must, I don’t want to have to sit at a computer to do this or have a cd drive attached to a laptop. I used Vortexbox server for years which auto ripped and tagged and it uses the same software as Roons ripper does and it’s been great. Since switching to Rock this server is only used for ripping and is a bit of a waste so now I can use Roon. The whole accuraterip thing is not necessary and to me is just another audiophile paranoia tick box. The downside to Roons ripper is it does not add any metadata to the ripped files so if you plan to use them elsewhere then you will need to add metadata. To do this is not difficult though plenty of free tools to do it. Even rippers that do tag don’t always get it right and can fail with new releases.
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if you’ve a PC with sufficient CPU grunt and RAM with multiple CD/DVD/BD drives then dbpoweramp’s batch ripper is fantastic as you can rip multiple CD’s concurrently, significantly cutting down the ripping time of your collection for every additonal drive you can deploy.
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If you have a modest number of CDs and will never need to rip them again, you might consider a ripping service:
https://www.musicshifter.com/order.php?gclid=CjwKCAjw67XpBRBqEiwA5RCocTQR-IHJuAW1etPagtsUfuFutFXYcUDfFQzgFXpAUOUxdNmJW7oe5BoCbkQQAvD_BwE
About $70 for 100 CDs. I don’t think ripping 100 CDs is too onerous, but if you are going to go down a path of paying for software to do the ripping it starts to make sense when you compare costs ($68 for dBpoweramp) and/or adding a USB CD Drive.
If you have the USB drive you can do it free on the ROCK and get SongKong to fill out your metadata later if you really need to have it.
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But exactly what aspect of CD ripping would you like to see Roon cover that isn’t done elsewhere? The process of extracting digital audio from CD’s is trivial, especially since, unlike DVD or Blu Ray, they are not copy protected. By default you might get files like “track1.flac, track2.flac”, etc. It’s what happens afterwards that interests me.
There are algorithms, mostly proprietary I think, for extracting a unique relatively small signature for any digital audio file in existence. There are various online databases one can subscribe to, MusicBrainz for example, on which these signatures can be looked up. If you’re lucky and the file’s signature is found, you get something meaningful for a file name, and various tag fields filled out. For example “Come Together” for a track title, “Come Together.flac” for a file name, “The Beatles” in the artist field, “Abbey Road” in the album title field, etc. Otherwise, “Track 1, …” is what you get. Contrary to what some people seem to believe, this “metadata” does not live on the CD, it lives in the online databases derived from the track signatures.
Unfortunately for us classical music fans, classical music is for the most part a rather poor fit to this Procrustean bed of “song, artist, album”. Various databases have various entries for, for example Beethoven’s second symphony performed by the English Baroque Soloists under the baton of John Elliot Gardiner may have the “artist” field filled with “Beethoven” or “Ludwig van Beethoven” or Beethoven, Ludwig van", or “John Elliot Gardiner”, etc. There is very little consistency, even within the same database.
Roon maintains its own database and, for the most part makes good and consistent sense of whatever metadata is in the tags. Sometimes not. It may, for example, see “Ludwig van Beethoven” and "Beethoven, Ludwig van(1770-1827) as separate composers.
My goal would be to put a disk in my computer’s CD drawer and have it seamlessly generate tags that are totally consistent with Roon so that I can browse or search by composer, composition, album, song title, etc. to my heart’s content. I’m not interested in having a particular appliance do it, like Roon Nucleus. I know 100% accuracy is too much to ask but 99% would be good.
Many products, like JRiver Media Center or Musichi, do ripping and tagging, playing, managing and maintaining your digital music collection all in one program or suite of programs. That’s what I’m after from Roon. Not a “music server” that lives in my audio rack, like Roon Nucleus, that does ripping and tagging, storage and playback all in one physical place. That’s the distinction I’m trying to make.
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Bad analogy 
. Both the automatic and the manual gearboxes are FULLY changing the gears. Roon does only half of the ripping process…
I did say in a way - and Roon/ROCK does do the ripping. If you really insist on having the metadata in the files, you can always export the files out of Roon, when Roon will write the basic ROVI metadata into the exported files.
I just ripped 20 cd’s using the build in ripping feature on RoonOs. I noticed no metadata was added at all and roon puts the albums in a new folder on the usb drive connected to my NUC called “CD rips” with a bunch of subfolders. Roon reads these all right but no other software will make sense of this.
This is easily fixed though as you can use use “Focus” ->“Inspector”->“storage location” to show only the albums you ripped. You can then select all and export them. Once the export is finished I deleted all the albums from roon.
Now add the albums again to roon from where you exported them to and voila… all albums are now in roon WITH all metadata added to them and other software like Audirvana, Plex,… reads the albums just fine.
Obviously it would be easier if this was done by roon in the first place but being able to quickly scan cd after cd without any intervention needed is rather nice. As long as you don’t rip to many in 1 session the export and re-import workaround is quick and easy 
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You can just tag them with any software after ripping to achieve the same thing and is easier.
nah… I’d have to attach the cd drive to my macbook every time I want to rip something the old way. Now I just leave it attached to the NUC and slide in a cd when I see the previous one was ejected.
If I rip using roon and then have to manually tag the albums using other software it’s also time-consuming and requires my attention.