What do you use to rip?

Hi All,

As I now use roon instead of the old trusty iTunes, i’m now left without an obvious solution for CD ripping.

I realise if I was to go down the ROCK route, it now has built in CD ripping, but it seems like a pretty poorly cobbled together solution. Folders with a date, and track names that are generic mean that if I ever give up on roon, trying to work out what music I have and where becomes a nightmare.

is EAC still a thing?

What’s everyone elses workflow for getting CD’s into their system. I’m happy with any level of technical complexity as long as it works well.

I loved the idea of ROCK doing it as a standalone, just popping a CD in, and letting it work it all out. But I Don’t like the way it deals with filenames and folders at all. I could mount the music folder as a network share and rip to it from laptop, at which point i’m interested in hearing your experiences with software that you feel works well.

As mentioned, EAC is of course still working, but personally I found it not userfriendly at all.
I use dBPoweramp for ripping, with AccurateRip activated. Highly recommended.

Dirk

P.S. Depending of the number of CD’s in your collection, I would not bother ripping if subscribed to either Qobuz/Tidal. I would favourite the corresponding album in the service. Of course, you always need internet to play then.

6 Likes

Music is an odd one for me, I’ve always had a much stronger relationship to it than to TV/Movies. I’m happy to stream TV etc, but music I like to own.

I do have Tidal… but so many times I’ve seen albums I favourited disappear from the site (probably due to licencing changes), that wouldn’t happy if I owned.

TBH I only rip the odd disc here and there as I Tend to purchase FLAC on qobuz. But the CD’s I do get are generally not available online.

dbpoweramp

Excellent program.

12 Likes

Another vote for dbPowerAmp, provided of course that you are using a Windows PC. dbPower

For tagging I use MP3Tag. Tag

For image files, aka art work, I use FastStone Image Viewer FastStone

And finally for renaming files I use a long unavailable but still working program called Renamer 6.0 by Albert Bertilsson - small, fast, easy to learn and uses wildcards similar MP3Tag. Renamer

1 Like

jeez… why is this all so complicated these days.

iTunes, stick CD in… tick “use error correction” and it creates a perfect ALAC with names and artwork. Surely it can’t be that hard for someone else to do likewise!

Another vote for dBpoweramp. Once setup ripping is quick and reliable.

4 Likes

iTunes error correction does not do what it claims to. After a certain point it gives up and leaves the rip faulty. No point.

On Mac: XLD for ripping, Metadatics for tagging.

2 Likes

I’m not using a mac any more, so it’ll be windows based.

After all this, sounds like using roon’s own ripping might be just as easy :wink:

I do one CD in a blue moon, so DB not gonna work, as i’m not paying £30 to rip a handful of cd’s a year.

The same ease of ripping can be accomplished with dbPowerAmp, i.e. error correction, perfect ALAC files (or better still FLAC files) in properly named folders with correct file names, file tags and artwork.

The other programs are used to clean up poorly tagged downloads, to add additional artwork, e.g. booklet scans, possible transcoding, e.g. from ALAC to MP3 for portable use, or renaming files in multidisc sets.

And as you stated above keeping your music files organized in a way that works for you does, indeed, require a bit of work and that work requires the proper tools, hence my list of “tools”.

I can tell you this - I’ve collecting digital music files for well over 10 years and I have a very large collection that is very well organized, is properly tagged and that has plenty of artwork. When I switched from LMS (Logitech Media Server) to Roon a little over a year ago, Roon was able to find all my music and cover art and display it properly. So I guess all that work worked out in the end. :smiley:

2 Likes

DBpoweramp will do what itunes does for 99.9% of CDs and to the satisfaction of 99.9% of people.
The roon forum contains those of the .1% who own the .1%. The anal owning the obscure.

3 Likes

I guess the issue is DB costing money when I rip maybe 5-10 cd’s a year max. Hardly seems worth the investment. I may just install whats left of iTunes onto the PC for the occasional rip… or use roon’s ripping system but send the files to a folder not monitored by roon, and rename the folder so I know at least what the artist and album were.

Actually, it’s not as bad as that. If you ever decide to leave Roon, then you can simply export all your albums to a location where a copy of all your albums will be made. The tracks will have the basic metadata written into them from the Roon database (if they did not already have them in place).

If you have ripped CDs using a CD drive attached to a ROCK NUC, then indeed in the Roon storage location you end up having folders with a date, and track names that are generic. However, the metadata is used in the export process to give the exported folders names following the Artist/Album naming convention, and track names are renamed from “track nn” to the title held in the track title metadata.

So you end up with a file and folder structure that is the same as the default naming convention used by dBpoweramp.

I also give a vote to the use of dBpoweramp if you don’t want to use the CD ripping function of ROCK. I’ve used dBpoweramp for years, but now I just use ROCK’s CD ripping function.

1 Like

Thanks, this is great information. So ripping with roon will create a basic and limited structure, but during an export process that kind of gets cleaned up.

I can live with that :slightly_smiling_face:

Although I think that ripping to a non monitored folder, renaming the folder / album and then dragging into the monitored folder would achieve some of the same result I guess.

I do like the idea of doing it from roon, as that’s much easier from a cd rom plugin perspective.

Here’s an example… First, what I see in Roon’s InternalStorage folder:

I chose 4 of these albums and exported them to a folder on my desktop PC:

Now Artist folders have been created, and within them, folders for the albums (bearing the Album Title). And further down, in an album folder, the tracks have been given the track title names:

I sometimes think that discussions around here are like listening to Greek Philosophers arguing about the number of teeth a horse has. The best way to find out is to go into the stable and count them…

4 Likes

I love it, this is perfectly ideal for my use case. I’m only worried about the “what if” in a few years if something changes on the digital landscape. I don’t want to have a pain moving my material. You’ve given me the answer I needed, and will be converting my win10 box to a ROCK tonight so I can try this out.

dbPoweramp also does batch converts and other esoteric stuff, like true HDCD rips (looking you Joni Mitchell “Hejira”).

It isn’t one of the most popular choices, but I settled on CUERipper when I started ripping many years ago and haven’t regretted it. http://cue.tools/wiki/Main_Page

What drew me to it was the other rippers I looked at seemed to have a bewildering number of options and I could imagine far into the project finding out I wasn’t getting bit-perfect copies of my CDs (my main goal) because I didn’t set something correctly.

1 Like

CUETools and dbPoweramp are both great tools. If I was bulk ripping again I’d use dbPoweramp’s batch ripper and load a PC with as many CD/DVD drives as it can muster to do the ripping concurrently.

These days I rarely acquire CDs so when I need to rip I just use cdparanoia from my Linux desktop and dbPoweramp if it’s a HDCD.

1 Like

XLD for Mac (AccurateRip activated / Metadata from various sources enabled). Excellent free app

2 Likes