CD Ripping Software advice.

Vlad Drac

Vlad Drac

Vlad Drac

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Joined
12 Mar 2004
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730
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Scotland
Hi folks

I could do with a little advice please.
I've been putting this task off for ages now.
I have well over a thousand CD's that I'm wanting to rip on to a hard drives. All legit and for my own use and not for file sharing I may add.
Can any of you recommend some software that I can use that will rip the CD's at the highest bit rate possible and can also capture all the Album cover artwork? Also is MP3 still the most future proof format to use or is there something better??
It doesn't have to be Freeware I don't mind paying for something that works well.
 
Use eac to rip. Some people recommend dbpoweramp not used it personally.

You will want to rip into flac format as this will give a lossless compressed copy of your CDs. Then you only ever have to rip them once. From there, convert your flac into mp3 or aac or whatever you need.
 
The only issue with ripping to a lossless format would be multiplying the amount of storage needed. And since ripping a thousand CDs is going to be an epic grind I'd want a backup of them too.
 
space really shouldn't be an issue. 100gb should be enough for 250 albums. 1000 albums = 400gb, roughly. all backed up = 800gb. couple of Tb drives £80 or so (enough for ~1200 albums), or 2x 2tb drives for about £130 (~2400 albums)
 
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any lossless format would do, you could even extract them to .wav or even to an iso if you want them for posterity and then convert them to whatever format and bitrate you need.

regarding space your only talking about 700gig you can get two 1tb drives for about eighty quid.
 
theheyes said:
The only issue with ripping to a lossless format would be multiplying the amount of storage needed. And since ripping a thousand CDs is going to be an epic grind I'd want a backup of them too.
Click to expand...

Ripping 1,000 CDs to MP3 then realising you want them in lossless would be more of an epic grind :p.

1,000 albums in FLAC would be around 380GB - 500GB drive are around £28 so it's not a huge cost I guess.
 
dazzerd said:
any lossless format would do, you could even extract them to .wav or even to an iso if you want them for posterity and then convert them to whatever format and bitrate you need.

regarding space your only talking about 700gig you can get two 1tb drives for about eighty quid.
Click to expand...

there's no need for .wav at all when we have flac
 
I used EAC to do this, to FLAC. Not totally simple to do, it's best to get the tags sorted as you rip and you have to detect the gaps or similar as you set it up. Once you've got a system going, it's pretty quick. And my music sounds great as FLAC.
 
EAC with FLAC for sure :). EAC ensures your rips are bit for bit perfect and FLAC preserves the exact same quality with less storage requirements. What you don't want to do is rip to a lossy codec only to need/want to use another lossy format or lossless.

For album artwork I would recommend sourcing it yourself to guarantee the best quality, automated programs are easy to use but the quality can be hit and miss. Go to www.albumartexchange.com . All the album artwork is of high quality with some being 1500x1500 from the master, ie. Not scanned in by Joe Bloggs.
 
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I use CDExtractor to rip to FLAC.
To catalogue my CDs (and DVDs) I use software from collectorz.com in combination with a barcode scanner.
 
Ripped all mine about 2 years ago, for the second time having done it years ago to MP3 stupid decision. I just used windows media player to rip them all to WMA lossless, the choice of format is pretty irrelevant as once you have lossless you can convert at will. Since then I've made a second copy of them all in MP3 format for portable use, that was a simple one click process in DBPoweramp which I now use with all new CD's to rip one copy to WMA for media centre use round the house and one copy to MP3 for portable use.
 
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