Another dumb question from an old school idiot...

veroman

Member
I imagine the answer is already buried in these pages but here goes... i Have an SET amp, a cdp and a Cambridge audio DAC. If I wanted an inexpensive(!) way to get my cd's and future music onto digital files what should i do. Cheap pc? I am new to this server business and its hard to get sound advice. Thanks friends. Also I am not MAC friendly fwiw
 
A cheap PC with a CD or DVD drive . I use an old laptop I bought on Craig's List. To rip your CD's you need software and the CD drive. Then you need a media player or media server software. I use Plex, but many prefer JRiver. I have around 750 CDs stored on around 200 GB hard disk space.

The PC can be connected to your DAC via USB cable, if you are not already using that input on the DAC. Your CA DAC can switch between digital inputs.
 
It doesn't need a high performance PC to rip. It does need a fast CD drive; you will want a modern, SATA, 40+ times CD drive, to give you an average rip speed of 25-30x.

Rip to lossless, whatever you do. FLAC is a good choice. I would also suggest you organise your physical storage to reflect the physical discs:

Artist/Album/Track# Title

There are many options for how to rip, tag & organise your music. I use EAC for ripping and MediaMonkey or MusicBee for organising/playing, but there are plenty of other options. MM and MB will also rip.

Then you need storage; this can be a HDD local to the ripping machine, or a NAS, or a HDD on your router, providing a poor man's NAS.

Once you have ripped and tagged your music, there are a huge number of choices as to how to get your music to your hifi.

And you are right; there are plenty of threads here on how to do this.
 
Yup....get a PC with a CD/DVD drive and a good size HD (or get a separate stand alone HD), some ripping software (I use dbpoweramp cdripper), a music playing software (I use JRiver) & a USB cable to go between the PC & the DAC.

As long as it works, it doesn't have to be a fancy PC or even a new one. I like using laptops because having a small package with a screen works pretty well in most spaces. I use a network attached storage box (my large HD storage which runs on my network), a music server (a small cased PC running Windows which runs on my network), a USB reclocker (addresses inherent jitter in digital data streams) and a McIntosh D100 digital preamp/headphone amp/DAC as a DAC only in my system.

Storage is an issue you have to plan for, especially if you rip to a lossless format such as FLAC which is what I rip to. A 500GB or 1TB or larger USB HD can be your storage drive. It's easy to set up the file structure, much as you would in Windows, and create a folder for each CD you have. I use the Artist - Album Name naming convention. My suggestion is storage is cheap, don't go small.

Ripper software allows you to rip to lossy formats as well, such as .mp3 and I'd suggest you rip a CD you are familiar with in both formats and listen to it via the PC and DAC. 320 kbps mp3 sounds pretty good. For me and my system, FLAC sounds even better. Give it a try and see what you think. Ripping a CD to a digital set of files won't be successful unless the ripping software does a good job of capturing and transferring the meta-data from the CD to your file storage. Meta-data includes artist name, album nae, song name, track number, track duration, genre (C&W, Rock, Classical, etc...), date and album art. For this reason I like dbpoweramp cdripper as it does an excellent job of capturing and transferring that data during the rip process. I've used other software but found it does the best job. It's not free but a license is fairly cheap. Worth the money, IMHO.

Music player software can be fancy, medium fancy or bare bones. I'd suggest trying some of the freeware out there. Some are limited in the codecs they will process. For instance, some only process .mp3 files. Others will process multiple codecs. I use JRiver and am happy with it. Again, it's not free software but it works well for me.

Cable from PC to DAC will be a USB A to B cable. Sometimes a really cheap one will work, sometimes it will.

Just so you can visualize the data stream, my system is hooked up like this:

NAS ===Ethernet cable===> Music Server===USB cable===>USB Reclocker ===USB A to B===> DAC===Balanced XLR===> Preamp

You don't need a network to make this work. I use a network so I can connect to my music server and control the music remotely from a laptop.
 
One suggestion: if you have lots of CDs to rip into your digital music library, consider adding a second, even third CD drive to read them.

With just one drive, you're up and down like a prairie dog and every break in the feed slows down the entire process. With multiple reading devices, when one rip ends the other drive fires up and begins reading automagically. Also, you won't have to delay to pick out the correct album name and/or make minor metadata corrections at the ripping stage (any such problems are apparent on the CD's initial insertion while the other drive is still reading its CD). I recently used three Apple SuperDrive readers to rip 500 or so CDs and, even though SDs are REALLY slow (max of about 20X, usually closer to 12X), I had plenty of time to "feed the monster," take breaks, have a snack, work on the computer, etc.
 
I would get a nice laptop. It doesn't have to have a large drive which brings cost down. Then get an external USB drive to contain your digital library. 2 TB USB drives are reasonably priced and why you don't need a huge drive on the main.
Windows has Free Media player you can rip and play.


You have a DAC which you want to connect to laptop. How does it connect?
How many CDs do you plan to rip? Or how big of a digital library do you expect. If only a few CDs my plan would be different than a few thousand.
 
Afterwards, use foobar to play music files - sound the best to me...Can be had for free.
 
Windows has Free Media player you can rip and play.

And for me for the past nearly 3 years, very well, thank you very much !!

Also WAV. for me only, as A/B`ing identical music tracks with FLAC on a Flash drive plugged into my OPPO UDP-203, or my Integra DHC 40.2 pre amp/processor, and my music dedicated Rack Gateway lap top, sounded different, where as not bad sounding, but different sounding, and that bothers me as FLAC is "supposed to be bit perfect".

I used the top tier($$) latest Media Monkey program for the rip WAV./FLAC on a Flash drive to compare the 2 types

So I`ll just buy and use bigger SSD/Flash drives, if and when needed(no more spindle based HD drives for me!) to store and run my digital music, as I have been doing for 2 &1/2 years.

And as to Meta tagging, about 98% CD rips were automatically done, after playing the CD`s first track, instead of setting it up on auto rip, as I ignorantly did at first..
All easy peasy, whether Win. 7/8.1/10`s included Media player program..

Go with what works for you.
This works perfectly for me with all day high quality sound, albeit 44.1 red book resolution, results.

Enjoy your music in anyway that best suits you.

Kind regards, Billy Ferris
 
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