Ripping My CD Library To Lossless Files - What A Process!!

I don't think it's a religious experience, and I'm sure you are getting good rips. But in my experience, damage is often limited to a track or two. I may want to skip a track completely rather than lose the rest of the CD.

See the tick-boxes on the below screen shot? Uncheck the ones you don't want to rip and it skips those. I've done that, as stated, a couple times when all else failed.


asunder_002 by Wigwam Jones, on Flickr
 
Well yes, but can you skip a track on the fly when it's stuck?

I have nothing against your program or your process. What I object to is the implication that using EAC is religious or difficult. It takes a bit to set it up, but most of that is automatic in recent versions.

You need to specify a receiving location, but you can set it to ask for each CD. It defaults to the previous location. I use this because I put different genres in different folders.

So after maybe five or ten minutes navigating to the necessary options, you have a work flow that is hardly different from yours. I'm not saying mine is better, but I hardly think it is more difficult.

I agree with your basic argument, that there isn't anything better than perfect. Secure ripping eliminates all the issues that plague the live playback of CDs and which make good CD players expensive. When you have an accurate rip, you have it and it can't be improved.

All the money that might be spent on a high end CD player can be spent on something useful, like beer.
 
I mean, you can keep posing 'yeah but what if' questions forever.

Yeah but what if ... we don't? :D

More on the beaten path (AKA windOHs!) I've had exactly three tracks that jRiver couldn't handle internally. Those were all in The Decca Sound box set. I'm thinking they did some hocus pocus with the header and compression on the CD to fit more than the standard time on the disk. EAC was only able to recover one of the three, with some serious time crunching, which to my mind says a lot about the internal ripper jRiver uses.

Strangely enough, those same tracks are all the very last on the affected disks, and play fine on the CD deck, so go figure.

Hmmmmm ... what if? ...
 
If they play fine they would probably rip fine if you turn off secure ripping and let the drive do its correcting. It won't be bit perfect, but you already know it's listenable.

There are folks that claim some CDs are defective by design to prevent copying.
 
So I got a 15" Dell Inspiron laptop from Costco--not the ultimate in computing, but it was $500 bucks. That said, it has 1 TB in memory, so I'm thinking I might just play around with ripping some CDs losslessly and then playing the files through my stereo to see what I think.
 
Best of luck on that ... most onboard sound tends to suck. Some less than others, but ...

I seriously suggest going with an outboard adapter. Doesn't have to cost a lot either. I was real happy with a Behringer UCA202 until I upgraded recently to a full scale DAC. You can score the UCA202 for $30 on Amazon. One real nice feature is it's full I/O, so you can also use it to rip vinyl using the analog IN side.

41sg7JFaDBL._SL500_AA300_.jpg


Just plug it into a USB port and RCA it into the stereo. No drivers. Couldn't be simpler. The sound quality just blew away my onboard sound AND a Creative E/MU expansion card.
 
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So I got a 15" Dell Inspiron laptop from Costco--not the ultimate in computing, but it was $500 bucks. That said, it has 1 TB in memory, so I'm thinking I might just play around with ripping some CDs losslessly and then playing the files through my stereo to see what I think.

Awesome!

Recommend you get the AppleTV to stream Audio and Video to your TV and or stereo.
step1-appletv-hero.jpg
 
Interesting discussion. I recently (well over several months) ripped my entire CD collection to my file server. But I didn't use FLAC but just 256Mbs which I thought would be just fine for me since it's mostly for casual music listening.

Most of the time I would be playing them from a Logitech Squeezebox Radio.

Then I uploaded pretty much all of them to Google Music. Turned out to be about 7000 songs which is well within the 20,000 free song limit Google Music has.

That allows me to listen to my collection from my Android phone or tablet whenever I have Internet access and that is way cool IMHO. I am discovering music I haven't listened to in years.
 
Coming back to this-

XLD with Toast Titanium 11 is my technique for ripping.

1- Load Disc in the drive, Toast searches CDDB/Gracenote and ID's the tracks.
2- Save as "BIN/CUE", save to directory
3- Load XLD and Open the Cue file. Since the .bin/cue is a 1 for 1 copy of the original disc, XLD* will load it's own Metadata search engine and verify with the user that is a disc it found on either/both FreedB or the great MusicBrainz.
4- Transcode bin./cue file to FLAC, ALAC, AAC, etc.. or into many formats at a time. Ensuring I have set my preference for folder and naming conventions.

This way I have the 1-1 replica(Back up 1) of the CD saved to a Hard Drive so I can transcode it to any format (Back up 2) for metadata editing or a certain device**

*You can use XLD to verify the Toast Rip through AccurateRip.
** Playstation 3, My Car, and several other gadgets read AAC files
 
Best of luck on that ... most onboard sound tends to suck. Some less than others, but ...

I seriously suggest going with an outboard adapter. Doesn't have to cost a lot either. I was real happy with a Behringer UCA202 until I upgraded recently to a full scale DAC. You can score the UCA202 for $30 on Amazon. One real nice feature is it's full I/O, so you can also use it to rip vinyl using the analog IN side.

41sg7JFaDBL._SL500_AA300_.jpg


Just plug it into a USB port and RCA it into the stereo. No drivers. Couldn't be simpler. The sound quality just blew away my onboard sound AND a Creative E/MU expansion card.

Another option is to use HDMI audio from the PC, if you have an AV receiver. I've compared the sound of my Denon AVR1611 to the DAC on my Rotel 965BX, and the Denon sounds pretty good. (Digital out vs, RCA out on the CDP).

Don't know how it compares to the Behringer, but definitely better than most onboard PC audio chips.
 
On the note of data backup and protection - look up Quickpar, or Multipar - once you have ripped your data, select all the resultant files in the dir, and make 10-15% par2 files ( generally speaking that's enough ) http://www.quickpar.org.uk/ http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA021385/ The latter is a 64 bit implementation - faster on 64 bit cpu's.

Say you backup to BluRay discs, 5 years from now it turns out the disc isnt in such good shape - as long as the damage to the files is not more than 10%-15%, Par can restore the data 100%. Does not matter which % gets damaged..
Its kind of like a hologram - cut it in half and you got two identical pictures instead of half of the whole..

As for FLAC compression - highest possible 'compression' has only one drawback - encoding time. The quality of the end result is the same from q1 to q5. Data corruption would have a larger impact though on the higher compression setting, but there is where Par comes in handy ^^ The space saved plus par files is still lower than lowest compression setting on flac.
 
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