iGrant
Grant Fidelity Forum Moderator
I get asked about this all the time, things that happen as soon as you launch a DAC 
Bit of background, I've been using the computer since 1984 in the studio as a music making tool and since the launch of CD drives for the computer have also used the computer to play back music, many of my home studios have also been my main home music system. Even back in the day, if memory serves me right around 1992 we could rip CD's to wav files in DOS and play them back, of course we could also record our studio work to wav, but that wasn't something that I was interested in until Windows 3.1 came along I think in '94.
It was around this time that I started making playlist from wav file rips and basically using the computer as a media server. About 3 years ago I discovered a very cool freeware program called Magic Iso Virtual CD/DVD manager that allows me to duplicate my CD library on my hard drives, this to me is the only way to go about having a media server using Windows. There may be others out there, but this is all I need, plus whatever playback software you want, I use Windows Media Player most of the time and Foobar for High Res.
Get on with Ian will you
Ok, the concept is to make exact copies of CD library onto your hard drive as a disk image, roughly 700MB/CD which means you can load about 700 CDs on a 500GB hard drive and terabyte USB hard drives are the norm now for around $100 !!. Combined with freeware this is pretty hard to beat cost wise, let alone sonically.
There is absolutely zero reason to rip your CDs to hard drive in any file format, even a wav file is compression (AIF on the mac) although that is typically what youyr CD is made from in the first place, with the price of hard drives you are wasting you rime and will forever be trying to reclaim lost information.
By creating an exact copy of your CD you can ignore all the debates on file formats, compression, bit perfect and even jitter to some degree. and just work on your library and enjoy your music.
After you have copied your CDs to your hard drive, then you can rip to wav or whatever file format you want, but again the hard drive capabilities for portable players is expanding all the time. A wav file is usually around 40MB per song, so even a 20GB player can hold up to 500 wav file songs, as close to uncompressed as you can get. 500 songs should get you thru a day or two and isn't the iPod classic now at 160 gb, that is around 4000 songs in wav file! Stick with wav files for your 44/16 CD library and Windows (AIF for Mac), stop wasting time with MP3 etc.
Ok, Ok, getting there:
Step by Step:
1. Download and install Magic Iso Virtual CD/DVD Manager
http://www.magiciso.com/tutorials/miso-magicdisc-overview.htm, if you can't find after install, look on your lower right side icons, right click to get the menu.
2. Grab a couple of CD and load one into your CD/DVD drive. Right Click Magic ISO and selct 'Make CD/DVD Image, follow the instructions ( I use Nero as my image format, use whatever you normally use, Nero is the simplest for me). Select your local or external hard drive, doesn't matter which. I keep my frequently played images on the laptop's hard drive. Do not use the compression format offered, kind of defeating the purpose here, good for movies I guess. Repeat for 2nd CD. You should be done in about 10 minutes.
At this point you should have some sort of idea about how you want to sort your CD images, whatever works for you, I use catagories, then artists, which seems enough for the images. When you rip these images to song files in wav format, you can use whatever player or librarian software you want to keep track of all the songs you have. I just again use Media Player for that.
3. After the above is finished, again right click on MaGic ISO and select number of drives, set 3 for now. You may or may not need to watch windows install drivers for the virtual drivers, depends on what you have been up to with your computer. It only happens when you add more virtual drives. And you only need to do this once, The virtual drives will be loaded up every time you start windows.
4. Right Click again Magic Iso and select the top one "Virtual CD/DVD-ROM", then select from the pop-out the first (or second, doesn't matter) "No Media", from the next pop-out select "Mount", select the image file you just made above in step 2 and click OK, if like my computer, Media Player will pop up playing your CD. Bingo.
5. Repeat above for 2nd image. Same thing will happen, now click Library on Media Player and you will see the 2 drive with the CDs mounted, if you are connected to the internet you get album covers and titles etc, just like if you popped in a real CD.
6. Now you can rip to wav or whatever to make your playlists or to get ready to export to your portable, just like any CD, except they are on your hard drive, things work a lot faster too from the hard drive The virtual drives will remain loaded until you remount them with a different CD image or unmount them.
7. Go back and set the number of virtual drives you think you need, I can run 15 on my laptop. That is like having 15 cdroms in your laptop (plus the physical ones you have).
That is it !!, simple as pie and as good as it gets sonically from a computer. The big bonus with thios method is the old saying, your Data doesn't exist if it isn't in at least 2 places, your CD collection is Data, if you lose your CD collection like I did, you will understand.
Hope that helps you enjoy your music library, you will see me running the above at the audio shows, usually from my little 7" netbook. This is my idea of a music server that I can still run my business from when travelling.
I'll add to this as/if I remember more.
edit - of course I forgot the final and most important step, plug USB cable from computer into TubeDAC-09 or Opera Consonance USB wirelss DAC to hear how amazing your computer actually sounds as a Transport (with any mechanical transport issues. When going to visit friends high-end systems or your local dealer, take TubeDAc-09 and your laptop with you, compare against high priced CD players and smile, some gloating allowed.
Cheers,
Ian
Bit of background, I've been using the computer since 1984 in the studio as a music making tool and since the launch of CD drives for the computer have also used the computer to play back music, many of my home studios have also been my main home music system. Even back in the day, if memory serves me right around 1992 we could rip CD's to wav files in DOS and play them back, of course we could also record our studio work to wav, but that wasn't something that I was interested in until Windows 3.1 came along I think in '94.
It was around this time that I started making playlist from wav file rips and basically using the computer as a media server. About 3 years ago I discovered a very cool freeware program called Magic Iso Virtual CD/DVD manager that allows me to duplicate my CD library on my hard drives, this to me is the only way to go about having a media server using Windows. There may be others out there, but this is all I need, plus whatever playback software you want, I use Windows Media Player most of the time and Foobar for High Res.
Get on with Ian will you
Ok, the concept is to make exact copies of CD library onto your hard drive as a disk image, roughly 700MB/CD which means you can load about 700 CDs on a 500GB hard drive and terabyte USB hard drives are the norm now for around $100 !!. Combined with freeware this is pretty hard to beat cost wise, let alone sonically.
There is absolutely zero reason to rip your CDs to hard drive in any file format, even a wav file is compression (AIF on the mac) although that is typically what youyr CD is made from in the first place, with the price of hard drives you are wasting you rime and will forever be trying to reclaim lost information.
By creating an exact copy of your CD you can ignore all the debates on file formats, compression, bit perfect and even jitter to some degree. and just work on your library and enjoy your music.
After you have copied your CDs to your hard drive, then you can rip to wav or whatever file format you want, but again the hard drive capabilities for portable players is expanding all the time. A wav file is usually around 40MB per song, so even a 20GB player can hold up to 500 wav file songs, as close to uncompressed as you can get. 500 songs should get you thru a day or two and isn't the iPod classic now at 160 gb, that is around 4000 songs in wav file! Stick with wav files for your 44/16 CD library and Windows (AIF for Mac), stop wasting time with MP3 etc.
Ok, Ok, getting there:
Step by Step:
1. Download and install Magic Iso Virtual CD/DVD Manager
http://www.magiciso.com/tutorials/miso-magicdisc-overview.htm, if you can't find after install, look on your lower right side icons, right click to get the menu.
2. Grab a couple of CD and load one into your CD/DVD drive. Right Click Magic ISO and selct 'Make CD/DVD Image, follow the instructions ( I use Nero as my image format, use whatever you normally use, Nero is the simplest for me). Select your local or external hard drive, doesn't matter which. I keep my frequently played images on the laptop's hard drive. Do not use the compression format offered, kind of defeating the purpose here, good for movies I guess. Repeat for 2nd CD. You should be done in about 10 minutes.
At this point you should have some sort of idea about how you want to sort your CD images, whatever works for you, I use catagories, then artists, which seems enough for the images. When you rip these images to song files in wav format, you can use whatever player or librarian software you want to keep track of all the songs you have. I just again use Media Player for that.
3. After the above is finished, again right click on MaGic ISO and select number of drives, set 3 for now. You may or may not need to watch windows install drivers for the virtual drivers, depends on what you have been up to with your computer
. It only happens when you add more virtual drives. And you only need to do this once, The virtual drives will be loaded up every time you start windows.4. Right Click again Magic Iso and select the top one "Virtual CD/DVD-ROM", then select from the pop-out the first (or second, doesn't matter) "No Media", from the next pop-out select "Mount", select the image file you just made above in step 2 and click OK, if like my computer, Media Player will pop up playing your CD. Bingo.
5. Repeat above for 2nd image. Same thing will happen, now click Library on Media Player and you will see the 2 drive with the CDs mounted, if you are connected to the internet you get album covers and titles etc, just like if you popped in a real CD.
6. Now you can rip to wav or whatever to make your playlists or to get ready to export to your portable, just like any CD, except they are on your hard drive, things work a lot faster too from the hard drive
The virtual drives will remain loaded until you remount them with a different CD image or unmount them.7. Go back and set the number of virtual drives you think you need, I can run 15 on my laptop. That is like having 15 cdroms in your laptop (plus the physical ones you have).
That is it !!, simple as pie and as good as it gets sonically from a computer. The big bonus with thios method is the old saying, your Data doesn't exist if it isn't in at least 2 places, your CD collection is Data, if you lose your CD collection like I did, you will understand.
Hope that helps you enjoy your music library, you will see me running the above at the audio shows, usually from my little 7" netbook. This is my idea of a music server that I can still run my business from when travelling.
I'll add to this as/if I remember more.
edit - of course I forgot the final and most important step, plug USB cable from computer into TubeDAC-09 or Opera Consonance USB wirelss DAC to hear how amazing your computer actually sounds as a Transport (with any mechanical transport issues
. When going to visit friends high-end systems or your local dealer, take TubeDAc-09 and your laptop with you, compare against high priced CD players and smile, some gloating allowed.Cheers,
Ian
. Best of all, MPD is very expandable, you can add other nodes to other stereos on your network and sync them all together if you want. MPD is generally used for offices and large buildings to distribute audio, as well as for home listening. If you want to make a music server as seemless as possible, Linux is the perfect tool for the job. You can write a shell script thatll tag everything as well as retrieve album art with the push of a button.