This past weekend the wife and I moved our CDs from the media cabinet to a box in the basement. Ripping and converting the CDs came up in conversation and since then I've casually been looking into ways to make that happen. Ideally, I'd like to take everything in that box and convert it to an mp3 or something on a hard drive.
We have something like 250-300 disks to deal with. At about a $1 per CD plus shipping and media costs, it looks like a lot of the services advertised online will be pretty pricey.
On the other hand, the only computer I have access to at home is an oldish Macbook. Doing this myself is going to take a lot of time and time is money.
Have any of you gone through something similar?
Can anyone recommend a good service to take care of this for me (preferably an inexpensive but reliable service)?
If I undertake this myself, can anyone recommend some software (if more than iTunes is required) to accomplish this task? What about format and settings? I'd like a compromise between file size and audio quality. Is mp3 at 190 or 320 good enough?
Do you have especially rare music on those CDs? Most of the tracks could probably downloaded much easier. Ripping yourself is also easy but I'd recommend some software that could identify and automatically fill in all the artist/track information automatically as most older CDs don't have that embedded.
Since you own the originals, and unless you are an extreme audiophile, MP3 @ 190kbps should suffice but then again, storage space is ridiculous these days so there is no reason not to go balls out on the bitrate. If you really want quality, you could try FLAC.
Last edited by Hack&Lube; 02-28-2012 at 11:47 AM.
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Do you have especially rare music on those CDs? Most of the tracks could probably downloaded much easier. Ripping yourself is also easy but I'd recommend some software that could identify and automatically fill in all the artist/track information automatically as most older CDs don't have that embedded.
Since you own the originals, and unless you are an extreme audiophile, MP3 @ 190kbps should suffice but then again, storage space is ridiculous these days so there is no reason not to go balls out on the bitrate. If you really want quality, you could try FLAC.
I depends on your PC. Since you have a Mac you can use itunes. I just used Windows media Player.
1 - Create a dedicated Music folder
2 - open WMP insert CD
3 - Select the required settings such as "automatically update".
4 - Pressed Rip
5 - Some CD's didn't have any info online so I typed them in myself.
It's easy but time consuming. I would probably take a few days to do.
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I redid my music when I killed a partition on my data drive a year or so ago. I used iTunes and rip to MP3 @ 320kbps to give me the most flexibility later on. The file size isn't big enough that it would be problematic, even with the slightly inflated disk prices these days. Although, as Hack mentioned, you probably won't notice the difference at 190, so saving the extra time to rip might be a better option for you.
The only real advice I can give to save time by using iTunes is to get an external drive so you can have 2 at the same time. iTunes won't let you rip 2 at once, but you can set it to queue one disc while the other is ripping, saving you a ton of time.
edit: just did a quick Google to see what the settings were to allow you to queue one disc while the other is ripping and this thread claims that apparently if you disable the 'automatically import CD' it will allow you do do 2 CD's at once. I wonder if it will let you do more? Would certainly be worth the price of an external optical drive, or find a few from friends.
edit2: that same thread also claims that Toast Titanium will do multiple discs at a time (5 at least), which at a price of $80 might be worthwhile, if you have access to the external drives. It also has some other nice features like video ripping and conversion which might be useful for other things later on.
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Last edited by Rathji; 02-28-2012 at 12:12 PM.
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I did all my music but I made sure everything was ripped to a lossless format. Like people on here I dedicated some time to it and then ended up finishing while I was doing other stuff on the computer.
I can't estimate the time, it took a while though. I basically just dedicated a weekend to doing it and then what I wasn't finished I did a few CDs at a time over the next week. At least you can do other stuff while on the computer. I used itunes.
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I put all my CDs into iTunes. This works well if you have an iPod with lots of space. You can burn CDs from iTunes from playlists that you make. Podcasts are easy to add.
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EAC is fine but I found you needed to dig around abit to get the best from it, plus is crashed my system on a couple of occasions (using Windows XP) and getting the right Codecs can cause problems if you have not done it before.
WMP or Itunes will do the job easily enough and if you can't get the CD information when you Rip them you can always use MP3 Tag, which I use and is also free. It will do multiple files and has three or four different sources it looks at for CD info.
Ripping at 190 is fine if you only plan to listen on a MP3 player or your computer speakers but if you plan to listen to your rips through anything else I would go with 320. The extra space needed is worth it and the price of hard drives is starting to come down again.
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Personally I would never rip in anything but lossless. It is the most flexible. You can always downgrade but you can't upgrade without re-ripping the music.
Especially if you use an apple product. Itunes will automatically downgrade them for you to make sure they fit on your device.
Personally I would never rip in anything but lossless. It is the most flexible. You can always downgrade but you can't upgrade without re-ripping the music.
Especially if you use an apple product. Itunes will automatically downgrade them for you to make sure they fit on your device.
Not sure what you mean by this. iTunes will rip them in many formats (Apple Lossless, AAC, MP3, Wav, etc) or quality you want, up to 320 kbps. It just depends what you set it to.
Maybe you are thinking of the default for mp3s, which is about 160kbps IIRC.
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Not sure what you mean by this. iTunes will rip them in many formats (Apple Lossless, AAC, MP3, Wav, etc) or quality you want, up to 320 kbps. It just depends what you set it to.
Maybe you are thinking of the default for mp3s, which is about 160kbps IIRC.
I'm not talking about the way itunes rips the music, I'm talking about how it puts it on your ipod.
My whole library is in lossless, well most of it anyways.
When syncing my ipod it gives the option to load all music as 128aac. I only have a 32gig ipod and my library is closer to 80gigs (or more)
If I left it at lossless I won't be able to fit my library on my ipod.
I could just have all my library as mp3s but by the time I buy a new ipod or iphone hopefully it will be 64gigs (or even 128) and then I'll be happy I use lossless because I won't have to re-rip everything.
Even at 64 I can just manually convert some of my songs (while keeping the lossless) to a lower quality and use that until such time that there is an ipod big enough to fit my entire library without downconverting any of it.
Que someone chiming in with "what would you want lossless for anyways, there is no audible difference to your crappy ears".
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I've been using EAC for a long time and it works well. There are lots of guides to show you how to set it up and once it is done you don't need to do it again.
One thing I haven't played around with much are things like CUE sheets. I would love to do some lossless ripping to FLAC then be able to burn back to a perfect CD replica for albums like Pink Floyd albums or live albums where many tracks are gapless and others have gaps.
Some day I'll get a good way to archive those types of albums figured out.
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Digitizing CD Collection
