Ripping your CDs aka masochism: how did you do yours?

I ripped about 2.5k odd cds.

It took a spare PC with 2 dvd/cd drives plonked next to me in the lounge and a significant amount of time. Used dbpoweramp to rip to flac, then used the converter to convert to alac, mp3 etc.

Benefit of using dbpoweramp for me is the artwork gets tagged correctly and almost all cds were found. For the very few that weren't I ended up using mediamonkey to rip to flac, where you can tag from the internet, for example if it is for sale on amazon. I found EAC didn't identify as many cds correctly and after a while I couldn't face any more manual inputting. If you rip in itunes the artwork doesnt seem to be permanently there, i.e if you have to reload libarary.

Now I just rip the cds as I buy them. Have the files on both flac and alac on more than one drive as I never, ever want to have to do it again. Not even sure I would have the heart to do it agian even if the worst did happen, oh and my wife would kill me.

Can't even begin to comtemplate doing the vinyl.

For my sins, with only the merest and vaguest outlines of any plan, with 1Tb of HDD on my laptop, I decided to rip our combined CD collection to lossless.  Flac was my format of choice, and Winamp the software.  Off and on, for the better part of two months I laboriously loaded CD after CD into the drive of the laptop.  There were set-backs and false starts.  Certainly, there has been frustration and irritation.  Album artwork has been a pain, particularly for older discs.  Likewise the info that gets loaded might be inconsistent across a multi-CD package or collection.  It might be completely wrong!

I now have 977 albums (according to Winamp) on my laptop, on an external 500Gb drive, and the NAS I have finally ended up purchasing.  I know that the OH has still more at work that I haven't got my paws on.  I opted to rip 99% of what we own, irrespective of whether it passes my taste filter or not or even if I will ever listen to it.  At least we have everything stored and backed up. Looking at what Winamp shows in its audio library there is an awful lot of tidying to do if I want to fully index, categorise and sanity check everything.  I have to say that the classical CDs are the worst for cataloging.

What I will probably do now is trim down the files on my laptop to MY listening.  Sort the wheat from the chaff as it were.

Would I go through the pain all over?  Probably - in the long run it is probably worth the effort.  However, a concentrated effort is pretty soul destroying if you have a life. 

And more:

Just use Add Encoder.

There is a detailed guide to using DbPoweramp on the Computer Audiophile website; it's part of a wider article on ripping strategy. Very good, I followed it pretty much to the letter to do my 2000+ CD's. DbPoweramp is Windows only by the way. I now rip on windows and play on Mac Mini.

Andrew / moderators - I hope referencing another website isn't a problem. Hopefully not as they don't sell magazines, but no offence if you want to delete this post

Well that's another first for me.

I've just received a CD I bought online the other day which will probably never see the drawer of my CD player: Caro Emerald, Deleted Scenes From The Cutting Room Floor. Have to say, I'm one of what must be a dying minority of people who enjoys upwrapping physical media like CDs and LPs and thumbing-through the artwork and booklets.

Painful as ripping is, I find it pales into insignificance when compared to sorting out all the metadata.

When all goes well, that is a part of ripping.

I'm another dBPowerAmp person, all 800+ CD's duly ripped into FLAC over the years. Tried EAC but it's just far too slow, life's too short for all that nonsense. Likewise I had a longterm plan to rip all my vinyl using Audacity, but again that got so long and tedious I gave it up as a bad job very quickly.

.

Maybe we are all getting too soft in this day and age ... I mean it's not that hard to rip a CD to FLAC in about 3 minutes and having the metadata and artwork automatically downloaded for you.  

In the time it takes to read a couple of the posts on this thread you could have ripped a couple of CDs already. Meta data sorting and cleanup can be done at any time afterwards.

I do sympathise with those having uber large music collections, but really, there's no need to lock yourself in a dark room for a couple of weeks and rip everything in one go.

PS ... back to the original question .... about 250 CDs ripped with EAC, artwork sourced on t'internet and resized/tidied up using a PC graphics program, then meta data cleaned up in Foobar 2000. Also format shifted < 100 vinyl albums and only 60% through the post editing process 

And I thought I read quite slowly

T o o k   m e   a   1 / 4   o f   a   C D   t o   r e a d   a n d   r e p l y   t o   t h a t   p o s t 

.. and I'm not even dyslexic KO?

As I retire in 3 years time I've been gradually converting my CDs to flac using EAC. (Not done many yet – about 40 of the 1,000 CDs we have) But I decided Greenwich Woman deserves to have her music in flac format too – but I am doing my own 1^st.

I expect to complete it after retirement - then I will get the appropriate dac box

One thing that slowed me down was the old computers I had (but just invested in a brand new laptop)

This is far cheaper:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Fanless-Server-Automatic-Ripping-VortexBox/dp/B0...

http://www.whathifi.com/forum/computer-based-music/vortexbox-appliance-i...

I wonder if anyone has used this service:

http://www.mp3bymail.com/datagrooming/datagroom.html

I'm tempted...