_(please don't take this rant as telling you what to do)_ Here's the thing. Once you ripped everything in lossless you are a few clicks away from converting it to any fancy codec future might bring us. Not with the AAC rip, not without degradation. Plus you (might) lose correct silence length between tracks (good to save cuesheets), plus you might lose some starting/ending track data as iTunes probably relies on OS/disc drive and doesn't care about sector offsets (not sure how good or bad the situation is with the accurate sector reads on OS X). I've lost quite some time in the 90s/2000s ripping CDs in mp3. Never again.
This is really the only way to future-proof your collection. Once you have a lossless copy, it can be converted to any other format without needing to rip all your CD's again.
Kevin, I started my CD-ripping project in 2017. It took me many months to rip my entire collection, a total of 66237 tracks. I use the free FairStars CD Ripper software for ripping and MusicBee for playing the music. I tried iTunes, but didn't like it.
I recently acquired a couple hundred CDs from my mother (she does not use them anymore as she just streams using Pandora/Spotify) and I ripped everything earlier this year. My setup was a modern multi-core desktop PC with Windows Media Player (ripping to standard DRM-free MP3, 320k). I sped things up by using four optical drives - two internal SATA and two external USB drives and WMP would quite happily rip four discs in parallel. If one got "stuck" the others would keep going. Call me old fashioned, but I still prefer to buy my media physically (and then rip it so that I have easy access to it electronically). Thrift stores often have good finds for building my collection.
look up the game discs labeled namco museum and you will see why i like cd you get a bunch of music or games and then can play the popular ones or discover the unknown not all is crap
Personally, I am using a windows laptop, a USB 3 blu-ray drive and EAC for software. The speed on the blu-ray drive has DRASTICALLY decreased the time it takes to RIP a CD. 5 and a half minutes for a standard length CD
Exactly. A 1TB drive could hold about 1,500 discs. Seems like an obvious choice. No compromises, and no need to hold the master disc for any reason besides nostalgia.
I did the same with my own collection recently. 200 CDs into FLAC-8 with foobar2000 using two Blu-Ray drives simultaneously on my desktop PC. A BD drive with 24x read speed can rip a CD considerably faster than your Mac, I'm sure.
FLAC or something else, but flac is preferred. When you see, for example, some kind of rare cassette rip in mp3@128/192 kbps, and nothing more, you don’t have to choose.
I ripped 2,045 CD recently using EZ CD Audio Converter in FLAC format. Despite this, I cannot tell the difference between FLAC and 320kbps AAC or MP3. Compression is ideal for saving space, for sure. Anyway... All I can say is backup, backup and backup. You'll never want to rip tons of CDs again in a hurry. I never backed up and lost my CD rips when my hard-drive corrupted, so had to rip them all over again, took ages. Now I have a master hard-drive and 2 x back-ups, I'm not taking any chances! Haha. Love your videos :).
Andrew Coulson I compressed my library down to 96kbps Mp3 to fit on my iPod and it sounded just the same as 320kpbs to me. It's very possible I have hearing damage. Life is short and I'd rather have more songs in my pocket. The high-quality files can stay on the computer.
As stated before, FLAC has device compatibility issues. AAC does as well after all these years. None of my phones will play back AAC files because they weren't encoded by iTunes. I don't use iTunes, so I have to use mp3, a legacy codec with mediocre audio quality at even the highest settings. My Windows Phone is the only device that will play anything I put in it and playback on my car radio.
@E. O. ALAC is worse when it comes to device compatibility since it's a proprietary Apple product. Since I don't use any Apple devices, it would be a waste of time to do it. In broadcast radio, a field I work part-time in, most everything runs on Windows computers. Traffic, scheduling, playout and audio processing is all on Windows. ALAC support is not heard of and probably won't ever. It's not laziness; it's just knowing what I can use and for what purpose it serves.
@Jakub Klimczak Our new government claims to defend the free internet, and maintain freedom of speech, yet inciting hate and discrimination towards us opposition leaders, members, as well as the pro-opposition media. As for now, the government is not attempting to ban VPNs (in fact i'm currently using one, which is NordVPN), but they have the right to do so if there's anything that threatens the government.
Surprised EAC wasn't an option The most complicated thing is making sure the mp3 format is correct, but even then, just copy and paste something online. Personally, I just use FLAC only when ripping and convert later if I HAVE to. It also has an auto tag for metadata that is automatically suggested if a disk is recognized. To mass edit tags, using MP3tag is my go to.
Did this a few years back, 3,500 CD's into Apple Lossless, used a MacBook like yours and used 2 USB external optical drives in tandem. Took me 9 months ripping every evening :) some artwork I needed to scan myself and add myself. The iTunes is just over 1TB when I was finished
I did this in 2020. I used dbpoweramp for that accuraterip database to ensure perfect rips. I also used a lossless codec so I would be stuck in a dead end lossy format. But now I'm doing it all over again with EAC because I've stumbled upon a handful of audible blips that dbpoweramp seems to have added, or something. It's all very tedious.
Personally, I use lossless but not because I can hear a difference. If my main "archival" copy of every song is lossless, I can convert it over and over again to my heart's content to any lossy format I want and I can know that I'm not going to have artifacts from having a second-generation encoding.
It took me about 5 years of ripping off and on to digitize my collection. My iPod Classic battery became problematic a year ago so I switched to a Sony Walkman hi-res player with 64 GB internal plus a 200 GB micro SD card. I still use iTunes to rip because it’s typically easier, but I do a final cleanup on metadata using TagScanner.
I just rip my CDs with Windows Media Player. Works perfectly fine and is extremely easy. I can rip it directly to FLAC. Pulls all the tags automatically and if it can't find the album art, I just look it up, hit copy, then paste it onto the albums in the Library section. iTunes requires an Apple account to pull tag information.
I don't really like the fact that you need a iTunes store account in order to find the album art. For the album art, I try to aim for the biggest possible picture I can find. I used to think that the 600x600 picture that you usually get with iTunes was fine but on newer smartphones with QHD displays, the album art is often blurry. Also, I've yet to find a proper lyrics tagging software for Windows. Apple Music (subscription) has got a decent amount of lyrics and I wished these would be automatically applied to the ripping procedure. For some reason, iTunes also loves to think that an album is a compilation. For example, the CD I ripped this morning, The Principal of Moments by Robert Plant was considered a compilation by iTunes. I like to browse musicbrainz using MP3tag in order to find the album art or other informations that iTunes does not complete. I especially try to make sure that the "album artist" category is correctly filled, because iTunes likes to create seperate folders for different artists within the same album. But overall, I also like to use iTunes for my music collection. I've tried to use foobar and musicbee for months but I never felt at home with these two. For some reason, I always find my place back with iTunes. Although I've been forcing myself in the past to not go beyond iTunes 10.7 I believe, I've recently switched to the Windows Store edition of iTunes which works flawlessly. I also tried to switch to music subscription services, especially Tidal and Apple Music, but I never really enjoyed them. I found myself enjoying the physical aspect of music ownership that the CD provide. Added to the fact that CDs provide fantastic music quality (apart from the loudness issues), the prices of CDs are very attracting. The Robert Plant CD I mentionned was bought on eBay used for 3 dollars, shipped to my house. I wished you would do a video showing your entire collection and how it is stored. Thanks for your video
I don't have a newer smartphone, so that's not a problem for me. And iTunes' artist/title tagging is much better than FreeDB, which often has people typing it in all caps or all lowercase, spelling mistakes, listing The Beatles as "Beatles, The", etc.
@@vwestlife Thanks a lot for taking the time to read my comment and to reply to it. I definitely understand that the issue with newer high quality displays is pettiness but, on the other hand, I've never really used FreeDB so I am not aware of the mistakes you mentionned. Overall, I like to think of iTunes as a one stop shop for music.
I use windows 7's windows media player for ripping. I've got it set up for automatic ripping and ejecting, essentially what it sounds like, I pop a cd in my computer, and it automatically starts ripping the disc, and when it's done, it automatically/immediately spits the disc out. As for it getting the aritst info and other stuff like the year, track info and album art, it does do a pretty good gob of it for the most part, I do have at least 8 albums (as of the beginning of march of 2019) that are currently unidentified. So there's that. I know a guy through my grandfather's friend on my dads side that has been/is pretty well giving away (if that's what you really want to call it, to be honest, that is kinda what he was pretty well doing) some of his old things to me, such as a old 386 (I think that's what it was) portable computer. There's other things too, but I shouldn't make this too long.
I just did this with a 2009 Mac Pro, about 900 Music CD’s + foreign language audiobooks + literally the entire bible (25 discs and I’m not even religious) and it took me a little under a week swapping in and out the discs as I saw they were finished. Tedious but happy to have everything in one place now! Used an old version of iTunes with no relation to iCloud or Apple Music of any kind.
Seeing that macbook running on nov 2018 is something that really caught my attention for i've bought one recently and i've been thinking if really was worth buying. Seeing your macbook made me think it really was worth it. It is a really splendid sight.
honestly you're pretty lucky the Totally No.1 Hits compilation didn't have a re-recording of Too Shy by Kajagoogoo, poor Limahl did a handful of cash grab re-recordings in the 90s himself so there are a handful of his re-recordings floating out there on compilations
Ripping your entire collection to AAC with iTunes...oh dear, oh dear! If anyone is watching this and considering ripping their collection, this is what NOT to do. Complete some independent research and you will find that the best known method is to rip to FLAC using EAC or dbpoweramp. You can then convert those flac files to AAC or any other codec (including future, yet to exist codecs) on the fly.
I recently did a Great Conversion Project of 2018 where I converted my CD library from FLAC to MP3. As you said, at 320Kbps there really isn't a noticeable quality difference between FLAC and MP3, but there sure is for size. It saved me a ton of space since I have hundreds of CDs ripped to my PC.
really ? Mp3 uses joint stereo mixing left and right channel -listen a ogg file win 320kbps vs mp3 but you can hear the difference more clearly at 192k
+Jupp Schlabutt No need to spend money on keeping FLAC files if I can't perceive a difference between them and MP3s. It's not like my CDs are going anywhere.
ive been collecting music for 12 years, mostly (about 90%) from peoples 100 disc wallets. i started out only having part of a 40 gb hd for my project. fortunately i realized my mistake of using a low bitrate, and switched to 320mp3. only a small part of my collection falls in that category. i have roughly 875gb of music now, somewhere like 10000+ albums, a to z. i was not picky about artists. i dont do it much any more, just occasionally.
Well, Apple made ALAC open-source back in 2011, so the compatibility issue has slightly improved in recent years. Personally, while I don’t rip CDs as much as the other people in the comments do (mainly because I don’t buy CDs), when I do, I use iTunes and rip files in ALAC. I subscribe to Apple Music, which also has the features of iTunes Match built in, so it would match songs it recognized with the iTunes Store version and make that version available on my other devices, while it would upload all other songs it didn’t recognize in AAC and make that version available on my other devices, all while keeping the original lossless copy on my main computer and keeping the files DRM-free.
But with the iTunes downloads you get the UMG copyright watermarking, which causes a much greater loss of quality than AAC encoding: www.mattmontag.com/music/universals-audible-watermark
@@vwestlife 1. I did not know this was a thing until now. 2. Most of the DRM-free music I have in Apple Music isn't from Universal (it's mostly a mixture of music from Sony and Warner). 3. I really can't tell the difference between a watermarked track and a non-watermarked track anyways (which is probably why I haven't heard about these watermarks until you brought them up).
I had a great CD ripping project in the mid 2000s, so most of my song files are in mp3 format. They're also in 320 kbps, and I think that's pretty much how I'll listen to my CD music collection until I die, even though I do have most of my CDs and could re-rip them to a modern format. I wouldn't be able to tell the difference anyway.
As one of those people who can hear the difference between lossy and lossless, I chose FLAC as I don't use iTunes, and I can make copies of a format that my car can play. For future proofing and comparability, I do lossless so I can transcode to any other format I want.
Nice video. I had Great CD Ripping Project of 2017. If anyone's planning a GCDRP of 2019, I have a few tips: - Like in this video, I started out using a SuperDrive (Mine was in a 2012 iMac). They seem to be quite a bit slower than 5.25 SATA drives, so if you have a lot of discs to go through, it might be worth trying different drives. - If you want lossless flac, I can recommmend Sony's Media Go. Even though it is discontinued, it still packs a lot of features. I think it would be fair to say Sony was heavily inspiried by iTunes when they made it. That said, I'd say its on par with iTunes when it comes to recognising albums and artwork. It also syncs with a lot more devices - including non-Sony devices. My Huawei phone showed straight up in it when I plugged it in. - Keep a bottle of Brasso nearby - Works a treat for scratched CDs.
Good tips thanks, but I've honestly have never heard of Brasso for CDs, but I have been using a product for years called Scratch Out that comes in an oversized toothpaste tube, and has worked for me on everything short of Blu-Ray disc.
Can Media Go do all the things iTunes does, including correct ID tags on lossless files and artwork? I love iTunes but none of the versions rip to FLAC and WAV takes up way too much space.
I really enjoyed the short snippet of "Beginnings" by Chicago in this video. Having never heard the full song, I bought a copy of Chicago IX, and it turns out the currently available Rhino has the same mastering as your 1987 CD. Thanks for introducing me to some great music!
That’s because Chicago OWNS their masters now, for both the Columbia and Warner/Reprise catalogs. And, Chicago’s Greatest Hits has been superseded by the two volume “The Heart Of Chicago” (Reprise) and “Only The Beginning: The Very Best Of Chicago” AND the “Chicago Box Set” (both Rhino, the box set also including a DVD).
A few years ago I went to the curb to add something to our trash bin. I discovered the neighbor had filled our bin with empty CD cases from his music collection. Not the CDs though - I guess he didn't digitize his music, just switched them to thin sleeves or something. I got a lot of free jewel cases that day. Given how much they break it's been handy to have spares. I'm starting to think about ripping my CD based console and PC games. I've done a few games so far as BIN/CUE, but I don't think that will work with copy protection so I may need to get fancier before going any further with it. Hope it's not a huge rabbit hole or I may just give up on the protected games.
it's back! I was going to comment last night and all of a sudden it was blocked in the US. AAC is a good format to go with, MP3 320 VBR might have also worked well. AAC is less lossy though so I can see why you chose it. As far as ALAC is concerned, there are plenty of options on Windows to play ALAC back since it is *kinda* an openish format now, but the adoption has been stagnant since everyone wants FLAC or OGG Vorbis (which also would have been a good choice I guess? Android supports it natively for one.) My imports for the past 5 years have been in ALAC since I've got a sizable iPod collection. if stuff is going on an iPod with not a lot of space, it gets converted to 128k AAC. but for the flash-modded Mini, it just goes on as ALAC. it works fairly well. on mom's machine upstairs her music imports go in as 320k VBR MP3 for the "I don't know where her music is going to be in the next decade so may as well use a safe format" dealie.
The way I ripped my CD collection was also with iTunes, but I ripped everything in ALAC. If I ever need anything converted to another format I use DB Poweramp and convert any given album to FLAC or MP3 on the fly so I can use it on my Android phone. The real reason I went with iTunes was that the only way my car stereo ( a pioneer DEH-80prs) could play lossles was either WAV on a USB stick or my iPod classic loaded with ALAC files. So I went with the latter.
I tend to ignore cover art from CDs I rip to computer. I generally use Sound Forge Audio Studio 10(Sony) for the ripping process. Once ripped I dispense with the SFK file and save with this tag in the following method as the example shows - Tommy James] DRAGGIN' THE LINE(James-King) Polygram 1971 - Artist/group] SONG TITLE(Composer{s}) Mechanical Copyright Holder Year, in that order. The songs are stored in sub-folders for each relevant year inside a folder for each decade.
You know if #article13 passes a lot of copyrighted material will be censored to death. I wouldnt get rid of those cds anytime soon. You might need them.
@@ps5hasnogames55 It is, but if an entire continent is being heavily censored it will certainly be affecting the rest of the world in some way too. If it is as severe as people think, companies will probably have to pour time and money into moving all their data centers and hosting facilities out of Europe, and that isn't going to be quick.
The biggest advantage to lossless is that you can re-convert it to any format you want without sacrificing the original quality (eg make an ALAC and then when you want to play songs in the car select the songs and make another copy as AAC). However if you are convinced you do not need to ever rip your CD's again and you are happy with what you have, well, that's up to you and I won't try further to change your mind.
I've ripped well over a thousands CD in my collection. • Don't use a notebook, ripping at full speed wears out the CD ROM drive. Use a desktop where you can just replace the drive if you wear it out. • More memory means faster ripping speed. • Do NOT apply any signal processing when ripping and saving, this can be applied during playback. • Don't let itunes dictate your file system.
I'm sharing the ripping duties with my 2008 MacBook Pro. After close to 200 CDs ripped so far, no signs of wear yet. Both machines have 4 GB of RAM. No signal processing, and iTunes saves its files in folders organized according to artist and title, which is what I would have done anyway.
I know this is an older video, but this is very similar to my iTunes setup! I’ve got a 2008 black MacBook also on Mac OS X Lion and it’s excellent for iTunes. I do use an external drive for the library itself, but it’s a great setup for everything iTunes related. It also works great with old iPods/iPhones etc. Eventually it would also be nice to archive DVDs onto it, plus it means I can sync both music and video to old devices.
I noticed you using itunes. Ive had good luck with windows media player. But now I see discogs you have I didnt know of a site like that which is very good to know about
My ripping software of choice is dBpoweramp, while using as many as 3 drives at once so ripping a large collection doesn't take forever. dBpoweramp also alerts you if there were any ripping errors, at which point you can try a different drive.
My biggest concern regarding a mass rip project on a laptop is wear and tear on your optical drive... I've worn out many optical drives over the past two decades with thousands of rips and burns of CDs and DVDs... Desktop drives tend to be less expensive and easier to replace than laptop drives.
Heh I can tell which computer I ripped an album on by whether it was OGG or MP3 or M4A (but yeah, I later did re-rip my entire collection to M4A anyway, replacing the MP3s and OGGs/etc.) Gonna re-rip as FLAC now that I have another drive/partition solely for music/movies though, then convert to M4A from there to another folder on another partition
I used to do it exactly the same way as you do now. Using iTunes, ripping to 320kbps and trashing duplicates... Which ended in me ripping all my well over 1000 CDs again in FLAC a couple of years later, without deleting anything. If you wanna archive your CDs, do it right the first time. You can always easily convert the ripped lossless files to anything you want.
I needed an audio format with very high quality and universal compatibility and AAC at 320 kbps VBR achieves that goal. With VBR enabled the actual bitrate is around 340 - 350 kbps and it significantly outperforms MP3 at 320 kbps. After all, TH-cam's audio is AAC at 128 kbps and I hardly hear anyone complaining about its audio quality!
I just use dB PowerAmp CD ripper to rip CDs. It automatically finds the track, album, etc info for most CDs. It supports multiple formats for ripping to including flac, mp3, wav, and aac. I don't get the point of the loudness war, its stupid and reduces auduo quality. I don't want music to be really loud, i want it just normal or even quiet sometimes.
Hi All, i done the same thing in Xmas 2002, i had bought a copy of "hotburn" a generic cd burner for probably a kodak 4x cd burner and a cyrix 686 or Pentium 4, ( hard to keep track of things when at the time you mix and match and upgrade 1 part on a pc every 6 months ) Anyway, i ripped all of my cd collection and filled the hard drive. Next i picked my favorite 200 songs and turned them into mp3 using maybe vlc specs were 22050hz 32bits per sample 48 / 56kb/s. A bit low in quality but there were 3 reasons acutally i just checked a gear songs that i did not rename are titled GAnumber ( Gear Audio ?? anyone ) 1) eachsong was to be betweet 1.2 and 1.4meg 2) my pc only had those little tiny box speakers, the surround sound boom box setup i bought latern 3) i had a size limit for the next step The end result was i was able to have all of my favourite songs on a a "new" usb thumb drive with 256 or 512 meg capacity and run it on a mp3 to FM radio transmitter, that device sat in my car for about 8 years until my next car had a factory cd player. Now i just rip to lossless or have music video. With todays compression algorithims and the pc's ability to decode - uncompress on the fly, i can have some very good video & audio quality to about 8meg a file Regards George
Something that has helped me a lot in dealing with multiple audio formats is dBpoweramp, which allows for audio conversions across multiple formats and even batch conversions.
I performed an audio null test between a lossless file and other lossy formats. It turned out that MP3 was the worst at low bit rates but was the best at the highest (using LAME for mp3). This test was only for the residual audio left after differentiating the files in an editor software. It doesn't consider the psychoacoustic masking that is supposed to hide the effects of the lossy formats.
I've done those null tests myself. The LAME MP3 encoder performs significantly better than Fraunhofer. But at 320 kbps, AAC and Ogg Vorbis both outperform MP3. Ogg does even better than AAC on some samples but worse on others, so I'd say they're about equal. MusePack (MPC) is surprisingly slightly worse than LAME MP3 -- which shows you just how much they've been able to improve MP3 since MusePack was last updated in 2009.
@@vwestlife I went back and played my test result files. The original had a music sample following with white noise. In my case, the mp3 320 nearly nulled the music and the noise was very low. Ogg Vorbis matched (or nearly matched) the noise but didn't quite do as well with the music. Considering the file size, it is amazing in what Ogg can do. The ACC files were missing, so I'll have to retest them. I want to post a video on the results at some point. It would be interesting if you shared your results in a video (if you haven't already).
Sounds like a great project! Will you finish ripping all those discs in 2018? If I tried something like this it would have to be called the ripping project 2018-2020.
When I did the rippening last month I had about 5 releases that didn't have a discogs page yet, including one russian cd so I had to go over to a friend who was able to use cyrillic for filling in the cd names and all. Luckily the database of the software (EAC) I was using did have some of the obscure cd's in there, but it still surprised me how many releases aren't on discogs yet.
There's even a quicker way to get the album art pasted in if you're on a Mac - if you open the image on Discogs or Amazon and right click and 'copy image', you can then go to the artwork tab on the LP and just CMD-V it into there - then you don't have to save it. I switched around 5 years ago to Apple Lossless, historically using 256Kbits/s AAC. I use iTunes Match now though so have 2758 LP's loaded in via that. Also, if you want to load stuff onto SD card for the car, lossless is the master format for storage, but you can use an app called 'Export for iTunes' which will cross-compress lossless into whichever format works best in your car, allowing you to sync an entire playlist to your SD card. I do that for my Parents and it works fine in their Audi. I have carplay in my cars, so I use an iPhone with iTunes Match and it just drags the music down over the internet.
Yes, the copy-and-paste trick works, but saves the image as PNG, which wastes space compared to saving it to a file and then adding it, which keeps it JPG.
Hey Kevin, have you heard of a CD ripping software called dbPoweramp? I used that to rip all my CDs to either FLAC or AAC (320 kbps VBR) and surprisingly it allows you to automatically search for the album cover art as well as the metadata of an album instantly. It saved me 10 minutes (Prior to that, i had to search every of my CDs' album art on Discogs). And you can even normalize the volume of your CD tracks if it's too loud or smashed in the levels. That way, you can enjoy listening to your CDs without fatiguing your ears too much.
Yes, I've heard of dBPowerAmp, and tried it a few times, but I don't like it, and for this project I need an all-in-one solution, not just a CD ripper.
I went through this process for literally decades, but I've been using a streaming service (Apple Music in my case) for the past couple of years, and while the main attraction was being able to get more access to new music, I'm now realizing that it saves me from having to do this kind of busywork. I can't say I miss it.
If you just want to rip a CD to .mp3, .flac, WAV, ALAC etc the facility is built right into W10. Not only that, it finds the artwork and compares different versions of the same CD album automatically adding the correct metadata. Also, since you mentioned it, you can rip any CD to use specifically in your car. I have over 12 years experience using various music converters, ripping music, MS computing and programming, however, for archiving purposes, personally I would use EAC or dBpoweramp converting to either WAV or .flac.
But I need an entire music library management system, not just a CD ripper. One of my main goals is to identify songs which are duplicated across different CDs, so that I can eventually get rid of the CDs which contain mostly or all inferior-quality copies of songs that I have in better quality on other CDs.
You cant manage music much better than with WMP. The only problem being, as it comes it's not set up, people are lazy, they don't want to learn how to do stuff, so you need to set it up. Once done, you will never use anything else, assuming you use a W10 machine. Sorry, I can't help or comment on anything MAC related. Moving to another subject, I really like your videos. I use both vinyl and CD and learned a long time ago that when buying equipment, buy with your ears and take reviewers opinions cautiously.
@E. O. The problem is, WMP is not setup out of the box, its not idiot proof. If you knew how to set it up, its the best music manager, player out there. Yes I use Foobar and Audacity for more advanced stuff. EAC is good, but dBpoweramp is better in my opinion & the ripper I use daily. We all have our favourites, use what you're comfortable with, however, if you have a little more knowledge, my advice would be, for a player, WMP cant be beaten. People just don't know how to set it up, its capability or functionality.
I know I may have mentioned it once before on this video, but, I have used windows media player for years since I got my 1st computer back in 2010, to which is a windows default audio music player, and it has served me mostly pretty well over the years since. I don't there's been too much of a time when there hasn't been a problem with windows media player at all. It pretty much mostly does the same things that you (vwestlife) had explained that iTunes has done with getting the album info, album art, and some other things too. I think some of the mentioned things require a internet connection, as I learned years ago.
I've started to do the same thing as well, maybe 2 years ago. Ripping every CD i have into FLAC albums and adding everything to the Tag extra. Cover artwork, lyrics (if necessary), album sleevenotes, etc. For this i'm using Banshee with the slowest readout to eliminate reading errors. Yeah, i could use EAC as well but it has no native Linux version and i don't quite trust it fully to work properly with WINE.
Your best bet would have been, ripping cds in lossless format for master storage, since drive space is not an issue anymore. You would then have used any convertor software to convert your lossless copies to lossy formats for portable playback. Not being pessimistic, but you'll start your project all over again in a few years.
on pc just use 'Exact Audio Copy' ('EAC') It does all in one task. iTunes has one very big disadvantage: once it finds your cd in the itunes store it deletes your local ripped copy and downloads the files from itunes on first use. That's annoying. So you should copy these files away onto an offline storage so itunes can't grab them anymore.
I've always wondered if you could modify one of those robotic CD burner units to bulk-rip discs instead. I had one to experiment with for a month and figured out that particular model wouldn't talk to anything but the proprietary burning software.
I have ripped my whole CD collection to computer three times. First, right around 2000-2001, I ripped them as 128 kbps MP3. A couple years later I realized that was a pretty crappy format, and ripped them as 256 kbps AAC. Less than a year after that, my "media computer"'s hard drive gave out. So I re-ripped them again. Thankfully, iTunes has "iTunes Match" now, so the vast majority of my ripped CDs are available for me to download from the iTunes Store now. My "music only" collection is just under 40 GB. I have an older 40 GB iPod, and with the storage overhead, all my songs won't quite fit. If I leave off my two "full album length tracks" (Yes, I have a couple albums that I ripped as a single individual track,) I can fit all but about a dozen songs.
ALAC is now open source and is supported in Windows Media Player on Windows 10. You can even rip CDs in WMP to that codec. MP3 players are coming out now that support ALAC like the AGPTEK Rocker. I find 320 AAC to be generally good enough for most CD rips. Personally I archive in WMA Lossless, which is supported in Windows (obviously), Android, and can be losslessly transcoded to ALAC in iTunes. . Speaking of iTunes you'd probably have been better doing this with 11.4, as you can copy and paste the artwork directly from a web image into iTunes. They stupidly took this option away and make you save the image first in iTunes 12 onwards.
VWestlife did not know that. I know they took the right click option away at any rate. I feel like iTunes is much maligned but you can still do cool stuff with it like create your own mix CD compilation album covers and print them, even in the latest version. If you use AAC I find it the best application as you have options like AAC High Efficiency for audiobooks, and you can also compress your bitrates to varying levels of quality on an iPod for example. The 'pick up where you left off' features between computer and iPod are great for lengthy audiobooks and I don't see any other app out there that does it as seamlessly as iTunes does. As long as you use it for music and video you'll rarely have an issue
6:40 I get something similar when I download music from Spotify, or from Deezer. The sound is heard louder, to the point that it becomes saturated (something that does not happen with the original CDs of the beginning of the 90's), which, use Mp3Gain to normalize the sound.
Haven't watch the video but came to say that I love ripping my CDs. I ripped my collection of over 70 Hip Hop cds, many old and new from this year. The lossless audio is king. I also rip my DVDs too, I love having my shows in mp4 format so I can store and take them wherever.
I saw the notification for this video earlier, but I couldn't watch it because WMG had blocked it (not even a VPN worked). Whatever happened, thanks for making the video available again!
I disputed the copyright claim (on the 11 second clip of the Chicago song), and I intend to follow it up with an appeal and counter-notification, if necessary. My use of the music clips most definitely qualifies as Fair Use in even the strictest legal definition.
I understand the need to save space, but for archival purposes lossless is the way to go; FLAC or ALAC, they are equivalent, but at least from a lossless you can later get compressed audio to fit music on a phone. Beside I do not understand the choice to rip everything into the internal drive of an old macBook: an external 2TB drive is rather cheap this days and if the computer dies for whatever reason are you going to rip it apart to get the hard drive ? Or, more likely, if the old internal drive itself fails, are you starting all over on the new macbook ?
Never a fun task, but certainly a necessary one if you use an iPod or computer to listen to music alot! I've bet on ALAC, ripping using a PowerMac G5, and throw the CDs in whenever I pick a new one up. The local charity shops do 2 CDs for £1 quite often, been a surprisingly great way of hoarding music (and PS2 games)!
Thanks for posting that. I have a 1.6Ghz PowerMac G5 in a corner upstairs. If the last PPC version of iTunes can rip into ALAC, then I've found a good use for it. But I'll wait for the rain to go away so its power consumption can be off-set by my rooftop solar panels. :)
I started ripping CDs and records about the same time you did. I used lossless WMAs. I didn’t have a good way to get them into the stereo. At one point I used an X Box. That wasn’t worth a shit. Now the technology has caught up with me. Have 3,000 plus lossless files and some HD files. I play them with JRiver going into my stereo through a Yggdrasil. Also use Dirac.
I've been doing this for years myself and keeping those Macs backed up with Time Machine to make sure to preserve my music but I'm still intrigued by the Brennan B2 instead of a Mac. To make it short, it's kinda like a music server/CD ripper you can listen to anywhere on your network with app or web-based control.
The CDs are what I'm preserving -- they'll probably last longer than any computer. The whole point of copying them into the computer is just to have them organized and available in a more convenient form.
I have been doing the same thing, but i'm using a Grape tray loading iMac G3 with a 120GB hard drive and Mac OS 9.2.2. It's a tedious process that takes forever. I have it plugged into an Airport Express so it can still get the track names, which still works.
Audio CD has weak error correction, so you should carefully clean the disc before ripping, and use software that can verify the accuracy of the copy by querying the AccurateRip database. Also encode to a lossless format and disable any "audio normalization" etc. You can always make AAC files from the lossless copies for your car. Also some car stereos can play WAV files although this isn't very efficient lol.
@@vwestlife Audio CD does have some error correction, but once this has failed it performs a crude form of "error hiding" by interpolating across missing samples. But the two samples either side of the missing one are effectively sub-nyquist sampled, so the results aren't good. This can still happen when you rip with iTunes. Try using a program called "Exact Audio Copy" (it's Windows only, unfortunately).
I imported all my CDs into iTunes when I got my iMac in 2010, I previously used Windows Media Player and I prefer iTunes, so when I switch back to Windows full time as I plan to do, I'll continue using iTunes. I imported all my CDs into iTunes in MP3 format at 192 Kbps.
personally how I do it is I rip my CDs as wav (uncompressed PCM) 16bit and get a big hard drive it's about 600MB a disc now If I have a vinyl copy thats in good shape I use it instead and depending On what i'm trying to play it on depends on the way I format it if I'm just keeping it on my computer I normally set it up like this wav 24Bit 19200Hz sample rate which a 90Min cassette is about 3.5GB but that way has a lot of compatibility problems your video on the freq response comparing records to cds was very interesting I normally use 9600Hz sample rate now like you mentioned about your car stereo, for me it may or may not work depending on the stereo some stereos support my format and some don't go above 4800Hz 16Bit PCM WAV and well some don't care, it gets complicated. but I never use Mp3 ever, it sounds very terrible It drives me up the walls. always wave what normally is compatible is 4800hz sample rate 16Bit pcm Wav files basically a sound file that can be played on any sound card made in the past 25 years I use the higher sample rates and bits per sample because disk space isn't really a huge concern for me like you said at the end of the video "is what works best for me at this time" and I say good for you this is what works for me. p.s I have a vinyl copy of that Chicago album it takes up 2.80Gb on my hard drive lol.
ikaros alpha . I ripped my entire cd collection in WAV format too. (16bit 44.1khz ). It takes up a lot of space but I've always been happy with the sound quality. I also made copies of all files to MP3 @ 320kbts just to have it in a compressed format for my portable music player. I will never have a master file in MP3 format only. I'm up to around 2.5 TB of hard drive space for my master files and I have a back up hard drive with exact duplicates. For me this was the best way. Funny thing is I still don't trust hard drives, so will never get rid of my CDs and data DVDs.
@@vwestlife wow thats interesting, what company filed the copyright infringement? also, i really dont see how this is not just fair use... companies are getting really silly lately haha
I use the very last itunes version before apple ruined it. I use v10.7.0.21. I don't know what compression you are using? But I highly, and I mean highly recommend using itunes lossless codec especially when ripping a thousand cd's. It is just not worth ripping with any lossy codec anymore! With apple lossless, it can give you around 40 to 60% compression. Why not keep the quality at 100% ? I don't want to throw away good data by using lossy since HD's accommodate thousands of CD's easy now.
jeffhalebopp I've been updating my itunes for years now. Is there any way I can revert to a former version without harming my library? I put a lot of effort in collecting my music.
I like the cover flow in v10.7.0.21 that they removed later. I noticed that you are using AAC 320 kbps. If you use apple lossless, it will average about a little more than twice the size as AAC 320 kbps. For me, I'd gladly sacrifice twice the disc space for lossless. That way if anything happened to your cd's, you have 100% of the original quality, no compromise :) What's another 200 gigs hard drive space. That's nothing today. Think about it.
iTunes 12 reverts some of the layout changes they made in iTunes 11. Have you tried it? And spectrum analysis tests have shown that the only significant difference between AAC at 320 kbps and lossless is at audio frequencies higher than 18 kHz, which most adults can't hear anyway and is irrelevant for my ultimate purpose -- playing music on the radio -- because FM radio audio processing filters out all audio frequencies above 15 kHz.
I've never been a fan of Itunes, but use what works for you. Having said that I still have Winamp on my only Windows 10 PC, but have yet to find a good substitute for my Xubuntu machines, and lastly I'm a FLAC , and MP3 320Kbps guy since I have tons of files in MP3, and I'm either too lazy to reencode them to FLAC, or don't have the original sources for them any longer.
The problem with using iTunes is if you want to use MP3 the quality is appalling (AAC works however) and you can't rip to FLAC, only ALAC. I use EAC, lame, MP3gain and MP3Tag to edit tags. And Photoshop to edit and resize the artwork. All encoding is done with lame options -b32 -V0 -q0 -mj - quality is perfect.
I use Windows Media Player to rip my CDs, and surprisingly it works OK, at least in the newest version (12). It supports lossless FLAC, it automatically finds the correct album/track information most of the time, and I have about the same 50/50 success rate with automatically finding album art. The only thing I wish it had was a proper volume leveling feature like your iTunes setup.
I've been doing the same thing for since I got my first computer ( a laptop) right after my birthday in may of 2010, with windows 7 on it, and while I mainly use my phone to play music in a playlist, I used to use my laptop computer hooked up to a 3.5 mm to cassette (this was when my grandfather's friend on my dad's side owned vehicle's that had tape player radio, he still owns a vehicle that has a tape player in it, but he doesn't use the vehicle too much due to the low mpg, 10 mpg). Soon enough, I got a mp3 player, and that did ease some usage off of my laptop at the time, I'm not sure where the mp3 player went since. then when I got my an iPad 3 with Verizon wireless cell connection from my local school from a grant they got a couple of years prior (story of why I didn't get a iPad when my local school got a grant to spend the money on iPads is that I ended up getting transferred to another school around the time they got the grant, and when I transferred back, I finally got one), I tried putting my music on the iPad, and found that was not the best idea, and maybe i did use my ipod 4th gen for a little while, probably with about equal results, then when I got Samsung Galaxy s4 mini in 2015, I transferred my music over to that, and I've used my phones for my music since.
The interesting thing is that the digital was supposed to simplify our lives, and here we are chasing formats that may die and hope that our hard disk will never crash... No wonder analog is coming back....🤨
Gianluca Saccone CDs get bit rot. Hard drives aren't the be all and end all storage like CDs. You can make a copy on an external drive or upload all of it in the cloud. I hope to rip all of my Cassettes, DVDs, CDs, and VHS Tapes sometime next year. It's too risky keeping sentimental things without a backup.
Does the CD Ripping/Music Digitizing Project(tm) really ever get finished? At all? It started probably before 2000 for me; still far from finished, although of course the album collection has gotten far larger since then. Not even considering the tapes and records (maybe 700) although some of those are done. I just make MP3s in my flavor of choice; this has worked best for my requirements, and the ones I made back in the early 2000s are as serviceable as they've always been. I only archive uncompressed tracks (with FLAC of course) that I made substantial modifications to, such as re-equalization or massaging out spurious spikes so they normalize better, so if I need them in a different lossy format later on I don't have to re-encode the MP3s. My CDs were in storage for four years, buried on the floor in the back. Recently I moved from one storage locker to another, and this time the CDs and books are at the FRONT. Time to continue...got at least a couple hundred more to go.
_(please don't take this rant as telling you what to do)_ Here's the thing. Once you ripped everything in lossless you are a few clicks away from converting it to any fancy codec future might bring us. Not with the AAC rip, not without degradation. Plus you (might) lose correct silence length between tracks (good to save cuesheets), plus you might lose some starting/ending track data as iTunes probably relies on OS/disc drive and doesn't care about sector offsets (not sure how good or bad the situation is with the accurate sector reads on OS X). I've lost quite some time in the 90s/2000s ripping CDs in mp3. Never again.
This is really the only way to future-proof your collection. Once you have a lossless copy, it can be converted to any other format without needing to rip all your CD's again.
Absolutely right. Use a ripping software that supports offset correction, accuraterip and error correction. Tag the files correctly and go lossless.
I love it when people continue to use old tech where it is still practical.
VWestlife Presents:
The Ripping
The Rippening
@@wright96d hah, was about to say that too
And the Spinoff Movie "FLACs of our Fathers"
The rippin' and the tearin'
Kevin, I started my CD-ripping project in 2017. It took me many months to rip my entire collection, a total of 66237 tracks. I use the free FairStars CD Ripper software for ripping and MusicBee for playing the music. I tried iTunes, but didn't like it.
I recently acquired a couple hundred CDs from my mother (she does not use them anymore as she just streams using Pandora/Spotify) and I ripped everything earlier this year. My setup was a modern multi-core desktop PC with Windows Media Player (ripping to standard DRM-free MP3, 320k). I sped things up by using four optical drives - two internal SATA and two external USB drives and WMP would quite happily rip four discs in parallel. If one got "stuck" the others would keep going. Call me old fashioned, but I still prefer to buy my media physically (and then rip it so that I have easy access to it electronically). Thrift stores often have good finds for building my collection.
look up the game discs labeled namco museum and you will see why i like cd
you get a bunch of music or games and then can play the popular ones or discover the unknown not all is crap
same here!
Personally, I am using a windows laptop, a USB 3 blu-ray drive and EAC for software. The speed on the blu-ray drive has DRASTICALLY decreased the time it takes to RIP a CD. 5 and a half minutes for a standard length CD
Newer laptops did some way with them my cousin has Dell latitude but I'm not sure if has a disc Drive
Indeed. The laptop I'm using doesn't have an onboard disc drive, so I've got the USB one
Why that long? I can do it faster with an old SATA DVD drive and FRE:AC.
This inspired me to re-rip my own CDs before they turn to dust. Even raw rips don't take that much space on a modern archival hard drive.
IMO you should rip to lossless, and if you need it there is an option in iTunes to convert them to AAC.
Exactly. A 1TB drive could hold about 1,500 discs. Seems like an obvious choice. No compromises, and no need to hold the master disc for any reason besides nostalgia.
No no....what if the drive dies? Then you have to go and try to find the CD again...IF you can...then getting a new external hard drive....
Yeah, and because hard drives are cheaper than they used to be.
I did the same with my own collection recently. 200 CDs into FLAC-8 with foobar2000 using two Blu-Ray drives simultaneously on my desktop PC. A BD drive with 24x read speed can rip a CD considerably faster than your Mac, I'm sure.
Oh yes. I prefer FLAC I even have a standalone player that supports FLAC.
FLAC or nothing. This is for archiving. You may want to even do disk images.
@@nooneinpart I suppose a disk image could make sense for enhanced CDs.
FLAC or something else, but flac is preferred.
When you see, for example, some kind of rare cassette rip in mp3@128/192 kbps, and nothing more, you don’t have to choose.
WMA 192kbps should be more than enough. 320kbps is the highest that mp3 files support.
@@rs0389 Thats why I mentioned FLAC.
That's what I thought 10 years ago, now I do not agree with this statement
I ripped 2,045 CD recently using EZ CD Audio Converter in FLAC format. Despite this, I cannot tell the difference between FLAC and 320kbps AAC or MP3. Compression is ideal for saving space, for sure. Anyway... All I can say is backup, backup and backup. You'll never want to rip tons of CDs again in a hurry. I never backed up and lost my CD rips when my hard-drive corrupted, so had to rip them all over again, took ages. Now I have a master hard-drive and 2 x back-ups, I'm not taking any chances! Haha. Love your videos :).
Andrew Coulson I compressed my library down to 96kbps Mp3 to fit on my iPod and it sounded just the same as 320kpbs to me. It's very possible I have hearing damage. Life is short and I'd rather have more songs in my pocket. The high-quality files can stay on the computer.
As stated before, FLAC has device compatibility issues. AAC does as well after all these years. None of my phones will play back AAC files because they weren't encoded by iTunes. I don't use iTunes, so I have to use mp3, a legacy codec with mediocre audio quality at even the highest settings. My Windows Phone is the only device that will play anything I put in it and playback on my car radio.
@E. O. ALAC is worse when it comes to device compatibility since it's a proprietary Apple product. Since I don't use any Apple devices, it would be a waste of time to do it. In broadcast radio, a field I work part-time in, most everything runs on Windows computers. Traffic, scheduling, playout and audio processing is all on Windows. ALAC support is not heard of and probably won't ever. It's not laziness; it's just knowing what I can use and for what purpose it serves.
My country Malaysia will be taxxing Spotify steaming service starting 2020. I guess it's time to move back to CDs :P
@Hill At least I'll pay for albums I only wanted for once, no need monthly/yearly :)
@Hill Doesn't have to be. Also, you can buy and download wavs, mp3 these days.
i guess it would be smarter to just buy a subscription to a good VPN service so you access the european or american spotify ;)
@Jakub Klimczak good VPN services bring out new IPs to use every day or week, so you can always carry on
@Jakub Klimczak Our new government claims to defend the free internet, and maintain freedom of speech, yet inciting hate and discrimination towards us opposition leaders, members, as well as the pro-opposition media. As for now, the government is not attempting to ban VPNs (in fact i'm currently using one, which is NordVPN), but they have the right to do so if there's anything that threatens the government.
Surprised EAC wasn't an option The most complicated thing is making sure the mp3 format is correct, but even then, just copy and paste something online. Personally, I just use FLAC only when ripping and convert later if I HAVE to. It also has an auto tag for metadata that is automatically suggested if a disk is recognized.
To mass edit tags, using MP3tag is my go to.
I wanted an all-in-one solution for ripping, ReplayGain, AAC encoding, tag/artwork editing, and playback. EAC doesn't do that.
@@vwestlife EAC can do all that minus the playback. You can add RG with a command line parameter.
Did this a few years back, 3,500 CD's into Apple Lossless, used a MacBook like yours and used 2 USB external optical drives in tandem. Took me 9 months ripping every evening :) some artwork I needed to scan myself and add myself. The iTunes is just over 1TB when I was finished
I did this in 2020. I used dbpoweramp for that accuraterip database to ensure perfect rips. I also used a lossless codec so I would be stuck in a dead end lossy format. But now I'm doing it all over again with EAC because I've stumbled upon a handful of audible blips that dbpoweramp seems to have added, or something. It's all very tedious.
Just to let you know Westlife has reformed, there on tour in England next year :)
I was always wondering if his username has something to do with the band
Yes that's true :) and Volkswagen Cars apparently :) @@Time4Technology
Personally, I use lossless but not because I can hear a difference. If my main "archival" copy of every song is lossless, I can convert it over and over again to my heart's content to any lossy format I want and I can know that I'm not going to have artifacts from having a second-generation encoding.
It took me about 5 years of ripping off and on to digitize my collection. My iPod Classic battery became problematic a year ago so I switched to a Sony Walkman hi-res player with 64 GB internal plus a 200 GB micro SD card. I still use iTunes to rip because it’s typically easier, but I do a final cleanup on metadata using TagScanner.
I just rip my CDs with Windows Media Player. Works perfectly fine and is extremely easy. I can rip it directly to FLAC. Pulls all the tags automatically and if it can't find the album art, I just look it up, hit copy, then paste it onto the albums in the Library section. iTunes requires an Apple account to pull tag information.
I don't really like the fact that you need a iTunes store account in order to find the album art. For the album art, I try to aim for the biggest possible picture I can find. I used to think that the 600x600 picture that you usually get with iTunes was fine but on newer smartphones with QHD displays, the album art is often blurry. Also, I've yet to find a proper lyrics tagging software for Windows. Apple Music (subscription) has got a decent amount of lyrics and I wished these would be automatically applied to the ripping procedure. For some reason, iTunes also loves to think that an album is a compilation. For example, the CD I ripped this morning, The Principal of Moments by Robert Plant was considered a compilation by iTunes. I like to browse musicbrainz using MP3tag in order to find the album art or other informations that iTunes does not complete. I especially try to make sure that the "album artist" category is correctly filled, because iTunes likes to create seperate folders for different artists within the same album. But overall, I also like to use iTunes for my music collection. I've tried to use foobar and musicbee for months but I never felt at home with these two. For some reason, I always find my place back with iTunes. Although I've been forcing myself in the past to not go beyond iTunes 10.7 I believe, I've recently switched to the Windows Store edition of iTunes which works flawlessly. I also tried to switch to music subscription services, especially Tidal and Apple Music, but I never really enjoyed them. I found myself enjoying the physical aspect of music ownership that the CD provide. Added to the fact that CDs provide fantastic music quality (apart from the loudness issues), the prices of CDs are very attracting. The Robert Plant CD I mentionned was bought on eBay used for 3 dollars, shipped to my house. I wished you would do a video showing your entire collection and how it is stored. Thanks for your video
I don't have a newer smartphone, so that's not a problem for me. And iTunes' artist/title tagging is much better than FreeDB, which often has people typing it in all caps or all lowercase, spelling mistakes, listing The Beatles as "Beatles, The", etc.
@@vwestlife Thanks a lot for taking the time to read my comment and to reply to it. I definitely understand that the issue with newer high quality displays is pettiness but, on the other hand, I've never really used FreeDB so I am not aware of the mistakes you mentionned. Overall, I like to think of iTunes as a one stop shop for music.
@@ps5hasnogames55 I'll check it out
I use windows 7's windows media player for ripping. I've got it set up for automatic ripping and ejecting, essentially what it sounds like, I pop a cd in my computer, and it automatically starts ripping the disc, and when it's done, it automatically/immediately spits the disc out. As for it getting the aritst info and other stuff like the year, track info and album art, it does do a pretty good gob of it for the most part, I do have at least 8 albums (as of the beginning of march of 2019) that are currently unidentified. So there's that. I know a guy through my grandfather's friend on my dads side that has been/is pretty well giving away (if that's what you really want to call it, to be honest, that is kinda what he was pretty well doing) some of his old things to me, such as a old 386 (I think that's what it was) portable computer. There's other things too, but I shouldn't make this too long.
Glad to know i found another oingo boingo fan!
I just did this with a 2009 Mac Pro, about 900 Music CD’s + foreign language audiobooks + literally the entire bible (25 discs and I’m not even religious) and it took me a little under a week swapping in and out the discs as I saw they were finished. Tedious but happy to have everything in one place now! Used an old version of iTunes with no relation to iCloud or Apple Music of any kind.
Seeing that macbook running on nov 2018 is something that really caught my attention for i've bought one recently and i've been thinking if really was worth buying. Seeing your macbook made me think it really was worth it. It is a really splendid sight.
honestly you're pretty lucky the Totally No.1 Hits compilation didn't have a re-recording of Too Shy by Kajagoogoo, poor Limahl did a handful of cash grab re-recordings in the 90s himself so there are a handful of his re-recordings floating out there on compilations
Ripping your entire collection to AAC with iTunes...oh dear, oh dear! If anyone is watching this and considering ripping their collection, this is what NOT to do. Complete some independent research and you will find that the best known method is to rip to FLAC using EAC or dbpoweramp. You can then convert those flac files to AAC or any other codec (including future, yet to exist codecs) on the fly.
I recently did a Great Conversion Project of 2018 where I converted my CD library from FLAC to MP3. As you said, at 320Kbps there really isn't a noticeable quality difference between FLAC and MP3, but there sure is for size. It saved me a ton of space since I have hundreds of CDs ripped to my PC.
really ? Mp3 uses joint stereo mixing left and right channel -listen a ogg file win 320kbps vs mp3 but you can hear the difference more clearly at 192k
+Jupp Schlabutt No need to spend money on keeping FLAC files if I can't perceive a difference between them and MP3s. It's not like my CDs are going anywhere.
ive been collecting music for 12 years, mostly (about 90%) from peoples 100 disc wallets. i started out only having part of a 40 gb hd for my project. fortunately i realized my mistake of using a low bitrate, and switched to 320mp3. only a small part of my collection falls in that category. i have roughly 875gb of music now, somewhere like 10000+ albums, a to z. i was not picky about artists. i dont do it much any more, just occasionally.
Well, Apple made ALAC open-source back in 2011, so the compatibility issue has slightly improved in recent years. Personally, while I don’t rip CDs as much as the other people in the comments do (mainly because I don’t buy CDs), when I do, I use iTunes and rip files in ALAC. I subscribe to Apple Music, which also has the features of iTunes Match built in, so it would match songs it recognized with the iTunes Store version and make that version available on my other devices, while it would upload all other songs it didn’t recognize in AAC and make that version available on my other devices, all while keeping the original lossless copy on my main computer and keeping the files DRM-free.
But with the iTunes downloads you get the UMG copyright watermarking, which causes a much greater loss of quality than AAC encoding: www.mattmontag.com/music/universals-audible-watermark
I refuse to use ALAC simply out of hatred for Apple. FLAC ftw.
@@vwestlife 1. I did not know this was a thing until now.
2. Most of the DRM-free music I have in Apple Music isn't from Universal (it's mostly a mixture of music from Sony and Warner).
3. I really can't tell the difference between a watermarked track and a non-watermarked track anyways (which is probably why I haven't heard about these watermarks until you brought them up).
I had a great CD ripping project in the mid 2000s, so most of my song files are in mp3 format. They're also in 320 kbps, and I think that's pretty much how I'll listen to my CD music collection until I die, even though I do have most of my CDs and could re-rip them to a modern format. I wouldn't be able to tell the difference anyway.
I mostly just rip my CDs with EAC. For Mac, I used XLD. I recommend using the what.cd guide for ripping CDs with either programs.
As one of those people who can hear the difference between lossy and lossless, I chose FLAC as I don't use iTunes, and I can make copies of a format that my car can play. For future proofing and comparability, I do lossless so I can transcode to any other format I want.
@E. O. EAC
Nice video. I had Great CD Ripping Project of 2017. If anyone's planning a GCDRP of 2019, I have a few tips:
- Like in this video, I started out using a SuperDrive (Mine was in a 2012 iMac). They seem to be quite a bit slower than 5.25 SATA drives, so if you have a lot of discs to go through, it might be worth trying different drives.
- If you want lossless flac, I can recommmend Sony's Media Go. Even though it is discontinued, it still packs a lot of features. I think it would be fair to say Sony was heavily inspiried by iTunes when they made it. That said, I'd say its on par with iTunes when it comes to recognising albums and artwork. It also syncs with a lot more devices - including non-Sony devices. My Huawei phone showed straight up in it when I plugged it in.
- Keep a bottle of Brasso nearby - Works a treat for scratched CDs.
Good tips thanks, but I've honestly have never heard of Brasso for CDs, but I have been using a product for years called Scratch Out that comes in an oversized toothpaste tube, and has worked for me on everything short of Blu-Ray disc.
FREEAC is my tool of choice.
Can Media Go do all the things iTunes does, including correct ID tags on lossless files and artwork? I love iTunes but none of the versions rip to FLAC and WAV takes up way too much space.
I really enjoyed the short snippet of "Beginnings" by Chicago in this video. Having never heard the full song, I bought a copy of Chicago IX, and it turns out the currently available Rhino has the same mastering as your 1987 CD. Thanks for introducing me to some great music!
That’s because Chicago OWNS their masters now, for both the Columbia and Warner/Reprise catalogs. And, Chicago’s Greatest Hits has been superseded by the two volume “The Heart Of Chicago” (Reprise) and “Only The Beginning: The Very Best Of Chicago” AND the “Chicago Box Set” (both Rhino, the box set also including a DVD).
A few years ago I went to the curb to add something to our trash bin. I discovered the neighbor had filled our bin with empty CD cases from his music collection. Not the CDs though - I guess he didn't digitize his music, just switched them to thin sleeves or something.
I got a lot of free jewel cases that day. Given how much they break it's been handy to have spares.
I'm starting to think about ripping my CD based console and PC games. I've done a few games so far as BIN/CUE, but I don't think that will work with copy protection so I may need to get fancier before going any further with it. Hope it's not a huge rabbit hole or I may just give up on the protected games.
it's back! I was going to comment last night and all of a sudden it was blocked in the US. AAC is a good format to go with, MP3 320 VBR might have also worked well. AAC is less lossy though so I can see why you chose it. As far as ALAC is concerned, there are plenty of options on Windows to play ALAC back since it is *kinda* an openish format now, but the adoption has been stagnant since everyone wants FLAC or OGG Vorbis (which also would have been a good choice I guess? Android supports it natively for one.)
My imports for the past 5 years have been in ALAC since I've got a sizable iPod collection. if stuff is going on an iPod with not a lot of space, it gets converted to 128k AAC. but for the flash-modded Mini, it just goes on as ALAC. it works fairly well. on mom's machine upstairs her music imports go in as 320k VBR MP3 for the "I don't know where her music is going to be in the next decade so may as well use a safe format" dealie.
The way I ripped my CD collection was also with iTunes, but I ripped everything in ALAC. If I ever need anything converted to another format I use DB Poweramp and convert any given album to FLAC or MP3 on the fly so I can use it on my Android phone.
The real reason I went with iTunes was that the only way my car stereo ( a pioneer DEH-80prs) could play lossles was either WAV on a USB stick or my iPod classic loaded with ALAC files. So I went with the latter.
I tend to ignore cover art from CDs I rip to computer. I generally use Sound Forge Audio Studio 10(Sony) for the ripping process. Once ripped I dispense with the SFK file and save with this tag in the following method as the example shows - Tommy James] DRAGGIN' THE LINE(James-King) Polygram 1971 - Artist/group] SONG TITLE(Composer{s}) Mechanical Copyright Holder Year, in that order. The songs are stored in sub-folders for each relevant year inside a folder for each decade.
PolyGram? For Tommy James?
You know if #article13 passes a lot of copyrighted material will be censored to death. I wouldnt get rid of those cds anytime soon. You might need them.
@@ps5hasnogames55 It is, but if an entire continent is being heavily censored it will certainly be affecting the rest of the world in some way too. If it is as severe as people think, companies will probably have to pour time and money into moving all their data centers and hosting facilities out of Europe, and that isn't going to be quick.
@@Electrex8 or will Europe's audiophiles topple the EU in response? Call it #Auxit.
The biggest advantage to lossless is that you can re-convert it to any format you want without sacrificing the original quality (eg make an ALAC and then when you want to play songs in the car select the songs and make another copy as AAC). However if you are convinced you do not need to ever rip your CD's again and you are happy with what you have, well, that's up to you and I won't try further to change your mind.
I've had 15 years to decide which format I want, and it is AAC.
I've ripped well over a thousands CD in my collection.
• Don't use a notebook, ripping at full speed wears out the CD ROM drive. Use a desktop where you can just replace the drive if you wear it out.
• More memory means faster ripping speed.
• Do NOT apply any signal processing when ripping and saving, this can be applied during playback.
• Don't let itunes dictate your file system.
I'm sharing the ripping duties with my 2008 MacBook Pro. After close to 200 CDs ripped so far, no signs of wear yet. Both machines have 4 GB of RAM. No signal processing, and iTunes saves its files in folders organized according to artist and title, which is what I would have done anyway.
I have my entire CD collection ripped in FLAC, bought an external hard drive for them. Took a while, but I did!
Funny, I literally just had The Art of Noise’s “Beatback” stuck in my head and here I see it on an old CD commercial.
I know this is an older video, but this is very similar to my iTunes setup! I’ve got a 2008 black MacBook also on Mac OS X Lion and it’s excellent for iTunes. I do use an external drive for the library itself, but it’s a great setup for everything iTunes related. It also works great with old iPods/iPhones etc. Eventually it would also be nice to archive DVDs onto it, plus it means I can sync both music and video to old devices.
Easy CD audio Converter is a good software for ripping CDs. You can even choose to rip 5.1 audio.
@3MeatZk Official Yes red book is stereo but when I rip audiobooks they use a data format.
3MeatZk Official Well, SACDs support true 5.1 surround sound.
No One In Particular That or a certain model of Bluray Players. Certain models of Oppo & Pioneer units can be hacked to rip SACD’s.
Same with FRE:AC.
@@MysteryMii so did the rival DVD-Audio. MP3 killed them both off.
From the browser you can copy the image straight up, and paste onto the "Artwork" field on iTunes
Yup that's what I do.
I noticed you using itunes. Ive had good luck with windows media player. But now I see discogs you have I didnt know of a site like that which is very good to know about
My ripping software of choice is dBpoweramp, while using as many as 3 drives at once so ripping a large collection doesn't take forever. dBpoweramp also alerts you if there were any ripping errors, at which point you can try a different drive.
My biggest concern regarding a mass rip project on a laptop is wear and tear on your optical drive... I've worn out many optical drives over the past two decades with thousands of rips and burns of CDs and DVDs... Desktop drives tend to be less expensive and easier to replace than laptop drives.
@E. O. Is that question for me or VWestlife?... If for me, I've used EAC, CDex, and even Windows Media Player.
Heh I can tell which computer I ripped an album on by whether it was OGG or MP3 or M4A (but yeah, I later did re-rip my entire collection to M4A anyway, replacing the MP3s and OGGs/etc.)
Gonna re-rip as FLAC now that I have another drive/partition solely for music/movies though, then convert to M4A from there to another folder on another partition
I used to do it exactly the same way as you do now. Using iTunes, ripping to 320kbps and trashing duplicates... Which ended in me ripping all my well over 1000 CDs again in FLAC a couple of years later, without deleting anything. If you wanna archive your CDs, do it right the first time. You can always easily convert the ripped lossless files to anything you want.
I needed an audio format with very high quality and universal compatibility and AAC at 320 kbps VBR achieves that goal. With VBR enabled the actual bitrate is around 340 - 350 kbps and it significantly outperforms MP3 at 320 kbps. After all, TH-cam's audio is AAC at 128 kbps and I hardly hear anyone complaining about its audio quality!
@E. O. EAC with AccurateRip
I just use dB PowerAmp CD ripper to rip CDs. It automatically finds the track, album, etc info for most CDs. It supports multiple formats for ripping to including flac, mp3, wav, and aac.
I don't get the point of the loudness war, its stupid and reduces auduo quality. I don't want music to be really loud, i want it just normal or even quiet sometimes.
I approve of Year of the Cat being in your iTunes library. :)
Who is that by please?
Al Stewart. Also check out Time Passages and 24 Carrots by him. Solid stuff! :)
Hi All, i done the same thing in Xmas 2002, i had bought a copy of "hotburn" a generic cd burner for probably a kodak 4x cd burner and a cyrix 686 or Pentium 4, ( hard to keep track of things when at the time you mix and match and upgrade 1 part on a pc every 6 months )
Anyway, i ripped all of my cd collection and filled the hard drive.
Next i picked my favorite 200 songs and turned them into mp3 using maybe vlc specs were 22050hz 32bits per sample 48 / 56kb/s. A bit low in quality but there were 3 reasons
acutally i just checked a gear songs that i did not rename are titled GAnumber ( Gear Audio ?? anyone )
1) eachsong was to be betweet 1.2 and 1.4meg
2) my pc only had those little tiny box speakers, the surround sound boom box setup i bought latern
3) i had a size limit for the next step
The end result was i was able to have all of my favourite songs on a a "new" usb thumb drive with 256 or 512 meg capacity and run it on a mp3 to FM radio transmitter, that device sat in my car for about 8 years until my next car had a factory cd player.
Now i just rip to lossless or have music video. With todays compression algorithims and the pc's ability to decode - uncompress on the fly, i can have some very good video & audio quality to about 8meg a file
Regards
George
800 - 1000 CDs? Have fun! I only have 55. I had another 10 or so but I lost them when my Accord was stolen in '96.
Something that has helped me a lot in dealing with multiple audio formats is dBpoweramp, which allows for audio conversions across multiple formats and even batch conversions.
Can you please make a video update when you finish.
BTW, This was the best choice to do it. 👍
I performed an audio null test between a lossless file and other lossy formats. It turned out that MP3 was the worst at low bit rates but was the best at the highest (using LAME for mp3). This test was only for the residual audio left after differentiating the files in an editor software. It doesn't consider the psychoacoustic masking that is supposed to hide the effects of the lossy formats.
I've done those null tests myself. The LAME MP3 encoder performs significantly better than Fraunhofer. But at 320 kbps, AAC and Ogg Vorbis both outperform MP3. Ogg does even better than AAC on some samples but worse on others, so I'd say they're about equal. MusePack (MPC) is surprisingly slightly worse than LAME MP3 -- which shows you just how much they've been able to improve MP3 since MusePack was last updated in 2009.
@@vwestlife I went back and played my test result files. The original had a music sample following with white noise. In my case, the mp3 320 nearly nulled the music and the noise was very low. Ogg Vorbis matched (or nearly matched) the noise but didn't quite do as well with the music. Considering the file size, it is amazing in what Ogg can do. The ACC files were missing, so I'll have to retest them. I want to post a video on the results at some point. It would be interesting if you shared your results in a video (if you haven't already).
Sounds like a great project! Will you finish ripping all those discs in 2018? If I tried something like this it would have to be called the ripping project 2018-2020.
When I did the rippening last month I had about 5 releases that didn't have a discogs page yet, including one russian cd so I had to go over to a friend who was able to use cyrillic for filling in the cd names and all. Luckily the database of the software (EAC) I was using did have some of the obscure cd's in there, but it still surprised me how many releases aren't on discogs yet.
There's even a quicker way to get the album art pasted in if you're on a Mac - if you open the image on Discogs or Amazon and right click and 'copy image', you can then go to the artwork tab on the LP and just CMD-V it into there - then you don't have to save it. I switched around 5 years ago to Apple Lossless, historically using 256Kbits/s AAC. I use iTunes Match now though so have 2758 LP's loaded in via that. Also, if you want to load stuff onto SD card for the car, lossless is the master format for storage, but you can use an app called 'Export for iTunes' which will cross-compress lossless into whichever format works best in your car, allowing you to sync an entire playlist to your SD card. I do that for my Parents and it works fine in their Audi. I have carplay in my cars, so I use an iPhone with iTunes Match and it just drags the music down over the internet.
Yes, the copy-and-paste trick works, but saves the image as PNG, which wastes space compared to saving it to a file and then adding it, which keeps it JPG.
Hey Kevin, have you heard of a CD ripping software called dbPoweramp? I used that to rip all my CDs to either FLAC or AAC (320 kbps VBR) and surprisingly it allows you to automatically search for the album cover art as well as the metadata of an album instantly. It saved me 10 minutes (Prior to that, i had to search every of my CDs' album art on Discogs).
And you can even normalize the volume of your CD tracks if it's too loud or smashed in the levels. That way, you can enjoy listening to your CDs without fatiguing your ears too much.
Yes, I've heard of dBPowerAmp, and tried it a few times, but I don't like it, and for this project I need an all-in-one solution, not just a CD ripper.
@@vwestlife iTunes is that all-in-one solution for me, too . . . and a bowl of grits.
I went through this process for literally decades, but I've been using a streaming service (Apple Music in my case) for the past couple of years, and while the main attraction was being able to get more access to new music, I'm now realizing that it saves me from having to do this kind of busywork. I can't say I miss it.
With exact audio copy, is there another way to find album information, because freedb has been shutdown since 2019.
Personally I do all my ripping to FLAC using freac then just convert them to whatever format I need.
this is the way to do it
I use freac for ripping CDs.
If you just want to rip a CD to .mp3, .flac, WAV, ALAC etc the facility is built right into W10. Not only that, it finds the artwork and compares different versions of the same CD album automatically adding the correct metadata.
Also, since you mentioned it, you can rip any CD to use specifically in your car.
I have over 12 years experience using various music converters, ripping music, MS computing and programming, however, for archiving purposes, personally I would use EAC or dBpoweramp converting to either WAV or .flac.
But I need an entire music library management system, not just a CD ripper. One of my main goals is to identify songs which are duplicated across different CDs, so that I can eventually get rid of the CDs which contain mostly or all inferior-quality copies of songs that I have in better quality on other CDs.
You cant manage music much better than with WMP.
The only problem being, as it comes it's not set up, people are lazy, they don't want to learn how to do stuff, so you need to set it up. Once done, you will never use anything else, assuming you use a W10 machine.
Sorry, I can't help or comment on anything MAC related.
Moving to another subject, I really like your videos. I use both vinyl and CD and learned a long time ago that when buying equipment, buy with your ears and take reviewers opinions cautiously.
@E. O. The problem is, WMP is not setup out of the box, its not idiot proof.
If you knew how to set it up, its the best music manager, player out there.
Yes I use Foobar and Audacity for more advanced stuff.
EAC is good, but dBpoweramp is better in my opinion & the ripper I use daily.
We all have our favourites, use what you're comfortable with, however, if you have a little more knowledge, my advice would be, for a player, WMP cant be beaten. People just don't know how to set it up, its capability or functionality.
I know I may have mentioned it once before on this video, but, I have used windows media player for years since I got my 1st computer back in 2010, to which is a windows default audio music player, and it has served me mostly pretty well over the years since. I don't there's been too much of a time when there hasn't been a problem with windows media player at all. It pretty much mostly does the same things that you (vwestlife) had explained that iTunes has done with getting the album info, album art, and some other things too. I think some of the mentioned things require a internet connection, as I learned years ago.
I've started to do the same thing as well, maybe 2 years ago. Ripping every CD i have into FLAC albums and adding everything to the Tag extra. Cover artwork, lyrics (if necessary), album sleevenotes, etc. For this i'm using Banshee with the slowest readout to eliminate reading errors. Yeah, i could use EAC as well but it has no native Linux version and i don't quite trust it fully to work properly with WINE.
I usually rip my cds to 128k aac with DBPoweramp cdripper. The size is decent and the audio is too.
Your best bet would have been, ripping cds in lossless format for master storage, since drive space is not an issue anymore. You would then have used any convertor software to convert your lossless copies to lossy formats for portable playback. Not being pessimistic, but you'll start your project all over again in a few years.
I doubt he would care enough. I would be fine with what he went for this time.
on pc just use 'Exact Audio Copy' ('EAC') It does all in one task. iTunes has one very big disadvantage: once it finds your cd in the itunes store it deletes your local ripped copy and downloads the files from itunes on first use. That's annoying. So you should copy these files away onto an offline storage so itunes can't grab them anymore.
I've always wondered if you could modify one of those robotic CD burner units to bulk-rip discs instead. I had one to experiment with for a month and figured out that particular model wouldn't talk to anything but the proprietary burning software.
I have ripped my whole CD collection to computer three times.
First, right around 2000-2001, I ripped them as 128 kbps MP3.
A couple years later I realized that was a pretty crappy format, and ripped them as 256 kbps AAC. Less than a year after that, my "media computer"'s hard drive gave out. So I re-ripped them again. Thankfully, iTunes has "iTunes Match" now, so the vast majority of my ripped CDs are available for me to download from the iTunes Store now. My "music only" collection is just under 40 GB. I have an older 40 GB iPod, and with the storage overhead, all my songs won't quite fit. If I leave off my two "full album length tracks" (Yes, I have a couple albums that I ripped as a single individual track,) I can fit all but about a dozen songs.
ALAC is now open source and is supported in Windows Media Player on Windows 10. You can even rip CDs in WMP to that codec. MP3 players are coming out now that support ALAC like the AGPTEK Rocker. I find 320 AAC to be generally good enough for most CD rips. Personally I archive in WMA Lossless, which is supported in Windows (obviously), Android, and can be losslessly transcoded to ALAC in iTunes. .
Speaking of iTunes you'd probably have been better doing this with 11.4, as you can copy and paste the artwork directly from a web image into iTunes. They stupidly took this option away and make you save the image first in iTunes 12 onwards.
I discovered that you can cut and paste the album art in iTunes 12 as well. Just press Command-V.
VWestlife did not know that. I know they took the right click option away at any rate.
I feel like iTunes is much maligned but you can still do cool stuff with it like create your own mix CD compilation album covers and print them, even in the latest version.
If you use AAC I find it the best application as you have options like AAC High Efficiency for audiobooks, and you can also compress your bitrates to varying levels of quality on an iPod for example. The 'pick up where you left off' features between computer and iPod are great for lengthy audiobooks and I don't see any other app out there that does it as seamlessly as iTunes does. As long as you use it for music and video you'll rarely have an issue
In back 2006, I ripped all of my 500+ CDs "the hard way" to Flac and mp3s. It took over two weeks to finish that project.
6:40 I get something similar when I download music from Spotify, or from Deezer. The sound is heard louder, to the point that it becomes saturated (something that does not happen with the original CDs of the beginning of the 90's), which, use Mp3Gain to normalize the sound.
Just rip them to FLAC. Because sooner or later, you're going to end up doing that anyway. The space is already available to do that.
Audi's current radio/navigation systems surprisingly supports FLAC and even NTFS formatted USB flash drives and SD cards.
Even my Sony car stereo supports FLAC playback too, besides MP3, AAC, WMA and WAV files.
Haven't watch the video but came to say that I love ripping my CDs. I ripped my collection of over 70 Hip Hop cds, many old and new from this year. The lossless audio is king.
I also rip my DVDs too, I love having my shows in mp4 format so I can store and take them wherever.
You ever going to do an update on your radio station setup? I found that so fascinating, and I'm thinking of trying to set up my own.
Not really, because nothing has changed since I made that video, except I now use my Toshiba netbook to play the music instead of the old Compaq.
@@vwestlife ah. so, basically except for the computer, it's just the same as it was. Cool.
I saw the notification for this video earlier, but I couldn't watch it because WMG had blocked it (not even a VPN worked). Whatever happened, thanks for making the video available again!
I disputed the copyright claim (on the 11 second clip of the Chicago song), and I intend to follow it up with an appeal and counter-notification, if necessary. My use of the music clips most definitely qualifies as Fair Use in even the strictest legal definition.
I understand the need to save space, but for archival purposes lossless is the way to go; FLAC or ALAC, they are equivalent, but at least from a lossless you can later get compressed audio to fit music on a phone. Beside I do not understand the choice to rip everything into the internal drive of an old macBook: an external 2TB drive is rather cheap this days and if the computer dies for whatever reason are you going to rip it apart to get the hard drive ? Or, more likely, if the old internal drive itself fails, are you starting all over on the new macbook ?
Never a fun task, but certainly a necessary one if you use an iPod or computer to listen to music alot!
I've bet on ALAC, ripping using a PowerMac G5, and throw the CDs in whenever I pick a new one up. The local charity shops do 2 CDs for £1 quite often, been a surprisingly great way of hoarding music (and PS2 games)!
Thanks for posting that. I have a 1.6Ghz PowerMac G5 in a corner upstairs. If the last PPC version of iTunes can rip into ALAC, then I've found a good use for it. But I'll wait for the rain to go away so its power consumption can be off-set by my rooftop solar panels. :)
I started ripping CDs and records about the same time you did. I used lossless WMAs. I didn’t have a good way to get them into the stereo. At one point I used an X Box. That wasn’t worth a shit. Now the technology has caught up with me. Have 3,000 plus lossless files and some HD files. I play them with JRiver going into my stereo through a Yggdrasil. Also use Dirac.
I've been doing this for years myself and keeping those Macs backed up with Time Machine to make sure to preserve my music but I'm still intrigued by the Brennan B2 instead of a Mac. To make it short, it's kinda like a music server/CD ripper you can listen to anywhere on your network with app or web-based control.
Great taste in music! That Eagles album , Hotel California... superb!
Good luck man, that job is a bore, did a 900 cd collection last spring with dbpoweramp, and I'm glad it's done now!
Did you use AccurateRip? Nevermind 😬
You'll certainly get a lot of "flack" for using lossy formats for audio CD preservation.
The CDs are what I'm preserving -- they'll probably last longer than any computer. The whole point of copying them into the computer is just to have them organized and available in a more convenient form.
I have been doing the same thing, but i'm using a Grape tray loading iMac G3 with a 120GB hard drive and Mac OS 9.2.2. It's a tedious process that takes forever. I have it plugged into an Airport Express so it can still get the track names, which still works.
Audio CD has weak error correction, so you should carefully clean the disc before ripping, and use software that can verify the accuracy of the copy by querying the AccurateRip database. Also encode to a lossless format and disable any "audio normalization" etc.
You can always make AAC files from the lossless copies for your car. Also some car stereos can play WAV files although this isn't very efficient lol.
iTunes does do error correction when ripping CDs. And at the maximum setting (320 to 460+ kbps VBR), AAC is near-lossless.
@@vwestlife Audio CD does have some error correction, but once this has failed it performs a crude form of "error hiding" by interpolating across missing samples. But the two samples either side of the missing one are effectively sub-nyquist sampled, so the results aren't good. This can still happen when you rip with iTunes. Try using a program called "Exact Audio Copy" (it's Windows only, unfortunately).
I imported all my CDs into iTunes when I got my iMac in 2010, I previously used Windows Media Player and I prefer iTunes, so when I switch back to Windows full time as I plan to do, I'll continue using iTunes. I imported all my CDs into iTunes in MP3 format at 192 Kbps.
personally how I do it is
I rip my CDs as wav (uncompressed PCM) 16bit and get a big hard drive
it's about 600MB a disc
now If I have a vinyl copy thats in good shape I use it instead
and depending On what i'm trying to play it on depends on the way I format it
if I'm just keeping it on my computer I normally set it up like this
wav 24Bit 19200Hz sample rate which a 90Min cassette is about 3.5GB
but that way has a lot of compatibility problems
your video on the freq response comparing records to cds was very interesting
I normally use 9600Hz sample rate now
like you mentioned about your car stereo, for me it may or may not work depending on the stereo
some stereos support my format and some don't go above 4800Hz 16Bit PCM WAV
and well some don't care, it gets complicated.
but I never use Mp3 ever, it sounds very terrible It drives me up the walls.
always wave
what normally is compatible is 4800hz sample rate 16Bit pcm Wav files
basically a sound file that can be played on any sound card made in the past 25 years
I use the higher sample rates and bits per sample because disk space isn't really a huge concern for me
like you said at the end of the video "is what works best for me at this time" and I say good for you
this is what works for me.
p.s I have a vinyl copy of that Chicago album it takes up 2.80Gb on my hard drive lol.
ikaros alpha . I ripped my entire cd collection in WAV format too. (16bit 44.1khz ). It takes up a lot of space but I've always been happy with the sound quality. I also made copies of all files to MP3 @ 320kbts just to have it in a compressed format for my portable music player. I will never have a master file in MP3 format only. I'm up to around 2.5 TB of hard drive space for my master files and I have a back up hard drive with exact duplicates. For me this was the best way. Funny thing is I still don't trust hard drives, so will never get rid of my CDs and data DVDs.
For some reason this video has been impossible to find for me for last 6 hours or so
yeah, it just popped up now for me, but i see it was released yesterday. I guess youtube is feeling this flu epedemic too....
@@raafmaat yeah I guess lol, I've never had this issue before
Because it had a worldwide copyright block, which I have disputed.
@@vwestlife I see now! Thanks a lot
@@vwestlife wow thats interesting, what company filed the copyright infringement? also, i really dont see how this is not just fair use... companies are getting really silly lately haha
I use the very last itunes version before apple ruined it. I use v10.7.0.21. I don't know what compression you are using? But I highly, and I mean highly recommend using itunes lossless codec especially when ripping a thousand cd's. It is just not worth ripping with any lossy codec anymore! With apple lossless, it can give you around 40 to 60% compression. Why not keep the quality at 100% ? I don't want to throw away good data by using lossy since HD's accommodate thousands of CD's easy now.
jeffhalebopp I've been updating my itunes for years now. Is there any way I can revert to a former version without harming my library? I put a lot of effort in collecting my music.
I like the cover flow in v10.7.0.21 that they removed later. I noticed that you are using AAC 320 kbps. If you use apple lossless, it will average about a little more than twice the size as AAC 320 kbps. For me, I'd gladly sacrifice twice the disc space for lossless. That way if anything happened to your cd's, you have 100% of the original quality, no compromise :) What's another 200 gigs hard drive space. That's nothing today. Think about it.
George, Unfortunately, I don't think there is a way. Maybe try a google search "downgrade itunes without losing library". I'm not sure though.
iTunes 12 reverts some of the layout changes they made in iTunes 11. Have you tried it? And spectrum analysis tests have shown that the only significant difference between AAC at 320 kbps and lossless is at audio frequencies higher than 18 kHz, which most adults can't hear anyway and is irrelevant for my ultimate purpose -- playing music on the radio -- because FM radio audio processing filters out all audio frequencies above 15 kHz.
George Rios yes you can, you just have to delete certain files in the iTunes folder
I've never been a fan of Itunes, but use what works for you. Having said that I still have Winamp on my only Windows 10 PC, but have yet to find a good substitute for my Xubuntu machines, and lastly I'm a FLAC , and MP3 320Kbps guy since I have tons of files in MP3, and I'm either too lazy to reencode them to FLAC, or don't have the original sources for them any longer.
The problem with using iTunes is if you want to use MP3 the quality is appalling (AAC works however) and you can't rip to FLAC, only ALAC.
I use EAC, lame, MP3gain and MP3Tag to edit tags. And Photoshop to edit and resize the artwork.
All encoding is done with lame options -b32 -V0 -q0 -mj - quality is perfect.
I use Windows Media Player to rip my CDs, and surprisingly it works OK, at least in the newest version (12). It supports lossless FLAC, it automatically finds the correct album/track information most of the time, and I have about the same 50/50 success rate with automatically finding album art. The only thing I wish it had was a proper volume leveling feature like your iTunes setup.
I've been doing the same thing for since I got my first computer ( a laptop) right after my birthday in may of 2010, with windows 7 on it, and while I mainly use my phone to play music in a playlist, I used to use my laptop computer hooked up to a 3.5 mm to cassette (this was when my grandfather's friend on my dad's side owned vehicle's that had tape player radio, he still owns a vehicle that has a tape player in it, but he doesn't use the vehicle too much due to the low mpg, 10 mpg). Soon enough, I got a mp3 player, and that did ease some usage off of my laptop at the time, I'm not sure where the mp3 player went since. then when I got my an iPad 3 with Verizon wireless cell connection from my local school from a grant they got a couple of years prior (story of why I didn't get a iPad when my local school got a grant to spend the money on iPads is that I ended up getting transferred to another school around the time they got the grant, and when I transferred back, I finally got one), I tried putting my music on the iPad, and found that was not the best idea, and maybe i did use my ipod 4th gen for a little while, probably with about equal results, then when I got Samsung Galaxy s4 mini in 2015, I transferred my music over to that, and I've used my phones for my music since.
The interesting thing is that the digital was supposed to simplify our lives, and here we are chasing formats that may die and hope that our hard disk will never crash... No wonder analog is coming back....🤨
Gianluca Saccone CDs get bit rot. Hard drives aren't the be all and end all storage like CDs. You can make a copy on an external drive or upload all of it in the cloud. I hope to rip all of my Cassettes, DVDs, CDs, and VHS Tapes sometime next year. It's too risky keeping sentimental things without a backup.
Does the CD Ripping/Music Digitizing Project(tm) really ever get finished? At all? It started probably before 2000 for me; still far from finished, although of course the album collection has gotten far larger since then. Not even considering the tapes and records (maybe 700) although some of those are done. I just make MP3s in my flavor of choice; this has worked best for my requirements, and the ones I made back in the early 2000s are as serviceable as they've always been. I only archive uncompressed tracks (with FLAC of course) that I made substantial modifications to, such as re-equalization or massaging out spurious spikes so they normalize better, so if I need them in a different lossy format later on I don't have to re-encode the MP3s. My CDs were in storage for four years, buried on the floor in the back. Recently I moved from one storage locker to another, and this time the CDs and books are at the FRONT. Time to continue...got at least a couple hundred more to go.