one of my new year's resolutions was to digitize several hundred music CDs in preparation for figuring out what system to use in the domicile to play them, but regardless of how i decide to eventually play these CDs, i'm looking for recommendations for how to rip them to hard drive before i decide how i will end up using them.
given the cheapness of hard drives (and that i have a QNAP NAS anyway), i don't really care about disk usage, so i figured on ripping all of those CDs using (lossless) FLAC format, and i can decide down the road whether to convert them to a different format to save on space.
in short, any recommendations on simply ripping all these CDs to hard drive, while having no idea what i will eventually use to play them?
rday
On 02/03/18 06:29, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
one of my new year's resolutions was to digitize several hundred music CDs in preparation for figuring out what system to use in the domicile to play them, but regardless of how i decide to eventually play these CDs, i'm looking for recommendations for how to rip them to hard drive before i decide how i will end up using them.
given the cheapness of hard drives (and that i have a QNAP NAS anyway), i don't really care about disk usage, so i figured on ripping all of those CDs using (lossless) FLAC format, and i can decide down the road whether to convert them to a different format to save on space.
in short, any recommendations on simply ripping all these CDs to hard drive, while having no idea what i will eventually use to play them?
What is your desktop?
I converted a few hundred audio CDs years ago and with my KDE desktop I simply used k3b. You may want to explore what audio format you'd like to store them as. mp3, or an open format such as Vorbis audio.
Of course you can always google "rip audio cd linux" and find plenty of suggestions,
On 02/02/2018 04:29 PM, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
one of my new year's resolutions was to digitize several hundred music CDs in preparation for figuring out what system to use in the domicile to play them, but regardless of how i decide to eventually play these CDs, i'm looking for recommendations for how to rip them to hard drive before i decide how i will end up using them.
given the cheapness of hard drives (and that i have a QNAP NAS anyway), i don't really care about disk usage, so i figured on ripping all of those CDs using (lossless) FLAC format, and i can decide down the road whether to convert them to a different format to save on space.
in short, any recommendations on simply ripping all these CDs to hard drive, while having no idea what i will eventually use to play them?
I ripped all my CDs to flac in an m4a wrapper with Grip and play them on my computer with Amarok. However, I also installed Plex Media Server on my FreeNAS box. The files are actually on FreeNAS, shared to my computer via NFS. I then installed the Plex app on my Roku, so I can play them using through our home theater system as well. Currently, there are about 12,000 tracks.
Disk space is cheap. Rip to a lossless format.
Ripping CDs is incredibly boring.
On Fri, Feb 02, 2018 at 05:29:40PM -0500, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
one of my new year's resolutions was to digitize several hundred music CDs in preparation for figuring out what system to use in the domicile to play them, but regardless of how i decide to eventually play these CDs, i'm looking for recommendations for how to rip them to hard drive before i decide how i will end up using them.
given the cheapness of hard drives (and that i have a QNAP NAS anyway), i don't really care about disk usage, so i figured on ripping all of those CDs using (lossless) FLAC format, and i can decide down the road whether to convert them to a different format to save on space.
in short, any recommendations on simply ripping all these CDs to hard drive, while having no idea what i will eventually use to play them?
rday
Well, you aren't really digitizing them, they are already digital.
but, anyhow, here's a horrid little shellscript I use for ripping audio off CDs. You may find some inspiration in it (or maybe some feeling that you don't want to follow this), either way I hope it's helpful. Note that this whole operation assumes it can find your CD in the cddb database. If not, all bets are off.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - #!/bin/sh #set -x if [ -z $1 ] then echo usage: $0 <Album_Name (without spaces or punctuation)> exit fi
album_name=$1
# read all the files from the CD and download album info from cddb. # I note that on my system, cdda2wav is a link to icedax. cdda2wav dev=/dev/sr0 -B -L 1
# now that we've read all the files,... # use the audio_*.inf files to assign proper track filenames.
for i in audio_*.inf do # get the track number from the .inf file's name track=`echo $i | sed -e "s:.*_::" | sed -e "s:.inf$::"` #echo $track
# get the track title from the .inf file's contents title="`grep Tracktitle $i | sed -e "s:^Tracktitle= *::"`" #echo "$title"
# next, clean up spaces in the title # (whoever the genius was who thought spaces in filenames was a good idea, # should be taken out and shot.) title=`echo "$title" | tr ' ' '_'` #echo "$title"
# add numeric suffix and file extension full_title="${album_name}_${track}_${title}".wav #echo full_title=$full_title
# clean off the unneeded single quote marks, apostrophes, etc. full_title=`echo ${full_title} | tr -d "'"()[]{};:\t"` #echo full_title=$full_title
# now, at last, do the rename wavname=`basename $i .inf`.wav mv ${wavname} ${full_title} done
On 02/02/2018 02:29 PM, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
in short, any recommendations on simply ripping all these CDs to hard drive, while having no idea what i will eventually use to play them?
I use grip to do it. I used to rip to ogg, but now I have started using flac and I'm trying to go back and redo all the CDs again. I have a bit of a custom process because I have my own custom jukebox system with a web interface that I made *many* years ago. However, I have recently come across Logitech Media Server and I highly recommend it if you want a multi-room audio system. It can play to ChromeCast devices and UPNP and you can run the squeezelite client on any computer. There is also a free Android client for controlling the clients called "squeezer".
I will second what Steve said though, ripping CDs is mind numbing boring...
On Fri, 2 Feb 2018 17:29:40 -0500 (EST) "Robert P. J. Day" rpjday@crashcourse.ca wrote:
in short, any recommendations on simply ripping all these CDs to hard drive, while having no idea what i will eventually use to play them?
First step: making the *wav files:
man wodim:
"To copy an audio CD in the most accurate way, first run
icedax dev=/dev/cdrom -vall cddb=0 -B -Owav
and then run
wodim dev=/dev/cdrw -v -dao -useinfo -text *.wav"
Second step: converting the hopefully resulting wav files from above to flac: in the folder containing the wavs trying:
for f in *.wav; do sox "$f" "${f%.wav}.flac"; done
(latter snippet copied and edited from a previous thread here)
I'd assume one can script/automate that last step in a way so that once all CD's have been converted, this script simply needed to cd into every dir containing the wavs and then starts to convert the files via the "for f in *.wav ..." line ..
HTH, and good luck! Regards
the other option is to keep it native to linux in oog format, as a thought.
On Fri, Feb 2, 2018 at 7:28 PM, Wolfgang Pfeiffer roto@gmx.net wrote:
On Fri, 2 Feb 2018 17:29:40 -0500 (EST) "Robert P. J. Day" rpjday@crashcourse.ca wrote:
in short, any recommendations on simply ripping all these CDs to hard drive, while having no idea what i will eventually use to play them?
First step: making the *wav files:
man wodim:
"To copy an audio CD in the most accurate way, first run
icedax dev=/dev/cdrom -vall cddb=0 -B -Owav and then run wodim dev=/dev/cdrw -v -dao -useinfo -text *.wav"
Second step: converting the hopefully resulting wav files from above to flac: in the folder containing the wavs trying:
for f in *.wav; do sox "$f" "${f%.wav}.flac"; done
(latter snippet copied and edited from a previous thread here)
I'd assume one can script/automate that last step in a way so that once all CD's have been converted, this script simply needed to cd into every dir containing the wavs and then starts to convert the files via the "for f in *.wav ..." line ..
HTH, and good luck! Regards -- Wolfgang Pfeiffer _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@lists.fedoraproject.org
On Fri, Feb 02, 2018 at 05:29:40PM -0500, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
one of my new year's resolutions was to digitize several hundred music CDs in preparation for figuring out what system to use in the domicile to play them, but regardless of how i decide to eventually play these CDs, i'm looking for recommendations for how to rip them to hard drive before i decide how i will end up using them.
given the cheapness of hard drives (and that i have a QNAP NAS anyway), i don't really care about disk usage, so i figured on ripping all of those CDs using (lossless) FLAC format, and i can decide down the road whether to convert them to a different format to save on space.
in short, any recommendations on simply ripping all these CDs to hard drive, while having no idea what i will eventually use to play them?
I only had about 60 CDs to rip, but like you was uncertain about format.
I used "abcde" which let me save .wav, .flac, .oog, and .mp3 in 1 run.
jl
On Sat, 3 Feb 2018, Jon LaBadie wrote:
On Fri, Feb 02, 2018 at 05:29:40PM -0500, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
one of my new year's resolutions was to digitize several hundred music CDs in preparation for figuring out what system to use in the domicile to play them, but regardless of how i decide to eventually play these CDs, i'm looking for recommendations for how to rip them to hard drive before i decide how i will end up using them.
given the cheapness of hard drives (and that i have a QNAP NAS anyway), i don't really care about disk usage, so i figured on ripping all of those CDs using (lossless) FLAC format, and i can decide down the road whether to convert them to a different format to save on space.
in short, any recommendations on simply ripping all these CDs to hard drive, while having no idea what i will eventually use to play them?
I only had about 60 CDs to rip, but like you was uncertain about format.
I used "abcde" which let me save .wav, .flac, .oog, and .mp3 in 1 run.
for now, i was thinking of ripping just to .flac since that's lossless and i can always decide later what further format to rip to in order to save space. does that make sense? i just want to avoid having to go back and rip everything all over again.
rday
On 02/04/18 06:03, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
On Sat, 3 Feb 2018, Jon LaBadie wrote:
On Fri, Feb 02, 2018 at 05:29:40PM -0500, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
one of my new year's resolutions was to digitize several hundred music CDs in preparation for figuring out what system to use in the domicile to play them, but regardless of how i decide to eventually play these CDs, i'm looking for recommendations for how to rip them to hard drive before i decide how i will end up using them.
given the cheapness of hard drives (and that i have a QNAP NAS anyway), i don't really care about disk usage, so i figured on ripping all of those CDs using (lossless) FLAC format, and i can decide down the road whether to convert them to a different format to save on space.
in short, any recommendations on simply ripping all these CDs to hard drive, while having no idea what i will eventually use to play them?
I only had about 60 CDs to rip, but like you was uncertain about format.
I used "abcde" which let me save .wav, .flac, .oog, and .mp3 in 1 run.
for now, i was thinking of ripping just to .flac since that's lossless and i can always decide later what further format to rip to in order to save space. does that make sense? i just want to avoid having to go back and rip everything all over again.
What makes sense to me is to first select a few individual tracks with different types of music. For example, if you have classical, pick a few with quiet movements with only strings, those with lots of highs, etc. Then record and listen to all of those in various formats. Even better if you have have someone play them for you in different formats to see if you can tell the difference.
I've found that folks have a tendency to overvalue lossless formats but in fact their ears aren't up to the task.
On 02/04/18 08:21, Ed Greshko wrote:
I've found that folks have a tendency to overvalue lossless formats but in fact their ears aren't up to the task.
I also should have included that their audio equipment isn't "good" enough to make the difference noticeable.
Kind of like some folks insisting on the highest pixel density for their camera equipment and then only viewing on a standard monitor in relatively small format.
Allegedly, on or about 4 February 2018, Ed Greshko sent:
I've found that folks have a tendency to overvalue lossless formats but in fact their ears aren't up to the task.
That's often true (but I frequently find MP3 encoding is noticeably awful). And the converse is often true, that people rip down to a really crappy bitrate, thinking that saving space is more important than it is (producing what sounds like compact cassette recordings from shortwave radio).
But if you rip to a lossless format that you use now (e.g. ogg vorbis), and later on change players to one that doesn't support that lossless format (e.g. mp3-only, particularly when it comes to hardware devices), you have to re-encode from one lossy scheme to another, and that *does* introduce audible artefacts.
I've faced that situation. I generally compress to ogg vorbis, because it does the job well on almost everything I have, and I don't hear disturbing audio artefacts that I continually hear with MP3 (direct uncompressed WAV to MP3, I might add, too). But, from time to time, find I want to play a file on something that doesn't support it.
Given sufficient storage space, I'd rip to a lossless format, like flac. That gives you a good archive of the file. Then if you want to export to a hardware device, you have the choice of doing it any way that you like, without horrible degradation.
Another issue that crops up with various audio formats is an inability to do gapless playback of albums. That can depend on the format *and* the player.
On Sun, 04 Feb 2018 11:38:40 +1030 Tim ignored_mailbox@yahoo.com.au wrote:
Allegedly, on or about 4 February 2018, Ed Greshko sent:
I've found that folks have a tendency to overvalue lossless formats but in fact their ears aren't up to the task.
That's often true (but I frequently find MP3 encoding is noticeably awful). And the converse is often true, that people rip down to a really crappy bitrate, thinking that saving space is more important than it is (producing what sounds like compact cassette recordings from shortwave radio).
I think it's true, that it's possible to encode to crappy mp3 quality.
But it's definitely true that with fine tools you can encode to mp3's with a quality so high that for me at least it's difficult to find a difference to the wav's they were encoded from, even with decent stereo equipment. Also true, I'm old, so I might have ruined ears enough to be unable to hear differences where they actually are.
Easy test: try this in a dir with wav's, and the command below will (should) code them to mp3's. With the resulting mp3's I'd bet anyone will have difficulties to find a remarkable difference between the wav's and the mp3's ...
for f in *.wav; do ffmpeg -i "$f" -codec:a libmp3lame -qscale:a 0 "${f/%wav/mp3}"; done
For a quick check about what ffmpeg is actually doing here: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/MP3
Feeling challenged, anyone? ... ;)
Regards
Allegedly, on or about 4 February 2018, Wolfgang Pfeiffer sent:
it's definitely true that with fine tools you can encode to mp3's with a quality so high that for me at least it's difficult to find a difference to the wav's they were encoded from, even with decent stereo equipment. Also true, I'm old, so I might have ruined ears enough to be unable to hear differences where they actually are.
Easy test: try this in a dir with wav's, and the command below will (should) code them to mp3's. With the resulting mp3's I'd bet anyone will have difficulties to find a remarkable difference between the wav's and the mp3's ...
for f in *.wav; do ffmpeg -i "$f" -codec:a libmp3lame -qscale:a 0 "${f/%wav/mp3}"; done
Well, if you're going to encode to an unusually high bit rate (that example did it at 320kB/s), I'm going to agree with you (that most people won't pick the difference).
However, I find most people encode MP3s to a much lower bitrate, where I can hear burbles, squeaks and squealies, and the quieter nuances of some music disappears completely. There's also a number of old, and not very good, codecs around, to which I notice that treble seems to be lacking. But it's the added noises that I particularly notice and dislike.
One thing I notice with MP3 encoding that I can give it a wave with specific lead-in and lead-out time, and the encoded file is missing that (screwing up audio comprised of multiple files). Sometimes to the point where it's actually slightly cutting off the start of the audio. Whatever Audacity was doing behind the scenes tended to do that a lot.
On Sun, 04 Feb 2018 19:55:14 +1030 Tim ignored_mailbox@yahoo.com.au wrote:
Allegedly, on or about 4 February 2018, Wolfgang Pfeiffer sent:
it's definitely true that with fine tools you can encode to mp3's with a quality so high that for me at least it's difficult to find a difference to the wav's they were encoded from, even with decent stereo equipment. Also true, I'm old, so I might have ruined ears enough to be unable to hear differences where they actually are.
Easy test: try this in a dir with wav's, and the command below will (should) code them to mp3's. With the resulting mp3's I'd bet anyone will have difficulties to find a remarkable difference between the wav's and the mp3's ...
for f in *.wav; do ffmpeg -i "$f" -codec:a libmp3lame -qscale:a 0 "${f/%wav/mp3}"; done
Well, if you're going to encode to an unusually high bit rate (that example did it at 320kB/s), I'm going to agree with you (that most people won't pick the difference).
Well, that's the only way i found to get decent mp's. ... ;)
However, I find most people encode MP3s to a much lower bitrate, where I can hear burbles, squeaks and squealies, and the quieter nuances of some music disappears completely.
If you look at the files you seem to have encoded with the oneliner from my prev. message (with "mediainfo" for example) you should see that the mp3's have variable bit rate. That's, IINM, and hopefully, one way to keep silent parts of a song existent and silent, and the louder ones just as loud as they are.
There's also a number of old, and not very good, codecs around, to which I notice that treble seems to be lacking. But it's the added noises that I particularly notice and dislike.
One thing I notice with MP3 encoding that I can give it a wave with specific lead-in and lead-out time, and the encoded file is missing that (screwing up audio comprised of multiple files). Sometimes to the point where it's actually slightly cutting off the start of the audio. Whatever Audacity was doing behind the scenes tended to do that a lot.
I don't use Audacity for reencoding of existing files. I do that with ffmpeg. Most of the time. And it just works - although it's hard at times to find the right switches to get it done.
I added a few notes to my git repo how fading in/out of videos/audio files, can be done with that tool. Look for "afade" in man ffmpeg-all and in the notes I uploaded.
These notes are simply taken from what I write down often when finding what worked on Linux, or Windows. They're mostly unedited, just commands to use, with a few comments added - definitely no How-To ... https://github.com/wlfgp/notes/blob/master/ffmpeg.txt Clicking the "Raw' button on that page might give better readability ...
HTH, Regards
On Sun, 4 Feb 2018 22:52:49 +0100 Wolfgang Pfeiffer roto@gmx.net wrote:
On Sun, 04 Feb 2018 19:55:14 +1030 Tim ignored_mailbox@yahoo.com.au wrote:
Well, if you're going to encode to an unusually high bit rate (that example did it at 320kB/s), I'm going to agree with you (that most people won't pick the difference).
Well, that's the only way i found to get decent mp's. ... ;)
^^^ that should say "mp3's" ...
Tim:
However, I find most people encode MP3s to a much lower bitrate, where I can hear burbles, squeaks and squealies, and the quieter nuances of some music disappears completely.
Wolfgang Pfeiffer:
If you look at the files you seem to have encoded with the oneliner from my prev. message (with "mediainfo" for example) you should see that the mp3's have variable bit rate. That's, IINM, and hopefully, one way to keep silent parts of a song existent and silent, and the louder ones just as loud as they are.
I don't expect variable compression to affect audio dynamics, but it will allow for smaller files when there's less complex audio to compress. Low bitrates just try to throw away too much data, and the less bits you have to play with, it's going to end up including some noticeable audio that gets thrown away.
One thing I notice with MP3 encoding that I can give it a wave with specific lead-in and lead-out time, and the encoded file is missing that (screwing up audio comprised of multiple files). Sometimes to the point where it's actually slightly cutting off the start of the audio. Whatever Audacity was doing behind the scenes tended to do that a lot.
I don't use Audacity for reencoding of existing files.
Me, neither, most of the time. Most of the audio that I'm dealing with is stuff that I've recorded myself. So I've created a project in Audacity, and saved it out as WAV files for all-purpose future work, and saved compressed audio to pass on to other people. MP3s being the worst, but easiest handled by most people. Flac can be a pain, it's support isn't as wide, and you may need to pick a different container file to hold the flac data, depending on the player. But if I wanted non-lossy compressed audio for my own purposes, it's a good choice.
I rarely ever re-encode/re-compress files, because it's such a chore and brings its own sets of problem (as has already been discussed). I tend to make several versions from the get-go.
I'll have a look at your notes, but my comment about continuous track playback is about audio that traverses across tracks, and needs to do so uninterrupted. No clicks, no fades, no interruptions to the beat of a song, a silent join. MP3 is not very good at that, and neither are many players.
On 02/03/2018 04:21 PM, Ed Greshko wrote:
I've found that folks have a tendency to overvalue lossless formats but in fact their ears aren't up to the task.
I definitely do notice mp3 artifacts sometimes. However, the reason I've switched to flac is just to have a true archive of the original cd. It's a straight copy without even volume normalization. I then convert that to a high-quality ogg file with normalization. In the future, if I need a different format, different volume adjustment, or even recreate the original cd, I don't have to use the compressed version, I can go back to the original copy.
On 02/04/18 11:58, Samuel Sieb wrote:
On 02/03/2018 04:21 PM, Ed Greshko wrote:
I've found that folks have a tendency to overvalue lossless formats but in fact their ears aren't up to the task.
I definitely do notice mp3 artifacts sometimes. However, the reason I've switched to flac is just to have a true archive of the original cd. It's a straight copy without even volume normalization. I then convert that to a high-quality ogg file with normalization. In the future, if I need a different format, different volume adjustment, or even recreate the original cd, I don't have to use the compressed version, I can go back to the original copy.
Of course everyone's ability to recognize "artifacts" is going to vary depending on their physical condition as well as the equipment which they listen on.
What someone chooses to do with regards to transferring from CD to HD will depend on how they intend to play, how much space they want to devote, and how much time they expect to devote to doing the work.
I happen to be the type of person that is more interested in just listening to the music than thinking I may want to do more conversions later. That is why I spent the time when I did to find what works best for "me". As a matter of fact, in the 3 years since I transferred my collection from CD to ogg files I've never said to myself "I wish I had done things differently". And I've never been tempted to recreate the original CD. :-) Only recently did I replace my CD/DVD drive which had been broken for about 2 years.
Most of my listening is done via VLC on one of my Android devices with my Bose headphones. Since VLC can play flac, mp3, ogg, as well as wav I've never been constrained by the format others have sent to me. Kind of why I've stayed away from Apple products. I've wanted to share music and videos with a few Apple Fan Friends and grumbled when I had to convert for them. Got close to wishing I would have spent a few extra $ on a NAS that did real-time conversions. :-)
On 02/03/2018 09:44 PM, Ed Greshko wrote:
I happen to be the type of person that is more interested in just listening to the music than thinking I may want to do more conversions later.
Same here, along with bad hearing. I have an artillery notch in both ears, plus tinnitus, caused by spending most of '72 in Tonkin Gulf doing shore support with a 5"/54. I really don't care if the format's lossy or not because I'm not going to hear the difference.
On 02/03/2018 09:44 PM, Ed Greshko wrote:
I happen to be the type of person that is more interested in just listening to the music than thinking I may want to do more conversions later. That is why I spent the time when I did to find what works best for "me". As a matter of fact, in the 3 years since I transferred my collection from CD to ogg files I've never said to myself "I wish I had done things differently". And I've never been tempted to recreate the original CD. :-) Only recently did I replace my CD/DVD drive which had been broken for about 2 years.
Well, see, I started doing conversions from CD to MP3 (probably at 128Kb) over 20 years ago when hard drives were still measured in MB. :-) Over the years, hard drives have become larger and I've switched to ogg and raised the quality level a couple of times. Now hard drives are large enough that I can go right to flac as the maximum quality and if there are any new formats or whatever, I can very easily re-encode the whole collection at once with no difficulty.
On Sun, 4 Feb 2018, Ed Greshko wrote:
... snip ...
What makes sense to me is to first select a few individual tracks with different types of music. For example, if you have classical, pick a few with quiet movements with only strings, those with lots of highs, etc. Then record and listen to all of those in various formats. Even better if you have have someone play them for you in different formats to see if you can tell the difference.
I've found that folks have a tendency to overvalue lossless formats but in fact their ears aren't up to the task...
my initial plan was to rip them all to FLAC, simply because the major investment here is the time doing all the ripping, at which point i'll have them all in lossless FLAC format and i can decide down the road if i want to do any further conversion, which i assume i should be able to do with a simple shell script.
or given that disk space really isn't an issue these days, i can just leave them in FLAC format. in any event, for now, i just want to avoid doing hours of ripping, only to have to go back later for some reason and do it all over again, and FLAC seems like the safest bet.
rday
On 02/03/2018 05:03 PM, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
On Sat, 3 Feb 2018, Jon LaBadie wrote:
On Fri, Feb 02, 2018 at 05:29:40PM -0500, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
one of my new year's resolutions was to digitize several hundred music CDs in preparation for figuring out what system to use in the domicile to play them, but regardless of how i decide to eventually play these CDs, i'm looking for recommendations for how to rip them to hard drive before i decide how i will end up using them.
given the cheapness of hard drives (and that i have a QNAP NAS anyway), i don't really care about disk usage, so i figured on ripping all of those CDs using (lossless) FLAC format, and i can decide down the road whether to convert them to a different format to save on space.
in short, any recommendations on simply ripping all these CDs to hard drive, while having no idea what i will eventually use to play them?
I only had about 60 CDs to rip, but like you was uncertain about format.
I used "abcde" which let me save .wav, .flac, .oog, and .mp3 in 1 run.
for now, i was thinking of ripping just to .flac since that's lossless and i can always decide later what further format to rip to in order to save space. does that make sense? i just want to avoid having to go back and rip everything all over again.
rday
That's exactly what I did five years ago, ripped all my CDs to FLAC using the abcde tool. After that I wrote scripts to put subsets of my collection in various formats onto disks for my cars, onto my phone, etc. I use MPD to drive both an FM transmitter in my house and a stream to the internet playing random songs from my collection. Recently I wrote an Alexa skill that does the same thing for the Echo devices in my house, letting me ask the Echo to play specific artists or albums from my collection. (Originally I uploaded everything into Amazon Music for this purpose but now they've announced that they'll be discontinuing the part of their service which supports large collections like mine.)
So I really like the idea of using FLAC as the base and then doing whatever conversions are needed to suit the particular device or service that I'm using the music with. It might be true that I'm incapable of hearing the difference in quality but given that disk space is so cheap these days, the space I'd save by using some compressed format really isn't important. I've got 14,954 songs in 292GB.
... snip ...
On Sun, 4 Feb 2018, David King wrote:
On 02/03/2018 05:03 PM, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
for now, i was thinking of ripping just to .flac since that's lossless and i can always decide later what further format to rip to in order to save space. does that make sense? i just want to avoid having to go back and rip everything all over again.
That's exactly what I did five years ago, ripped all my CDs to FLAC using the abcde tool...
i just did a quick test with abcde, ripping a CD to flac both with and without the "-1" option (diff being ripping to a single FLAC file versus individual FLAC files). the difference in final, total size is negligible, both directories around 267M.
is there any benefit to one strategy or the other? i assume that i can rip a CD to a single FLAC file and, subsequently, break it into pieces later when i decide how i want to organize CDs and individual songs.
all i want for now is to not rip in such a way that i regret it later when i discover i inadvertantly left out some useful meta-information from each CD. so for now, i'm looking at just, one CD at a time:
$ abcde -1 -o flac
am i overlooking anything? i can start the process of ripping several hundred CDs, knowing that, over time, i'll figure out more explicitly how i want to manage that content, and not having to start all over because i didn't do it properly the first time.
rday
On 02/04/18 22:45, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
i just did a quick test with abcde, ripping a CD to flac both with and without the "-1" option (diff being ripping to a single FLAC file versus individual FLAC files). the difference in final, total size is negligible, both directories around 267M.
is there any benefit to one strategy or the other? i assume that i can rip a CD to a single FLAC file and, subsequently, break it into pieces later when i decide how i want to organize CDs and individual songs.
I'd go with one file per track as opposed to one file per CD.
The breaking into pieces later on seems like more work. Besides, on almost any CD there will be one or two tracks that aren't of interest even if the artist is a favorite.
On 20180204 06:57, Ed Greshko wrote:
On 02/04/18 22:45, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
i just did a quick test with abcde, ripping a CD to flac both with and without the "-1" option (diff being ripping to a single FLAC file versus individual FLAC files). the difference in final, total size is negligible, both directories around 267M.
is there any benefit to one strategy or the other? i assume that i can rip a CD to a single FLAC file and, subsequently, break it into pieces later when i decide how i want to organize CDs and individual songs.
I'd go with one file per track as opposed to one file per CD.
The breaking into pieces later on seems like more work. Besides, on almost any CD there will be one or two tracks that aren't of interest even if the artist is a favorite.
BoBW - one folder per CD and one file per track.
{^_^}
On Sun, 4 Feb 2018, jdow wrote:
On 20180204 06:57, Ed Greshko wrote:
On 02/04/18 22:45, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
i just did a quick test with abcde, ripping a CD to flac both with and without the "-1" option (diff being ripping to a single FLAC file versus individual FLAC files). the difference in final, total size is negligible, both directories around 267M.
is there any benefit to one strategy or the other? i assume that i can rip a CD to a single FLAC file and, subsequently, break it into pieces later when i decide how i want to organize CDs and individual songs.
I'd go with one file per track as opposed to one file per CD.
The breaking into pieces later on seems like more work. Besides, on almost any CD there will be one or two tracks that aren't of interest even if the artist is a favorite.
BoBW - one folder per CD and one file per track.
that's what i'm getting with "abcde -o flac", so i'm just going to stick with that.
rday
On Mon, 5 Feb 2018 06:55:31 -0500 (EST) "Robert P. J. Day" rpjday@crashcourse.ca wrote:
that's what i'm getting with "abcde -o flac", so i'm just going to stick with that.
Just for the archives on the internets:
Looks like there's an issue if one tries to rip only a few tracks of a CD, in the following case track 2 and 3: this won't work here:
% abcde 2 3 -o flac [ERROR] abcde: syntax error while processing track numbers (-o)
this will:
% abcde -o flac 2 3 Grabbing tracks: 2 3 [ ... ]
Seems like order of options/ arguments is important ...
HTH, Wolfgang
On 02/04/2018 09:45 AM, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
... snip ...
On Sun, 4 Feb 2018, David King wrote:
On 02/03/2018 05:03 PM, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
for now, i was thinking of ripping just to .flac since that's lossless and i can always decide later what further format to rip to in order to save space. does that make sense? i just want to avoid having to go back and rip everything all over again.
That's exactly what I did five years ago, ripped all my CDs to FLAC using the abcde tool...
i just did a quick test with abcde, ripping a CD to flac both with and without the "-1" option (diff being ripping to a single FLAC file versus individual FLAC files). the difference in final, total size is negligible, both directories around 267M.
is there any benefit to one strategy or the other? i assume that i can rip a CD to a single FLAC file and, subsequently, break it into pieces later when i decide how i want to organize CDs and individual songs.
all i want for now is to not rip in such a way that i regret it later when i discover i inadvertantly left out some useful meta-information from each CD
I went with individual files for each track because all of my use cases involved playing / working with individual songs, not whole CDs. I think the choice is mostly about how you plan to use the files after ripping them. As far as metadata goes, FreeDB or MusicBrainz provide backup sources for anything that you forget or lose. You haven't said whether or not you plan to dispose of the physical CDs after you've finished the rips. Keeping them around would be the ultimate backup source.
On 02/02/2018 05:29 PM, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
i'm looking for recommendations for how to rip them to hard drive before i decide how i will end up using them.
Various good tools and storage methods addressed, but most of your effort will be spent on tagging. I recommend using Musicbrainz as a source and avoiding the thieves who are Gracenote and their "CDDB", not to be confused with FreeDB.
What I use is Asunder to rip to flac and tag and Picard for more advanced tagging. Both are GUI tools. For naming I prefer
Music/Artist/Album/01. Artist - Track.flac
The approach I take to ripping my hundreds of CDs is to do a session of multiple discs by the same artist or some other grouping while listening to some of the ripped tracks. This gives a direct reward for some boring work.
Documentation on ripping media from disc found on the web is frequently out-of-date.