4:29 p.m.
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
5:01 p.m.
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,
--
A motto of mine is: When in doubt, try it out
5:10 p.m.
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.
--
-- Steve
5:25 p.m.
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} ${full_title}
done
--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Under no circumstances will I ever purchase anything offered to me as
the result of an unsolicited e-mail message. Nor will I forward chain
letters, petitions, mass mailings, or virus warnings to large numbers
of others. This is my contribution to the survival of the online
community.
--Roger Ebert, December, 1996
----------------------------- The Boulder Pledge -----------------------------
6:23 p.m.
On 02/02/2018 02:29 PM, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
in short, any recommendations on simply ripping all these CDs to
hard drive, while having no idea what i will eventually use to play
them?
I use grip to do it. I used to rip to ogg, but now I have started using
flac and I'm trying to go back and redo all the CDs again. I have a bit
of a custom process because I have my own custom jukebox system with a
web interface that I made *many* years ago. However, I have recently
come across Logitech Media Server and I highly recommend it if you want
a multi-room audio system. It can play to ChromeCast devices and UPNP
and you can run the squeezelite client on any computer. There is also a
free Android client for controlling the clients called "squeezer".
I will second what Steve said though, ripping CDs is mind numbing boring...
6:28 p.m.
On Fri, 2 Feb 2018 17:29:40 -0500 (EST)
"Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday(a)crashcourse.ca> wrote:
in short, any recommendations on simply ripping all these CDs to
hard drive, while having no idea what i will eventually use to play
them?
First step:
making the *wav files:
man wodim:
"To copy an audio CD in the most accurate way, first run
icedax dev=/dev/cdrom -vall cddb=0 -B -Owav
and then run
wodim dev=/dev/cdrw -v -dao -useinfo -text *.wav"
Second step:
converting the hopefully resulting wav files from above to flac:
in the folder containing the wavs trying:
for f in *.wav; do sox "$f" "${f%.wav}.flac"; done
(latter snippet copied and edited from a previous thread here)
I'd assume one can script/automate that last step in a way so that
once all CD's have been converted, this script simply needed to cd
into every dir containing the wavs and then starts to convert the files
via the "for f in *.wav ..." line ..
HTH, and good luck!
Regards
--
Wolfgang Pfeiffer
10:49 p.m.
the other option is to keep it native to linux in oog format, as a thought.
On Fri, Feb 2, 2018 at 7:28 PM, Wolfgang Pfeiffer <roto(a)gmx.net> wrote:
On Fri, 2 Feb 2018 17:29:40 -0500 (EST)
"Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday(a)crashcourse.ca> wrote:
>
> in short, any recommendations on simply ripping all these CDs to
> hard drive, while having no idea what i will eventually use to play
> them?
First step:
making the *wav files:
man wodim:
"To copy an audio CD in the most accurate way, first run
icedax dev=/dev/cdrom -vall cddb=0 -B -Owav
and then run
wodim dev=/dev/cdrw -v -dao -useinfo -text *.wav"
Second step:
converting the hopefully resulting wav files from above to flac:
in the folder containing the wavs trying:
for f in *.wav; do sox "$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(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
2:31 a.m.
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
--
Jon H. LaBadie jonfu(a)jgcomp.com
4:03 p.m.
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
6:21 p.m.
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.
--
A motto of mine is: When in doubt, try it out
6:48 p.m.
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.
--
A motto of mine is: When in doubt, try it out
7:08 p.m.
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.
--
[tim@localhost ~]$ uname -rsvp
Linux 4.14.14-200.fc26.x86_64 #1 SMP Fri Jan 19 13:27:06 UTC 2018 x86_64
Boilerplate: All mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted.
There is no point trying to privately email me, I only get to see
the messages posted to the mailing list.
You can't have equality AND special treatment.
9:59 p.m.
On Sun, 04 Feb 2018 11:38:40 +1030
Tim <ignored_mailbox(a)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
--
Wolfgang Pfeiffer
3:25 a.m.
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.
--
[tim@localhost ~]$ uname -rsvp
Linux 4.14.14-200.fc26.x86_64 #1 SMP Fri Jan 19 13:27:06 UTC 2018 x86_64
Boilerplate: All mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted.
There is no point trying to privately email me, I only get to see
the messages posted to the mailing list.
The internet, your opportunity to learn from other peoples' mistakes.
3:52 p.m.
On Sun, 04 Feb 2018 19:55:14 +1030
Tim <ignored_mailbox(a)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
--
Wolfgang Pfeiffer
3:57 p.m.
On Sun, 4 Feb 2018 22:52:49 +0100
Wolfgang Pfeiffer <roto(a)gmx.net> wrote:
On Sun, 04 Feb 2018 19:55:14 +1030
Tim <ignored_mailbox(a)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" ...
--
Wolfgang Pfeiffer
8:45 a.m.
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.
--
[tim@localhost ~]$ uname -rsvp
Linux 4.14.14-200.fc26.x86_64 #1 SMP Fri Jan 19 13:27:06 UTC 2018 x86_64
Boilerplate: All mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted.
There is no point trying to privately email me, I only get to see
the messages posted to the mailing list.
This email brought to you by potato omelates... Mmm, yummy!
9:58 p.m.
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.
11:44 p.m.
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. :-)
--
A motto of mine is: When in doubt, try it out
12:07 a.m.
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.
1:07 a.m.
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.
2:33 a.m.
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
7:36 a.m.
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.
--
David King
dave(a)daveking.com
8:45 a.m.
... 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
8:57 a.m.
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.
--
A motto of mine is: When in doubt, try it out
8:23 p.m.
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.
{^_^}
5:55 a.m.
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
5:18 p.m.
On Mon, 5 Feb 2018 06:55:31 -0500 (EST)
"Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday(a)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
5:32 p.m.
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.
--
David King
dave(a)daveking.com
12:58 p.m.
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.
--
-Andrew J. Caines- Unix Systems Architect A.J.Caines(a)halplant.com
"Machines take me by surprise with great frequency" - Alan Turing
2264
days inactive
2272
days old
29 comments
14 participants
participants (14)
-
Andrew J. Caines -
David King -
Ed Greshko -
Ed Greshko -
fred roller -
Fred Smith -
jdow -
Joe Zeff -
Jon LaBadie -
Robert P. J. Day -
Samuel Sieb -
SternData -
Tim -
Wolfgang Pfeiffer