Backing up CD library

[Homura]

I was just wondering how others have gone about backing up there entire collection of audio CDs..or if they have. I am going to go back through my CD collection and re-rip everything. I want to rip it once in a high quality file (probably lossless using FLAC) to play through my computer with my new HT system I am getting in a few weeks (either Polk Monitor 70s or Paradigm..debating financially) and another copy in probably 128 aac for my iPod. Before I spend days doing this, I wanted to see what others had done and would have done differently. Is there a smarter way to go about this?

[Galley]

I use Apple Lossless, which I use to play on my iPhone, AirPort Express in the bedroom, and Apple TV in the living room.

[Homura]

After looking a little bit more, I think I am going to go with FLAC lossless for the archive and 192 LAME mp3 encoder for the ipod.

[jlakma]

I am about 2 days or so into my cd backup project using iTunes. What is flac? I use iTunes for simplicity to put on my 30 gig iPod video/wife's 8gig mini/her 8gig iPhone/my 16 gig iPhone/8 gig iPod touch (gift). I use cucusoft for my DVD collection for iPod conversions also.

[Homura]

I used iTunes the first time around, but frankly I am a little tired of the program. Before I ever had my iPod back in Gen 1 or 2, I used winamp. I decided to go back to winamp because it is a much smoother program. That, along with winamp remote was very appealing to me. In case you didn't know, winamp remote will basically stream all of your music and allow you to access it anywhere you have internet.

As far as Flac; it stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec. It takes .wav files from a CD (which are also lossless) and compresses them in such a way to lose no integrity of the audio. That way, should your CD get scratched or damaged in another way, you have an exact copy of the information. It is similar to zipping a file, but instead of getting between 10-20% file reduction, you get around 30-50%.

Now I know my process is going to be time consuming, but I am tired of having iTunes screw up on Tags or not embedding the album art to the file. I am going to take my time and do it exactly how I want the files so that they will have the same ID in any program I use, and will have cover art permanently embedded into the file. I am going to use EAC (exact audio copy) with the FLAC for my archive file (which will be sent to my receiver from my computer via optical). I will then go through those as I rip with MP3Tag and make my tags all pretty and uniform. Then I am looking at a program called flac2mp3 which will scan a directory and make a mirror image of the directory with encoded mp3s for my iPod. It seems like is should work out pretty good, I'll let you know after I do a few albums.

[Teazle]

For over a year now I've had my CD collection ripped to WAV files on an external HDD. I don't use any compression. This is not ideal (from the standpoint of use of disc space) but I can't be bothered at the moment to improve it. Also with WAV I can be sure the music is playable on virtually any device.

My portable media player is a PSP; I just copy some files over to a MS Duo (8GB card). When I get bored of that "mix tape" I erase and start over with a fresh 8GB mix taken from the HDD.

For local audio play I plug the HDD into my PS3 via USB. PS3 recognises the Windows file structure with no problems; however you have to press Green Triangle first (to show all files).

Recently a FW update allows the PSP to be used as a full-function remote for the PS3. In the Remote Play options screen select PS3 as audio output. This way the music collection can be navigated without turning on the HDTV.

Misc. remark: Sometimes audiophiles tell you to watch out for "jitter" which can happen when playing an optical disc. This has to do with the clock on the DAC or something; I don't really understand it, but anyway by playing music from the HDD optical disc jitter is eliminated.

[Homura]

Originally Posted by Teazle

For over a year now I've had my CD collection ripped to WAV files on an external HDD. I don't use any compression. This is not ideal (from the standpoint of use of disc space) but I can't be bothered at the moment to improve it. Also with WAV I can be sure the music is playable on virtually any device.

My portable media player is a PSP; I just copy some files over to a MS Duo (8GB card). When I get bored of that "mix tape" I erase and start over with a fresh 8GB mix taken from the HDD.

For local audio play I plug the HDD into my PS3 via USB. PS3 recognises the Windows file structure with no problems; however you have to press Green Triangle first (to show all files).

Recently a FW update allows the PSP to be used as a full-function remote for the PS3. In the Remote Play options screen select PS3 as audio output. This way the music collection can be navigated without turning on the HDTV.

Misc. remark: Sometimes audiophiles tell you to watch out for "jitter" which can happen when playing an optical disc. This has to do with the clock on the DAC or something; I don't really understand it, but anyway by playing music from the HDD optical disc jitter is eliminated.

You just use straight up .wav? Isn't that around 10mb/min of audio? And you use this for all of your portable devices, or do you convert to a lossy file?

[Teazle]

Originally Posted by Homura

You just use straight up .wav? Isn't that around 10mb/min of audio? And you use this for all of your portable devices, or do you convert to a lossy file?

Yep, plain vanilla WAV; I just have to deal with the larger file sizes. I forget exactly how much per min but 10MB sounds close; it's usually around 50MB per song.

I never use lossy compression any more since audio quality is significantly worse. PSP supports WAV playback and sounds great. It's the only portable I use for music, video and games.

File sizes are larger, however I don't have to keep two copies of the same song (I don't need one WAV and one mp3) so in that sense I save space.

However, to rip a CD to WAV sound the PS3 can't be used. (It limits CD importing to lossy mp3.) So I have to swap the external HDD over to my PC for this purpose. I have a USB extension cord set up conveniently for quick swapping between PC and PS3 without moving the HDD about.

(A cleverer person might figure out a way to share the HDD between PS3 and PC over a local area network but I can't be bothered.)

[frank_t]

i too rip all my CDs as WAV to an external 500GB HD which I mirror to another 500GB HD.

i stream this over the wired network to my PS3 in another part of the house.

great solution as it means i get the best i can without compression and i can encode to whatever i need.

[Cordre69]

I ripped my 500+ cd collection at 320 wma...

[Sith]

I'm about to buy a seperate hd with a usb plug in to do this, library is starting
to take up to much space on my main computer hd..

[Galley]

WAV files don't support tagging, so there my be no way to export the metadata in your current media player's library. Lossless codecs, such as Apple Lossless, or FLAC, do support tagging.

[Homura]

Originally Posted by Galley

WAV files don't support tagging, so there my be no way to export the metadata in your current media player's library. Lossless codecs, such as Apple Lossless, or FLAC, do support tagging.

Yea that's why I was leaning towards one or the other, might just encode all of them to Apple Lossless so that they can go straight to the iPod. Does anyone know if the PSP has Apple Lossless support?

[Galley]

Originally Posted by Homura

Yea that's why I was leaning towards one or the other, might just encode all of them to Apple Lossless so that they can go straight to the iPod. Does anyone know if the PSP has Apple Lossless support?

No, it does not.

[Röckzilla]

Attention all audio and technology experts out there:

I currently own somewhere between 3,000 and 6,000 CDs.
More specifically:

• the majority of them are Metal/Punk/Rock related
• some were released back in the eighties, others were released just a few month ago
• there's plenty of mainstream/big label stuff but there's also an equal amount of underground/local stuff
  (Which I know will probably never be reissued or even located again to be repurchased at an affordable price.)

I use to just burn all of my CDs directly onto a computer and then move everything onto an iPod so I could listen to my entire music collection while traveling, working outside, etc.
That computer is officially over 20 years old now and the iPod is over 15 so I can't imagine them properly functioning very much longer.
Throw in the additional paranoia of potential "disc rot" and you have where my mind is at right now.

I desperately need to rip all of my CDs and back everything up on some external hard-drives.

Technically speaking, I have already transferred most of the music from my CD collection over the course of many years.
However, this was all accomplished by using old(er) technology and paying very little attention to consistency, organization, and audio-file quality.
Needless to say, I am now planning on just starting completely over sometime soon this year in order to ensure that everything is done correctly, definitively, and meets the best quality standards possible.

For the record, I currently own/use an iMac Pro (2017) and I know it has the Apple Music application (?) already on it.

Basically what I need to know includes the following:

1. What is the best program/software to use for ripping CDs?
2. What is the best and highest quality audio file to have each song ripped to/formatted/saved as?
3. What is the best program/software for organizing, categorizing, and digitally storing all of this music?
4. What is the best brand for external hard-drives in terms of quality specifications and dependably for securely storing a "back up" of everything (just in case)?

Please forgive my total lack of digital and technological knowledge as well as my ignorance of its associated terminologies. (I am merely a frightened caveman.)

All help, information, specifications, details, suggestions, and recommendations will be tremendously appreciated by this music junkie.
Thanks in advanced!

[Necril]

I'm in the same boat, except my latest ipod is only 11 years old.

I know there is software for this specific purpose that would likely yeld best results, with built-in error correction and other features, but for ease of use, I've been quite happy with my first test with windows media player. I believe it's a default app on all windows systems, and allows importing cds in .flac, which is a lossless compression format.

It still takes more hard drive space than itunes compression (300-500mb/album on average), but the sound quality is as good or better, and being a free compression format, the files can be played by most systems available. If you allow the mediaplayer to connect to the internet, it will automatically fetch the tracklisting for each record, and in most cases, cover art as well.

However, I've tested this only recently, and if someone knows of a way that would yeld better results for aproximately the same amount of work, like previous poster, I would much appreciate the input.

[Kedrix]

Watching this thread a bit, I have about 1500 cds of many many genres, I've been extracting and encoding them through Winamp (probably showing my age I'm sure but it whips the llamas a$$), and another program I can't remember right now to add the appropriate tags/cover art(will take the picture from Discogs which is nice), etc.

It's been a very slow going. I have a basic laptop (maybe a couple of years old) and an external cd drive that I'm using. Then I transfer them to my phone and use that to play it on the go. It's painful so maybe there is a better way for me to do it.

[benricci]

As someone with an insanely large CD collection myself, the best solution is to simply get an Apple Music subscription, add all the albums you want to your library and stream them in hi-res for like 9 bucks a month.

All this ripping and storage nonsense is just not worth the effort anymore, to be honest. Unless you have REALLY obscure albums not on streaming, in which case you can just rip those individually using a lossless format and then upload them right to your Apple Music Library where they've live alongside any you've added from the vast Apple Music catalog.

Even then I only had to upload a handful of albums from my CD collection because the services these days have just about everything under the sun (even stuff I would have sworn was REALLY obscure, like one-off 70's Italian prog-rock albums no-one's ever heard of).

So yeah...SKIP THE RIP.

That's my advice. Life's far too short and hi-res streaming sounds phenomenal. Plus it's dirt cheap nowadays and they've likely got most of your albums on there anyway.

[apricissimus]

I have about 5000 CDs. I've been ripping and tagging them manually for literally the last 15 years and I still have a ways to go.

Don't be like me.

[LexInHD]

In case anyone missed it, the new Windows Media Player - simply referred to as "Media Player" in Windows 10/11 - has CD playback and ripping functionality and can encode in MP3, among other formats.