ripping cd's in 2021 and other audio matters

[giordana93]

so I actually bought a cd this week even though I don't have a cd player in service at the moment. Just wanted the physical disc. Anyway, I had to fire up the ancient IMac to rip it into the collection and got really frustrated navigating both Itunes (mac is so old that it still has itunes) and my phone to get the album and few others on the phone without syncing the whole shebang. Part of the problem is that when I ripped cd's back in the day I had both lossless and mp3 versions to conserve space on ipods & phones. so lots of duplication and Apple never made it easy to manage that. Now I'm wondering how/where/if anybody still rips/downloads music to local sources. What's best practice these days?

Also close to migrating to another streaming service. We've supplemented our original Rhapsody (now Napster) service with spotify and amazon, but have such a library built up from decades on Rhapsody that parting ways has been tough/delayed, but it is time. Let's hear how you are listening to music these days. thanks

[davids]

Tidal.

[Bob Ross]

I'm the last person you want to ask about "best practices" as I A) don't use any streaming services for music, B) still have over 300 physical CDs and a CD player...somewhere, and C) keep forgetting that I have nearly 1,000 albums stored on my ~20 year old Mac G4 running OS 10.3.9 that are accessible via iTunes but as you pointed out, who remembers how to navigate that?

But every now and then when I think What Would I Really Like To Do To Make My Music Collection More Accesible And Organized And As Good Sounding As Possible? I keep coming back to something like a Roon Nucleus + ...which, despite their own hype isn't so much about the audio quality per se (I mean, it is, but that's not the real strength of the Roon universe) so much as just the intuitive and engaging/inspiring way they organize your content.

E.g., if I want to hear Stanley Clarke's 1975 album Journey To Love it's trivial to call that up by name. But if I'm trying to remember "What was the name of that album by the guitarist who played on Stanley Clarke's 1975 album Journey To Love?" it's trivial to ask that and not only get several answers but also get a crap-ton of other related material featuring the same musicians and their other projects. It's like playing Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon with your music collection.

[giordana93]

Tidal.

have heard good things about them. is the catalog as wide/deep as others?

[davids]

have heard good things about them. is the catalog as wide/deep as others?

Wide and deep enough for me, most of the time. The search functions for classical aren't great.

But it's lossless. That is a full-stop non-negotiable requirement for me.

[sk_tle]

Use Tidal/Spotify/other streaming services if you want to have the opportunity to lose access to your favorite music from one day to another because a third party just decided it.

Buy music without DRM, either physical or digital if you care about freedom and store it safely.

As for ripping, well I have always done that from a linux computer so I might not be able to help you. Wikipedia says that FUSE is available for MacOS so maybe I can. With ffmpegfs you can virtually convert any video or audio folder to a format of your choice. Basically if ~/Music is your music folder on your computer and contain only lossless flac files, running this :

ffmpegfs --audiobitrate=256K --desttype=mp3 ~/Music ~/mp3_256k -o allow_other,ro

will make available all your music as mp3 256k on the folder ~/mp3 so you only have to copy/paste the songs of your choice from that folder to your smartphone and they will be transcoded on the fly in mp3. In that example it is mp3 but it can be lossy AAC, oggvorbis, whatever with the correct parameters.

[rec head]

I still buy and rip or download flac (or whatever the lossless option is).

I use Jriver media center for library management and playback both locally and on the road. Jriver is available on all platforms but I'm only familiar with Windows. I just don't seem to get along with the streaming services. I have a free 6 month trial with Spotify right now and think it sucks. The quality is fine because I only use it in the car but I hate the interface and mixes it thinks I will like. What I dislike the most is that the mixes only seem to be by genre. Punk and rap don't show up side by side.

[giordana93]

so is flac what most of you save files into when ripping?

[sailor]

I use Spotify premium and did a trial of Amazon lossless last winter. I could not hear the difference on my fairly nice system (denon AVR and nht speakers)

[giordana93]

for the record, I still use the old mac only because that's where most of my old data was done and it hardly gets fired up any more. I went Chromebook a while back and have had no real reason to return

[davids]

I use Spotify premium and did a trial of Amazon lossless last winter. I could not hear the difference on my fairly nice system (denon AVR and nht speakers)

I find that the lossy stuff wears on me over an hour or so. I don't notice differences in quick a-b switches.

My issue with streaming has to do with how little the artists get from plays. I'd be willing to pay more than my usual annual music budget for the cornucopia in front of me, rather than less.

I'm not too worried about losing access to music. All the various recording & storage technologies since Edison set a needle to a wax cylinder have been temporary and contingent - I personally have used vinyl, cassettes, 8 tracks, CDs and hard drives (disks and solid state.) The benefits of streaming are, for me, real and substantial!

[rec head]

I find that the lossy stuff wears on me over an hour or so. I don't notice differences in quick a-b switches.

Same here. My hearing isn't great due to pretty bad tinnitus but lossy becomes fatiguing. I took the NPR test a while back and was surprised that I could tell the difference in lossy vs lossless at such a high degree. I could tell in the bass.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thereco...-audio-quality


I have used flac to for a long time. It is free, open source and because it is lossless you can convert it if needed.

[zetroc]

For classical, I love Primephonic.

Pop, it's all Tidal.

[davids]

Same here. My hearing isn't great due to pretty bad tinnitus but lossy becomes fatiguing. I took the NPR test a while back and was surprised that I could tell the difference in lossy vs lossless at such a high degree. I could tell in the bass.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thereco...-audio-quality


I have used flac to for a long time. It is free, open source and because it is lossless you can convert it if needed.

That was a fun quiz (which I just did with my Schiit Modi -> Schiit Magni -> Sennheiser HD600 combo.) I got 4/6, missing Coldplay and Neil Young. For the most part it was the lack of sibilance and body that hooked me. And the low res Perahia stuff sounded strange - confused and almost phase-y.

[rmplum]

I could not hear the difference on my fairly nice system (denon AVR and nht speakers)

Hey! A fellow NHT guy!

What you using?

Ryan
-a trio of M5s, Classic Twos, original SuperOnes and a pair of Absolute Zeros

[hkgmatt]

I have a ripped a lot of my CDs and also bought some lossless digital music, but also have a Tidal subscription. After having been away from my own digital collection for over a year, I delight in being able to enjoy it again now that I'm back at the same place, even though most if not all albums are probably available on Tidal. An episode of the (excellent) Ongoing History of New Music podcast by Alan Cross on record stores made be realize how I listen to albums differently if I bought them, rather than listening to them through Tidal. Certainly there is a much more intense process of getting to know the music and listening to the same album over and over again than when I'm listening to music streams.

I'm now determined to rip the remaining CDs I have, not because I will listen to them much (although you never know) or because I can't get them on Tidal, but because my own music collection is also a reflection of who I was and who I am.

I've used EAC and dBpoweramp CD Ripper on the PC for ripping with an external DVD drive and am ripping to FLAC.

Matt

[zachateseverything]

honestly, my experience with the last 100 albums I've bought on physical media is that they either come with a download code in the package or the label emails you one as soon as you complete the transaction.