Ripping CD's to hard drive

@cjlundberg 

Anything at or above 192kbps MP3 is fine.

Below 192kbps it's fairly easy to hear sonic degradation on anything other than speech only/ simple recordings.

FLAC now seems to gradually be taking over from MP3 as the preferred file medium of storage but I can't say I hear any improvements with it.

I'll only use FLAC to rip the rarest or most important of recordings.

Giving each disc a quick cleaning wipe before ripping won't hurt either. I usually breathe on the disc first and then wipe it off using a clean cotton T shirt.

Some say that you should use 8x or 10x ripping speed and switch off error correction, but I can't say I've noticed any difference here either.

Therefore I tend to leave error correction on.

@m_j_s

Perhaps we should also mention that ripping to an SSD or a USB instead of a traditional HD will not only be faster but should be more reliable in the long term?

SSDs now also come in a similar form as RAM sticks (the ultra fast NVMe PCIe 3.0/4.0) and USB is up to version 3.

Surprisingly there’s also some evidence that SSDs in order to function optimally need at least as much free space as traditional hard drives do (10%).

USB sticks are generally reliable and I’ve haven't experienced any problems with them apart from a couple of cheap ones off eBay I was using in the car and carelessly removed before turning the media player off.

In both cases the USB stick was left totally unresponsive. It wasn’t too big a deal because they were both backed up at least twice.

@flyfish77

In some instances, I have purchased FLAC downloads of some of the same albums that I have ripped. In most cases there are minimal if any differences in sound quality between the AIFF files and the higher resolution FLAC files. When there are differences in sound quality, it appears to be due to the source being remastered versions of older albums.

Yes, different mastering is usually the biggest difference.

On sites like Amazon Music you can compare different masterings, and hardly any of them sound the same.

What bothers me is that some of them can initially sound better on less ambitious speaker systems, and then worse on more revealing full scale ones.

I spent some time comparing the remastered Beach Boys 1993 Good Vibrations box set with their remastered 1999 Greatest Hits, Vol. 1: 20 Good Vibrations after reading about both on the Steve Hoffman music forum.

The former sounded better on the better system.

Listening to them on headphones was something different yet again.

Without a reliable reference source of material (or playback equipment), it is tricky to come to any worthwhile lasting conclusions.

In comparison, the difference in bitrate is usually insignificant.

@8th-note 

4000 discs?  Ulp!

I can't have ripped more than 400 of my discs and that was enough.

They're now in a bag in the attic along with the rest due to lack of space. I've probably only got around 100 still left downstairs.

It's hard to get the notion that the original CDs sound the best out of your head, even if there isn't the slightest bit of evidence to support it.

Besides some of them took a lot of getting hold of, eg 2003 Blonde on Blonde, Born to Run super bit mapping gold disc, Get Happy!! (Demon) and some are perennial favourites like Astral Weeks, Abbey Road, Sgt Pepper (87) etc

2) It compares your rip to a database to insure that it is completely accurate. 3) It fetches the metadata from the internet so you have the album info and the artwork all together in one folder.

Sounds like good features to have.

Ever since the Creevity Cover downloader software stopped working on my W7 PC I've had to add the art manually when I can be bothered.

CDBurnerXP is what I used to use to burn compilations after normalising levels with MP3 Gain.

These days it's easier to put the music on my phone and stream via my Ifi Zen Air Bluetooth streamer.

Of course it's even easier to use something like Amazon's Alexa but somehow for me that seems to cheapen the entire experience of listening.

And then there's the feeling that it's always listening to you...