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Ripping CD's to hard drive

What is the highest quality way to rip a collection of CD's to a hard drive?  Does it require a high-end transport and DAC of some sort?  How have others gone about this when loading their Lumin, Aurender, etc components? 

cjlundberg
cd318
2,636 posts
 

@m_j_s

I can’t believe that some are talking about ripping to mp3!? I don’t even rip to FLAC, I choose AIFF or WAV. I mean, storage is not a problem, so why bother with FLAC. If you can’t hear the difference between mp3 and a lossless file type, you need your ears tested

 

Ah, that old chestnut, MP3 v higher bitrates?

Well, I’d defy you, or anyone else, to tell the difference between MP3 192kbps and anything higher.

Unsighted of course.

As far as I’m aware, no human being reliably can.

It’s hard enough distinguishing 128kbps from 192kbps.

So enough with yet more misleading MP3 bashing.

 

Let’s not also forget that MP3 still remains the most compatible file format in the world even today.

You can play back MP3s on virtually anything, add album art and metadata with ease, normalise tracks or albums with MP3 Gain and edit to your heart’s desire on software like Audacity if you so wish.

 

That said, as an archival format, FLAC is to be recommended and it does gradually seems to be replacing MP3.

No doubt in time it will become equally as compatible and versatile as MP3 is right now, but some of us resent having to wait.

m_j_s
38 posts
 

Well, whether CDs are ripped to mp3 or 44/16 matters to me. I have a range of CD rips which I’ve put into a NAS library, including a number of old CD rips. 
 

I have since been listening to all of these files being played back on a highly resolving system. Occasionally I have been listening and then thinking a particular file being played is not right, the reproduced quality was just not quite right. Sure enough, when I checked the rip, it was actually a file ripped inadvertently years ago to mp3. This happened two or three times until I decided to check all of the rips and found a few more mp3 files. They have now all been re-ripped to AIFF, my file type of choice. Much better.

almosthome
40 posts
 

+1 Dbpoweramp suite.

I did ~3000 cds, and very happy with the results. FLAC for sure, external reader to Synology NAS w/ 2 SSDs.  Whoever said "One and Done" before got it right. Def not a project I ever want to repeat. =:0)

stilljim
36 posts
 

I used Exact Audio Copy on a Dell laptop to copy my collection to both Flac and Wav formats onto an 4TB external solid state hard drive. The hard drive feeds a Bluesound 2I and an external Dac.

What I didn't expect was that I could hear a difference between Flac and Wav playback. I don't have "golden ears" but could still hear a difference. I prefer Wav, but that's just me.

Jim S.

cd318
2,636 posts
 

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.

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