What are My Options for Ripping My CD Collection ?


I'm not a tech person and I'm looking for options to rip my 1,300 CD collection.  I've been looking at a used Innuos Zen Mk 3 with internal CD ripper because it would also be a considerable streamer upgrade.  However this is $1500 or more on the used market.  I can live with my current streamer if there are less expensive options for ripping with comparable sound quality (FLAC or better).  We are MAC based. Thanks.  

 

 

 

foamcutter

the USB hard drive would plug into your new streamer

There are advantages to having local files vs streaming files. Music on a USB stick is what propels far better sound from my 2018 car USB port. As fastfreight mentions, you can use your backup devices or any USB storage device to easily transport music files to any USB port, on any device, as long as the port is technically capable of reading and playing high resolution files. 

 

I dealt with a similar dilemma. My solution was to use DB power amp with an old Mac that had a CD drive. Ripped CDs directly to a Roon Nucleus+ and have had great results. 

As the guy said use DBpoweramp. I have windows not mac but DB is compatible, if you rip them in full value 1440kbps your collection is only 1tb, you could use a Netac 1tb usb drive for $80 to store, which would be fine and make a backup copy at some point with a Micro SD card and adaptor. I never did like FLAC, but found Ogg Vorbis running at 500kbps to be a Gas. All you need is an external cd drive, an HP or LG, otherwise you will get errors. Connect and away you go. I have stored all my collection on PC in Full Wave and when Qobuz is working correctly it is about the same. For me Qobuz seems to dump titles and have no data so I have ceased using it. Incidentally to play music from a PC you need at least a constant 3.2Ghz and A minimum of Quad Core or it's time lapse all the way

I still buy CD's and have a vast collection.  DBPoweramp sounds like a good solution for ripping software.  I simply used Apple music software (formerly iTunes) to rip to Apple Lossless.  It's compatible with most streamers and works for me, and easy to use.  If you don't have a CD drive you can purchase a USB drive for cheap.  I have one that will read/write to CD, DVD and Blue Ray and it was less than $40.

For storing, a cheap solution would be an external HD or SSD.  I have my collection backed up on several drives, but mainly use a NAS for my computer and device backups and to store my CD collection for easy playback.  My NAS is configured in RAID 1 which allows for redundancy as mentioned in another post.  I have two 8TB drives so a total of 8 TB storage, plenty for all my backups and music with room to spare.  A NAS is not that difficult to setup and easy to maintain.