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

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.

I took the advice of several folks here and bought a used Innuos MK3 Zen ripper/streamer and it has been a superb choice for me. Reading the responses, though, if I had over 4000 CD's it would have taken forever. Instead, my several hundred that I dragged out of several storage boxes, took me about 2 weeks to finally get completed. It allowed me an opportunity to recall each CD and some of them had been long forgotten and it was an opportunity to renew my enjoyment of some music (for example, Dark Latin Groove’s DLG CD). As a huge and lucky bonus, the guy who sold me his used MK3 Zen asked if I would like him to leave his music on it, so I ended up with a very eclectic selection of music! I have finally figured out how to back it all up to my Roon Nucleus (which has been pretty superfluous to me compared to the MK3 Zen and Qobuz streaming) and it’s all been good.

To confirm, NAS are set-and-forget.

Granted, you can get fancy and give your NAS Internet access so you can stream your tunes from the other side of the world, or set it up as a media server, or to record the numerous surveillance cameras that dot the grounds of your vast property. 

But for audiophile use, it will work great with just a basic setup (network, RAID, send notifications) that takes minutes and doesn't require tech skills.

If you’re planning to rip hundreds or thousands of CDs, consider a OWC Mercury Pro USB enclosure fitted with a 5.25" Plextor PXL-910S drive. It will plug right into any PC or Mac with a USB port and read CDs at 48x speed. It’s a workhorse. Make sure you use Exact Audio Copy or similar software to ensure bit-perfect transfers every time. Good luck! 

 

I am gobsmacked at how much music some collect and store. I have pretty much set my vinyl rig aside for the past 10 years and have been ripping CD's for the entire time and am now struggling to find titles I don't have or want. CD's are cheap, so you don't have to be rich to max out, but once attractive titles dry up, it just becomes a fairly ineffective time consuming task that frequebty nets nothing.

Am I the only one who feels like a collection has reached full capacity? I listen to various genre's and have thousands of digital files (my playlist that I listen to nightly is over 120 hours of music with more than 2,000 songs) and feel maxed out. 

For those with vast music collections, what is the end point? Are some folks out there, winded? Exhausting is how I characterize my music searches nowadays...

I use dBPowerAmp, ripped onto a Baetis Music Server. I run JRiver on that hardware, which organizes, gets the artwork, and lets me make playlists a variety of ways.  Playlists by taste, genre, capture what was recently played, played randomly, etc.  Jriver is stable and inexpensive, and even lets you play around with DSP if you want.  Have been using this setup for many years, and Jriver was originally on my PC, so Jriver was over 10 years.