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

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.

+1 dbPowerAmp with inexpensive USB CD drive on Mac. Works great. I rip to FLAC, goes to MacMini Roon/Audirvana server. 

With streaming you don't know which version/master you get, most likely more recent ones, so older CDs may sound better than current re-mastered streams. And the cost for streaming subscription quickly rises above dbPowerAmp and cheap CD drive.

my 2c.

@foamcutter DAP stands for Digital Audio Player. I use a FIIO M15 which accepts a large SD card for music storage. I can store my entire ripped music library without compression on a 4TB card. It's really a luxury to have all of my music ready to play any time I want. I'll mention a few other things.

  • I have an Eversolo DMP A10 and it accepts an NVMe card. I installed a 4TB card which allows me to store my ripped music on my streamer. That way I don't need an external drive. Even though I have 250 gig internet, once in a while it glitches and I just feel more relaxed if I'm using the stored files if I'm too lazy to fish out the CD and put it on the transport.
  • Spending hundreds of hours ripping my music has made me totally paranoid of losing all the data. I have backed it up to 4 different Hard Drives, one of which I keep in a large fireproof gun safe. If I lost those files I would have to call the suicide prevention hotline.