CD to USB

[Biggles]

Its a one off task, but it does take sme time.

The good news is that it is not as though you have to sit there through all the rip.

Start the CD ripping process and leave it, at some point go back and take out the CD.

Check and correct the digital files

Insert the next CD and repeat.

The problem of ripping is that not every CD has the associated data embedded into the CD correctly, so you can have unknown artist, track1, track2 etc showing in your digital files. You use MP3Tag to correct the digital files.

Is part 1 of how to rip a CD which shows what to do, part 2 completes the task and there is another video which shows how to use MP3Tag.

 

[happyrat1]

Jeremy >>>You forget I'm retired young and pretty

As for finding the time for the project?

You MAKE the time

Gary

 

[Jeremykeys]

Hi Ray! Yeah, I know the days of CD players in cars are numbered. I just don't know if I have the time to rip my entire collection. That and the fact that my poor ok'd computer isn't really up to the task.
Also, whenever my wife and I do go on road trips, the stereo is only very rarely on. Pretty much the only time I play it is when I'm by myself in the car.
I'm going to have to reread the thread and see the if there is a quick way to rip, convert to MP3 and transfer my CDs to a USB stick that won't fill my meaner hard drive. I'm not really interested in fiddling with my computer and adding a second drive.

 

[happyrat1]

You really don't need to buy and install another hard disk Jeremy.

500 CD's will fit on a 64 Gig Memory Stick or micro SD card with room to spare.

Everything plugs into a USB slot. Even an extra DVDROM drive to do the actual ripping.

https://www.amazon.ca/Kingston-Digital-64GB-microSDXC-Adapter/dp/B079GVC5B8/

https://www.amazon.ca/Kingston-Digital-64GB-Traveler-DT100G3/dp/B00C5K8CQ2/

https://www.amazon.ca/External-Rewriter-Superdrive-Transfer-Notebook/dp/B07D9V9J6Q/

As for finding the time to rip? Do it while you are practicing your arpeggios.



Gary

 

[Rayblewit]

I'm retired young and pretty

Pretty?

 

[happyrat1]

Pretty?

Oh so pretty

Gary

 

[Jeremykeys]

Practice? Practice? I don't need no steenking practice!
Actually what I do need to do is first put all my CDs in alphabetical order. When we moved last year I put them in labelled boxes and carefully packed them in order.
Once we were well into the move, the boxes became needed and the CDs were put into a cabinet in whatever order happened. Then of course they ended up being put on the shelf where they live. By simply grabbing handfuls and stuffed onto the shelves. Zappa next to Petty next to Beatles next to Dream Theater next to Prince.
Well, you get the idea.
It's now been a year and they're still not sorted. Which has become not a big issue. I'd much rather write and record my music in my studio than sort CDs. AND, since I also have at least half a dozen unfinished songs; probably more now that I think about it; sorting CDs becomes even less of a worry. Hence so does copying them to a stick.
Maybe one day much further down the road. Of course organizing is my weakest suit. It means I have to care about it.
Not a worry! I have tons on unlabelled memory sticks kicking around. A veritable treasure trove! Unknown and undiscovered territory just waiting for me to search through!
I'm 64 now and hope to retire when I hit 70. By then I should have a nice shoebox full. Who knows what lies in wait? It's times like these that I wish I had a time machine just so I could jump ahead 6 1/2 years and see what I have accumulated!
Anyway, it just doesn't matter. I'm still paying for this car and I'm quite sure that my next one will have a cerebral to USB adapter. At that point, this all becomes moot.
Cheers!
And be kind to your cats!

 

[Biggles]

Jeremy

I have to disagree with Gary’s suggestion and statement about 500 CDs easily fitting on a 64Gb memory stick.

They will BUT only at a low bit rate which for me would compromises quality.

I do not have 500 CDs but I have precisely 271 CDs and they are all ripped and the combined total of all the ripped files is 72Gb.

So before you get to far into the ripping please rip your favourite song at different bit rates and listen to them.

My older CDs were ripped at 160 and there is a difinitive difference in audio quality between them and the CDs that have been ripped since at 320.

The best ripping quality is Lossless or near Lossless such as WAV or AIFF or FLAC but this results in huge files.

In a test that I did a few years ago the file size of one song was 2x greater at 320 than it was at 160 but a WAV was a whopping 20x larger than the 320 ripped file. There was a huge difference in audio quality of the files for me listening to quite passages at any bit rate below 320 resulted in a higher noise ratio that could be heard during playback.

I have SD slots in my car for music on SD cards but there is also an inbuilt 10Gb solid state drive into which I have installed 6 CDs that are in FLAC format and the drive is full.

Good luck.

 

[Rayblewit]

Took me about 6 weeks of pretty intense sessions to rip 14,714 songs!!! 99.3 GB of muzak!!! It all fits very nicely on a 128 GB Sandisk Thumb Drive.

I have to disagree with Gary’s suggestion and statement about 500 CDs easily fitting on a 64Gb memory stick

There is conflict here!

I have started the copy process to a 64 gb usb.
I am doing the ripping using mp3 (on advice).
I tried a couple of cds ripping on FLAC and Lossless. These take time.
I played these and to my ears I detected no difference in the sound quality between these and the mp3.
I also have some ripped cds in my computer from years earlier. These were done on the most basic setting about 5 years ago. I copied some of these to usb and the playback sound quality is just the same as the cd original.

In conclusion I say forget about FLAC and Lossless unless you have super human hearing to detect slight quality difference. Also ripping time would extend 3 - 4 time. That is massive when you consider doing 100's of cd's.
Also these files will take up more than one 64gb usb.

I learnt all this info from this forum and I am so grateful. No BS.

Ray . . expert on the subject

 

[Biggles]

Its what works for you that matters.

There is no conflict btw, it was a case of explaining the options and what I experienced when I ripped all my CDs.

You would have been pretty miffed if you had ripped a lot of CDs at a low bit rate only to not like the resulting sound quality.

The test I referred to for me did result in a very noticable difference especially with brass sounds so I used the highest bit rate during the rip.

One thing about digital music that I find odd, over the last 40 years many things in life have improved, except the quality of recorded music. MP3 music files do compare very poorly when compared to the same song on vinyl and it played back on a reasonable HiFi system, put said MP3 on a bluetooth speaker and its dire, stream it via Alexa and its bandwidth is limited.

To each their own.

 

[Rayblewit]

Nicely explained Col.
I respect your knowledge on the subject.
Cheers man!
'Ray

 

[happyrat1]

All of my CD's were ripped at 256 Kbps.

I found that was adequate for decent quality without sonar super hearing.

If you rip at 256 Kbps or less you'll easily fit 400 discs onto a 64 GB stick..

Gary

 

[happyrat1]

BTW, check your bit rate in the ripping software you are using. It should be under the options tab somewhere.

Try not to use too low a bitrate either. Otherwise you start hearing noticeable bass distortion and high frequency digital artifacts in the music.

Gary

 

[Rayblewit]

Still on their Way: . . . A couple of Snarky Puppy CDs

Hi Gary,
I watched a whole concert of Snarky Puppy this week . . WOW! Blew my mind. Love the percussion!
I noticed every tune has weird time signatures . . Have you noticed that? How does the band keep up!
Call it Jazz . . maybe! Afro Rock?
Whatever, but thanks for the link.
Ray

 

[MusicwithHarry]

Hi Gary,
I watched a whole concert of Snarky Puppy this week . . WOW! Blew my mind. Love the percussion!
I noticed every tune has weird time signatures . . Have you noticed that? How does the band keep up!
Call it Jazz . . maybe! Afro Rock?
Whatever, but thanks for the link.
Ray

Snarky Puppy are pretty awesome. I think that my favorite song is Lingus (We Like It Here). There is an awesome video on YT that feaures them playing that song. Incredible musicianship, especially the keyboard player, Cory Henry.

I just saw this thread on ripping CDs and being able to play them back on a flash drive. I have way too many CDs myself, but I performed the task of ripping all of the CDs to the PC and then saved them on Google Drive. I also use iTunes and so my phone has everything on it now and I use a Bluetooth device to hook into my car stereo.

Grace,
Harry

 

[Jeremykeys]

Snarky Puppy are incredible!
As for loading CDs onto a memory stick, I wish I had the time. I have over 500 CDs now. I'm just glad that the car I bought last week has a CD player in it. Plus I can play music from my phone over Bluetooth. Does that name make you feel like you need a dentist?
I have to learn how to put whole CDs onto a stick and have each artist in a specific folder so that, if say I want to listen to Genesis Foxtrot, I can find it in my Genesis folder along with my other Genesis CDs. I'm sure there is a way and my car will be able to find the folder, open it to the album. I never listen to individual songs. I much prefer the whole album in order.
Music snob, doncha know?

 

[Biggles]

Snarky Puppy are incredible!
As for loading CDs onto a memory stick, I wish I had the time. I have over 500 CDs now. I'm just glad that the car I bought last week has a CD player in it. Plus I can play music from my phone over Bluetooth. Does that name make you feel like you need a dentist?
I have to learn how to put whole CDs onto a stick and have each artist in a specific folder so that, if say I want to listen to Genesis Foxtrot, I can find it in my Genesis folder along with my other Genesis CDs. I'm sure there is a way and my car will be able to find the folder, open it to the album. I never listen to individual songs. I much prefer the whole album in order.
Music snob, doncha know?

Jeremy
If you put a CD in your Windows PC it will or rather should play automatically and whilst it is playing from the Menu select Rip, check that it is MP3 at 256 or 320 mbps and it should then rip the contents to a folder named after the Artist(s) and put the ripped CD songs in a sub folder with the title of the Album.

Hence all being well it does the job for you of setting up a Library.

The potential issues are the electronic tagging of each song has to be in a specific form and not all CD Sound Engineers are good at being consistent but that said the processes that I have written in the prior posts do work.

Which reminds me I must take the music SD cards in my car out and update them to include a couple of Snark Puppy albums, a very impressive ensemble that are too.

 

[Jeremykeys]

Jeremy
If you put a CD in your Windows PC it will or rather should play automatically and whilst it is playing from the Menu select Rip, check that it is MP3 at 256 or 320 mbps and it should then rip the contents to a folder named after the Artist(s) and put the ripped CD songs in a sub folder with the title of the Album.

Hence all being well it does the job for you of setting up a Library.

The potential issues are the electronic tagging of each song has to be in a specific form and not all CD Sound Engineers are good at being consistent but that said the processes that I have written in the prior posts do work.

Which reminds me I must take the music SD cards in my car out and update them to include a couple of Snark Puppy albums, a very impressive ensemble that are too.

Thank you! I will have to try that. I just hope that my car is smart enough to open folders in a way that I can find the specific album that I want to hear, and I'm smart enough to figure out how to make this work!

 

[Jeremykeys]

Some fun silliness!

 

[happyrat1]

I used an open source CD Ripper called Asunder to rip my entire collection of over 1000 CDs 2 years ago.

At a rate of about 6 to 8 per day while I watched TV, they took about 15 minutes apiece to rip over a span of about 3 or 4 months.

The program also automatically downloads the MP3 Tag Info from Musicbrainz. org while setting up Artist and Title Folders for each CD.

Really, once you've set your preferences a chimp could learn how to do it.

Nowadays I have about a dozen backup copies of my entire collection on my computers and Micro-SD cards.

I keep a portable HiFi MP3 player in my jacket pocket whenever I go out.

I know it's a pain in the ass and I put it off for years and years but I'll never have to do that many at once again and adding new CD's is no bother at all.

Gary