Anyone digitizing their CD music collection?

[Ramanuj]

The only way I see forward of ripping & preserving without being dependent on an undependable storage solution like a Mechanical or SSD drive is to make the CD's image thus not loosing an iota of that CDs quality by Nero or IMG burn etc and DL then storing in HDD before transferring to a Bluray disk or a Dual Layer DVD. A very long and time consuming process but at the end of the day your work won't be redundant depending on a HDD.

 

[balavignesh002]

Thanks and that makes sense. If i do use a DVD drive to use with my Mac, is there any enclosure you would recommend to house it in ?

If the drive is powered by usb you may not need an enclosure as it has its own. But if it's a 12v cd drive it needs an enclosure and 12v psu with that. I use owc all aluminium enclosure with 12v dc power supply.

 

[MIOM]

The only way I see forward of ripping & preserving without being dependent on an undependable storage solution like a Mechanical or SSD drive is to make the CD's image thus not loosing an iota of that CDs quality by Nero or IMG burn etc and DL then storing in HDD before transferring to a Bluray disk or a Dual Layer DVD. A very long and time consuming process but at the end of the day your work won't be redundant depending on a HDD.

Maybe. But what about those who wish to rid themselves of the physical media? And people like me with large collections will still have large collections, even in copying from CD to dual layer DVD's. Yeah, it'll downsize my collection, but still.

Anyway HD/SSD drive technology is ever improving along with lifespan. And as a PC builder and enthusiast, I can definitely tell you drives don't fail like they did in the past. And to be honest, since getting into PCs in 1998, I've only had 3 drives die on me, and thus far no SSD's. I'll also add this is where being cheap can hurt. In other words, buy quality drives and your failure rate lessons significantly. And yeah, backups help too.

My two cents.

 

[mbhangui]

Anyway HD/SSD drive technology is ever improving along with lifespan. And as a PC builder and enthusiast, I can definitely tell you drives don't fail like they did in the past. And to be honest, since getting into PCs in 1998, I've only had 3 drives die on me, and thus far no SSD's. I'll also add this is where being cheap can hurt. In other words, buy quality drives and your failure rate lessons significantly. And yeah, backups help too.

Damn true. In the 90s, hard drives failed like crazy. I haven't had a hard disk crash since 2010. The only crash that I have witnessed in this period are my employees macbook pro's ssds since 2016 or so. Specifically macbooks used for adobe photoshop. Personally I have had one Toshiba hybrid disk crash on me. But so far, touch wood, no mechanical hard disk failure. They have become so reliable when SSDs are becoming so popular. But my Samsung evo ssds from 2017 too havn't crashed yet. So not sure what apple is using in their macbooks.

EDIT: mechanical hard disk can be so robuse. I have a personal story
in 1996 I was a systems eng working for Citibank NA at Chennai. We had a major fire in our datacenter. One important server, a DEC Alpa Unix 4100 server for entire credit cards was burnt alive. The server was absolutely charred. We removed the hard disks and put that in tubs of isopropyl alcohol. After a day, we inserted the drives in a new server and lo, behold the server booted. That was the time we utilized to take a backup and bring up a new server. Had it been on ssd's, it wouldn't have survived the fire. Mechanical hard disks are pretty robust. There are electronic components on every mechanical HD too. So not sure how they survived. This was long before linux was in fashian. The os was 64bit and was reconfigurable through text files without the need of recompiling the kernel. The DEC OSF/1 was the probably the first UNIX OS certified by Open System Foundation. I still have the book on Source Code Control System (SCCS) my Marc Rochkind that was distributed with this server. The concept of using diff between versions comes from SCCS. RCS, Git all use that same idea that SCCS came up with

 

[balavignesh002]

Anyone have any suggestions on a good "external" drive for rips?

Found these options for you, You can do an easy install your self

CD Drive:

Option 1

Option 2

Option 3

Enclosure:

Option 1

Option 2

You can try this also. some time back i saw a DVD version of this, but couldnt find one now.

 

[MIOM]

Found these options for you, You can do an easy install your self

CD Drive:

Option 1

Option 2

Option 3

Enclosure:

Option 1

Option 2

You can try this also. some time back i saw a DVD version of this, but couldnt find one now.

@balavignesh002, thanks, but as I said, I'm looking external, not internal. I have an internal Lite-On drive in my backup system that works just fine as shown in post #33, page 2. Appreciate the suggestion though as it provides options.

Anyway, I'm currently using the backup system to do my rips, but if I need another drive for that system, that Plextor in option 1 is a nice choice.

BTW, I'm in the US. Thanks

 

[MIOM]

Damn true. In the 90s, hard drives failed like crazy. I haven't had a hard disk crash since 2010. The only crash that I have witnessed in this period are my employees macbook pro's ssds since 2016 or so. Specifically macbooks used for adobe photoshop. Personally I have had one Toshiba hybrid disk crash on me. But so far, touch wood, no mechanical hard disk failure. They have become so reliable when SSDs are becoming so popular. But my Samsung evo ssds from 2017 too havn't crashed yet. So not sure what apple is using in their macbooks.

I have no issues or fears about SSD's and have been using them since 2012. My main rig has 5 Samsung SSD drive to include to NVMe drives. The NVMe drives are Samsung 970 Pros (512gig OS, 1TB photos drive). The other 3 are SATA drives (960 EVO's (2 x 2TB, and 1TB)).

I have NO HDD drives installed in my PC's - Wanted to make my PC as quiet as possible, that meant eliminating HDD drives and their thrashing. There's also no fan noise as I trimmed them to the be as quiet as possible while still cooling the system.

My Western Digital NAS contains 4 WD Red Pro drives (6TB each) running in RAID 10 which gives me 10TB of useable storage. I also still have a lot of my old internal HDD drives that I put in a dock if I need to use/access them.

BTW, that was impressive that your company was able to recover that data from a burnt down server. Shows how hardy HDD drives can be.

 

[balavignesh002]

@balavignesh002, thanks, but as I said, I'm looking external, not internal. I have an internal Lite-On drive in my backup system that works just fine as shown in post #33, page 2. Appreciate the suggestion though as it provides options.

Anyway, I'm currently using the backup system to do my rips, but if I need another drive for that system, that Plextor in option 1 is a nice choice.

BTW, I'm in the US. Thanks

What i meant is get a 12v internal drive and use an enclosure to make it external usable.

Didn't know that you are in USA, you get a lot of NOS Plextor in Ebay.

 

[anirban420]

I believe @anirban420 did a poll on this sometime last year with sample files from original and later copies , and most weren’t able to identify the original.

Correct @Bloom@83 . That was a fun yet serious experiment that we conducted last year.

Fun project to beat the lockdown blues: you could compare a factory CD with your burned CD and check if there's degradation in the burned copy. MD5 checksum on the copy will prove that the copy is perfect, but is there a difference in the sonics?

Dear FM @jls001 - I with my friends have done a blindfold test regarding the difference in aural sonic quality between an original and its copied CDs. We have used up to ten sequential copies for this test. The thread can be found here. In the blindfold test, the majority of the participants could not identify any sonic difference among the tested files.

Regarding the sonic difference between ripping drives, I have personally checked between multiple drives, there is no difference. I had planned to establish this phenomenon again through an open-mode blindfold test, I could not allot time, preparation and follow-up of such test need time. The same holds true for the sonic differences between different ripping software, we get sonically identical files. But without any logical test, these phenomena remain inconclusive and I am not in a place to give any statement solely based on my personal observation.

 

[jls001]

Dear FM @jls001 - I with my friends have done a blindfold test regarding the difference in aural sonic quality between an original and its copied CDs.

Thanks for the detailed report, @anirban420.

This agrees with my experience. I personally could not hear sonic differences between original and burned CDs in my modest setup. I've done the same experiment at friend's places too. These setups are considered high end by any metrics. The listeners are also very experienced audiophiles. And none could identify a burned CD from the original. Caveat being none of the test subjects were blindfolded. So as far as I'm concerned I've disproved this audiophile dogma for myself.

 

[balavignesh002]

where did you get the plextor ? have been looking for one !

Missed your question. Bought it from Amazon.com. got it delivered in India. Enclosure from eBay.

 

[anirban420]

The only way I see forward of ripping & preserving without being dependent on an undependable storage solution like a Mechanical or SSD drive is to make the CD's image thus not loosing an iota of that CDs quality by Nero or IMG burn etc and DL then storing in HDD before transferring to a Bluray disk or a Dual Layer DVD. A very long and time consuming process but at the end of the day your work won't be redundant depending on a HDD.

I also do a similar thing. I make CD images and store them on my hard disk. Simultaneously I keep a 1-to-1 backup of my hard disks.

CD images have many advantages. It can be played back by loading onto a virtual drive, it can also be ripped from there. Just like ripped wav/flac files, images can be portable if stored on an external drive. When needed, a physical CD can be burned as an identical copy of the original CD via a single click on the image.

And yeah, backups help too

+1

 

[Sean de Silva]

I also do a similar thing. I make CD images and store them on my hard disk. Simultaneously I keep a 1-to-1 backup of my hard disks.

CD images have many advantages. It can be played back by loading onto a virtual drive, it can also be ripped from there. Just like ripped wav/flac files, images can be portable if stored on an external drive. When needed, a physical CD can be burned as an identical copy of the original CD via a single click on the image.


+1

@anirban420 Can https://www.imgburn.com/ be used to create an image file from files (ripped wav) already existing on the pc hdd. I read that a single ISO file cannot be created of an audio CD which has multiple tracks. I would appreciate if you could share how you go about this process.

 

[MIOM]

The only way I see forward of ripping & preserving without being dependent on an undependable storage solution like a Mechanical or SSD drive is to make the CD's image thus not loosing an iota of that CDs quality by Nero or IMG burn etc and DL then storing in HDD before transferring to a Bluray disk or a Dual Layer DVD. A very long and time consuming process but at the end of the day your work won't be redundant depending on a HDD.

This to me defeats the purpose of what I'm doing in "digitizing" my music.

Why would I want to copy a CD to CD when I already have... a CD? Especially when I'm trying to reduce the amount of physical space taken up by my collection? With that, that's not an option I'm willing to entertain. I already have a CD collection; I don't need to make "CD copies" of them.

And in the world of "what ifs", yes drives can go bad, but your house can burn down, and you lose everything so...

Anyway, my plan is to rip to an HDD drive and backup as necessary. What I'm not doing is copying CD to CD. That's me.

 

[anirban420]

@anirban420 Can https://www.imgburn.com/ be used to create an image file from files (ripped wav) already existing on the pc hdd. I read that a single ISO file cannot be created of an audio CD which has multiple tracks. I would appreciate if you could share how you go about this process.

You are right, ISO can not be created from an Audio CD. I make .nrg files using Nero. Load them back on PowerISO's virtual drive as a virtual CD. This virtual CD can be played back via VLC. Ripping can be done from PowerISO. Nero created images are widely supported by many virtual drive applications. So, except for PowerISO, any kind of virtual drive software can be used in this process. Also, besides Nero, PowerISO can create disk images in CUE-BIN format. Two files are generated in this process - .cue and .bin - much like a cue/wav rip of an audio CD. Sometimes, .nrg images of Video CDs fail to load onto a virtual drive, but cue/bin image never failed, I do not know the reason for such failure. So for the sake of simplicity, I make the backup of Video CDs in cue/bin only. Cue/Bin is also a standard image file format and supports many virtual drive software.

Besides keeping the image files of my Audio CDs, I also keep high-resolution scans of every page of the inlay. It serves two purposes. During playback using the computer, which I do often, I do not need the physical CD anymore, so it saves time and effort. Secondly, I am a Discogs contributor. I use these scans for Discogs entry.

If you have already created WAV rips, then you can use them as it is for playback. Whenever you need to burn a disk from them, you can simply use any burning software like NERO and burn a blank CD using "Audio CD" mode. Although, in the same process of burning a CD, you can also make an image file of the WAVs. To do that, simply go to the target drive of your burning software (eg. Nero), and select the destination drive as Image Drive (In Nero 8.1, this option is called "Use Nero Image Recorder" and is enabled via a tick mark near the drive selection option). After initiating the "Burn" process, you will get a "Save As' dialogue box to save your disk image.

 

[IndianEars]

anirban420
Interesting archive option.

However it seems you cant create a library to use these files for locating a specific track n playing it ....

 

[anirban420]

anirban420
Interesting archive option.

However it seems you cant create a library to use these files for locating a specific track n playing it ....

Yes. You pointed out correctly. Individual tracks can not be located. That is a drawback. Search is possible up to the folder name which contains the album name and for solo albums, the artist/band name also. But since I have an idea about my collection, for me, it is not that much of an issue to locate a track. It is much like searching a physical library with a catalogue of albums names in hand but in a virtual way.

 

[viveshsahu]

Hello to all....

Anyone "digitizing" their CD collection? As a music collector I have amassed over 2,700 music CD's since they became available. Also have a vinyl collection but that's nowhere as large (about 900).

Anyway, I'm about to embark on this journey of ripping all these CD's to an external hard drive. Over the years I've ripped something like 600 thus far, but I was being selective. This time everything gets ripped. Also doing this to free up physical space around the house as 2,700 CD's take up a lot of space....

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Will be encoding in uncompressed flac using dBpoweramp as I have a lot of "audiophile edition" CD's as well.

Anyone else? Thoughts?

Wow!! great collection you have and it looks great on those racks. EAC is a great program to rip and it automatically add all track properties with a single key press.

 

[venkatcr]

Enclosure:

Option 1

10K for just an enclosure? That is crazy pricing.

 

[balavignesh002]

10K for just an enclosure? That is crazy pricing.

I think it's around 50 usd in USA.. Amazon India over charges it. But it's the best enclosure available in market.