Need to redo my whole CD collection. Currently it’s all in 256 VBR but I want to re-rip all music discs into WAV so I can store them once and for all and convert to any format I need from there. Just want them in an external hard drive for DJing, iPhone, etc, etc.
I’m not going to use the drive on my macbook to do that - any recommended external CD drive to do so? It’s about a 1000 CDs.
Id look into using FLAC instead of wav.
its also lossless and also slightly smaller.
Okay yeah I could do that. But any hardware advice? A CD drive that can read with damned good data correction and reliable? I can remember from years back, Plextor were good - still the case?
no idea about that im afraid.
i do know that philips sucks though, so at least thats one brand you shouldnt invest in…
i’ve been using LiteOn Drives for years (CD, DVD, burning), and had pretty good results. MACs even used them a while back.
LiteOn is okay, but Plextor’s are still the Cadillac’s of CD burners.
I’d go with Flac as the back & forth to .wav is easy enough.
if you go .flac make sure to always have various .flac drivers and such on that external drive. it would be a shame to be somewhere and you plug in your drive only to find out the guy’s pc/mac doesn’t have .flac drivers/codecs/players
flac yes. shn is dead - only hippies are using it. stick with wav to have forever availability.
Thanks guys.
When ripping the CDs, the slower speed the better or does this not matter?
Anyone have any good plextor/liteon model numbers to go for? There shouldn’t be a latency issue with usb, I hope? I suppose I’d prefer firewire 800.
I use the cdparanoia program to the rip the CDs which really does a good job at it. It checks for errors while ripping but it would be good if the hardware end of things also did this.
Thanks for all the tips.
ya know some people would say that you will lose something at fast ripping - but i’ve never noticed a difference. in my experience USB drives are kinda slow - i’d go firewire if you can - but they are more expensive.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827106098
Though, can’t find any reviews for this on other sites - anyone know where to look? Seems like it should get the job done and is reasonably priced.
ahh, too late - bought it.
or you could just walk your ass over to
best buy and buy some…
[:P]
looks good man. looks good. btw, i love newegg. i buy all of my personal stuff and all of my gear for everyone at my office there as well.
crucial - RAM
newegg - everything else
plextor is the way to go…been using since 95!
There is no reliable error correction for audio CDs for technical reasons. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripping#Obtaining_an_accurate_rip
Therefore slower ripping might be the better way, so the CD drive has more time to look a the bits and see if they have errors or not. Normally a CD/DVD drive can tell the software the max. speed for reading audio data, which is significantly lower than for data CDs. Good ripping tools take that in consideration.
Plextor drives were great for many years, but now I think there are less differences between vendors and drives. During the last 2-3 years I prefered LG drives and was always satisfied with them.
USB shouldn’t be a problem as long as it is USB 2.0. The controllers inside external USB cases are universal, so you might want to buy a 5.25" case and put in any IDE CD/DVD drive that you want.
Okay, just want to get this right… I appreciate all the input.
I got everything set up and I’m going to use ripit to do the ripping and encoding:
http://www.suwald.com/ripit/ripit.html
Converting to FLAC with 0 compression level. After processing the file, it gives the info:
FLAC audio bitstream data, 16 bit, stereo, 44.1 kHz, 15638448 samples
So converting to MP3, or WAV, or Apple’s AAC should not be a problem - no quality loss (when going to WAV for example)? The FLAC has the same quality as a WAV file?
yes, FLAC is completely losseless.
use FLAC level 8!!
Level 8 as in compression level? I’m using level 0 or this, -0:
-0…-8, --compression-level-0…–compression-level-8
Fastest compression…highest compression (default is -5). These are synonyms for other options:
-0, --compression-level-0
Synonymous with -l 0 -b 1152 -r 2,2
Is this okay? I have the drive space - not worried about that.
It’ll still be the best most quality if I choose 8? Here it is:
-8, --compression-level-8
Synonymous with -l 12 -b 4608 -m -e -r 6
–best Highest compression. Currently synonymous with -8.
Essentially, I want to ask, regardless of compression, it will still be lossless? I chose 0 to be safe and hard drive space isn’t that much of an issue…
Edit: Nevermind:
http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=17203
I guess time is not on my side so I’m shutting off compression. I did a test with level 0 and 8 and there wasn’t a significant size difference.
Thanks guys - already did the K-M artists 