Interesting thread on ripping music, esp the 9th posting

[GeorgeO]

Lossless--Better late than never...

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

When it comes to listening to music, the origin of which may have given me no choice of format, I have given up even thinking about what the format is. It is what it is, and the music I hear is the music I hear.

However...

When we rip, or otherwise record, our own music, we have a choice, and it seems to me to be wrong to select any method/format that does not give us all of that music even if we can't actually hear any difference. Reasons vary from considering who else might listen to our rips to principle and being comfortable.

Compression (as in FLAC, lossless) is ok: it is just a question of storage technology --- but lossy compression works by throwing part of the music away, and however clever the algorithm, and however good the processing might be, why would we do that?

I'd also add one IT-management comment on backups... There should be two. One should be handy, and the other one should be at a different location.

This is important: the external-hdd attached to your machine does nothing to protect you against fire, flood, burglary, or even a nasty mains voltage spike, or lightening, that fries your machine and everything connected to it. Do what the pros do: keep off-site backups.

 

[Staxxx]

I bought enough back up drives and even a NAS for back up....but i do not know how to do this systematically and easily.
I often copy and move items from one external hard drive to another (I use 7 plugged into my music player) and at other times I am busy "organizing" my music - whether by composer or type of music etc. At other times I convert the format I have purchased the album on into WAV64 etc. So at all times my primary collection is dynamic.
I wish I had a simple way to keep all the back ups that I made about a year ago current. It would be very painful to reformat all the drives and re-copy everything over again.

 

[Rockfella]

I find it hard to find good music these days, the old ones are mostly available online (as a backup forever). Perhaps you guys some really rare collection.

 

[esanthosh]

I would think most people would be much more organized than me. But here's my unasked for two cents anyways.

1) My collection is pretty small. All my CDs were ripped using EAC using the settings outlined here. I set it once long back and forgot about it.

2) I ripped all my CDs to FLAC. From there, it's pretty easy to convert into anything I want using foobar and plugins (WAV for QLS QA350, 320kbps MP3 for Clip+ and iPod Video 5.5G, VBR-0 for space starved Sony E353). Each conversion goes to Devices -> <Device Name> folder. I am hoping to someday get a portable device that replaces everything so that I can get rid of that folder and add more music.

3) My collection is organized in a very standard way

Music

--> Genre
---> Artist
--> Year - Album
--> Track No - Track

I am not very picky about Genre. For example, "Atmospheric Black Metal", "Progressive Psychedelic Black Metal" all go into a folder named "Black Metal".

For Classical, depending on how the original CD is organized, I choose the <artist> name accordingly. I have a Mahler CD collection as well as a Jascha Heifetz collection. I would choose "Gustav Mahler" and "Jascha Heifetz" respectively as <artist> name and arrange them CD wise.

4) I have never used anything other than MP3Tag. I manually select Album Art from Amazon / CD Covers as the case may be. For all albums with various artists, "Various Artists" is the 'Album Artist' tag with individual artists for each track. For Classical, I use <Composer> tag for Composer name as well as <Album Artist> tag for Conductor, Orchestra information. But then, my Classical collection is very minimal. So, the work is not huge.

5) Even if I get music from <you know where> to try out, I always make sure I have proper tags so that they work nicely across my portable devices. There is also an <Unorganized> folder (in root, along with Music folder) where every other 'borrowed' music I have not tagged yet goes.

6) Since my collection is small, it fits within a 1 TB disk. Every time I add anything, I use Microsoft SyncToy to back it up to an external 1 TB HDD.

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

I bought enough back up drives and even a NAS for back up....but i do not know how to do this systematically and easily.
I often copy and move items from one external hard drive to another (I use 7 plugged into my music player) and at other times I am busy "organizing" my music - whether by composer or type of music etc. At other times I convert the format I have purchased the album on into WAV64 etc. So at all times my primary collection is dynamic.
I wish I had a simple way to keep all the back ups that I made about a year ago current. It would be very painful to reformat all the drives and re-copy everything over again.

I use software called grsync on linux. Not too hard to imagine that it is rsync with a graphical user interface. It will sync given directories, and there is the option to delete on the backup or not, so you can replicate your reorganisations.

I had a great tool on Windows that did much the same, but I've forgotten the same.

Another great Linux tool is FSlint which, amongst a heap of other stuff, will
find duplicate files, even if they have different names, so when you do end up with multiple copies you can do a clearup.

 

[hydra]

I use dbPoweramp to rip to WAV. 99% of the CDs get ripped with "Accurate Rip", which is considered to be as good as an EAC Rip. 99% of the CDs also get the required tags over the internet, as they are being ripped. If tags are not readily not available, I type in the tags right away.

I used to rip to FLAC, but now dbpoweramp can assign tags to WAV files, and JRMC (my front end) can read and organize by these tags too, so I nowadays I rip to WAV. I'm very particular about tagging, esp. as that is my only form of organization.

The CDs (and other music) are ripped/organized into individual folders labelled <Artist>-<Album> (<bitrate resolution> <yesr>) [<format>]. Album Art is downloaded and then put into each folder with the filename "folder.jpg". These folders then get dropped into my "Music" folder. The front-end takes care of organizing the music by Genre, Artist, Album.

I keep a single folder called "Music", so as to avoid multiple levels based on genre and artist and album (This increases file-path length, and sooner or later becomes a problem while backing up).

I keep a single on-site backup on HDD, a single off-site HDD backup and also write all of the music onto DVDs as a separate on-site backup. The on-site backup is refreshed every time I copy new music into the Music PC. (I just copy the same music into the on-site HDD right away). DVDs are written as and when I have 4GB plus unwritten music. The off-site backup is kept in my office, and that is updated as and when I rip/acquire the music (I rip the CDs in my office).

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

Very good back-up system. I suspect you of being an IT professional!

 

[hydra]

I'm actually not an IT professional: I run a small publishing business. I taught myself to manage my own IT (hardware and software) needs, and 12 years of doing that has taught me many lessons (and saved me a lot of money)!

 

[jls001]

Most of my rips are through EAC, to wav. If EAC spends too much time trying to rip a CD, I use Windows Media Player to rip, again to wav.

I am particular about organising my music into genres. Within genres, each album is simply named <Artist> - <Album name> and sorted in alphabetical order. So it is quite easy to home in on what one wants to play. But I do sometimes face a lot of problems trying to pigeonhole a particular artist into a specific genre. So I also have genres called "Mixed Bags" and "Far-Outs"

 

[technobhatt]

I have bought very few CDs (mostly Hindi albums) which I have ripped through EAC and all of them are ripped in FLAC with appropriate tags. For most of the Hindi albums, tags and artwork are not available easily...so I take them from internet doing some manual search and in return... I never forget uploading artwork, wiki or tags to "last.fm" so that it may be available there forever.
As of now, my collection is under 400 GB, so everything is in my computer. And I have saved the same in a 1TB External HDD as a primary backup in case of any unfortunate incident.
I specially care about Hindi FLACs and English Movies Soundtrack albums (in lossless format) which are hardly available to find or available only during a specific time.

I'm very particular about organizing my collection. Apart from managing albums folder wise appropriately, I differentiate them the folders with their format either FLAC, WAV, 320Kbps MP3 etc. In Windows 7 Music folder, I keep my collection like this:
ENGLISH Music - LOSSLESS
ENGLISH Music - LOSSY
HINDI Music - LOSSLESS
HINDI Music - LOSSY
An album is shown in foobar like this. (Artist is shown in background as per foobar setting. I generally keep CD Back image as Artist so that it is shown in background while playing the album songs.)

 

[reignofchaos]

I rip using EAC, accurate rip and make sure that every cd I rip is an image not individual files. An ISO image + cue sheet is way easier to tag and save. All one has to do is query freedb with the iso and all the info magically appears. Pretty impossible to do the same if the CD has been converted to files. Don't really care for compression - I have over 12TB of local storage.

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

I am particular about organising my music into genres. Within genres, each album is simply named <Artist> - <Album name> and sorted in alphabetical order. So it is quite easy to home in on what one wants to play. But I do sometimes face a lot of problems trying to pigeonhole a particular artist into a specific genre. So I also have genres called "Mixed Bags" and "Far-Outs"

Would it not be better for you to use one of the media-player management systems to organise your music?

I absolutely avoid them. I don't have that much anyway, and I suppose I'm an old-school file-and-directory man. When I started added music to the PC, I had probably not even heard of tagging, and I prefer that directory-tree approach. I reject any player that tries to make me use its database, or that makes it hard for me to find and use "open file".

I avoid organising by file format because once it comes to listening, I don't even think about it --- unless it is for transfer to a portable device.

 

[jls001]

Would it not be better for you to use one of the media-player management systems to organise your music?

I absolutely avoid them. I don't have that much anyway, and I suppose I'm an old-school file-and-directory man. When I started added music to the PC, I had probably not even heard of tagging, and I prefer that directory-tree approach. I reject any player that tries to make me use its database, or that makes it hard for me to find and use "open file".

I avoid organising by file format because once it comes to listening, I don't even think about it --- unless it is for transfer to a portable device.

I listen very less from my music PC. Ripping my CDs is more for archival and backup purpose. I am happy to spin them on the CD player. Besides, I (slightly) prefer the sound of the CDP to the PC because I feel it is more true to musical tones, whereas the PC has a slight hardness.

I am old school too and believe in directory and file structure. In fact the term "folder" hasn't really sunken into my mind. Earlier versions of Windows used to use the term "directory". So it is still directory in my mind, and not "folder". I guess that comes with gaining acquaintance of computers through Unix terminals and line printers .

The only organising I need is genre based. Within that, I am happy to have albums named as "Artist - Album Name".

The ability to tag is nice when one has a media player that can search content by tags. But I don't even care much for that most basic of tags - the album art. I can happily live without it. I get annoyed when Windows recognises folders containing music and start showing track number, artist, contributing artist, album, etc. I want to see file size and file type. So I invariably change folder property to treat such folders as General:lol:

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

We differ only in that I now mostly use the PC for music playback.

(and in that I have now given up Windows completely, but that's just a detail)

I still, though, have a great number of un-ripped CDs. And some un-digitised vinyl.

(As of today, a pre-amp has joined me in my PC corner: I will now be able to attach TT/phono-pre, cassette, whatever, and listen on same headphones or powered speakers as PC/DAC. It should be like having my own hifi for the first time, again!)

 

[GeorgeO]

I have completely given up on disks, it's 100% digital both fro audio and video.