FLAC and CDs

In a vain attempt to reclaim some space in the house, I'm considering ripping a few hundred CDs to FLAC. I'll put whatever I want to keep long-term in storage, and the rest either goes to the charity shop/goodwill, or first come, first serve on here for free (although I'll have to ask any takers to pick up the postage costs. Beer money is always nice though!).

 

I'm all set for encoding and digital storage space isn't an issue, but is there anything I should be mindful of before I embark on this project? I don't anticipate it taking a huge amount of time/effort, but it's sizable enough that I'd like to try and consider any potential hiccups now rather than later. If anyone else has done likewise, I'm all ears.

Nope, just make sure the encoder ID-tags and names the files properly (well as per your needs) and all will be fine. I used EAC for my ripping, though made a mistake of not really thinking ahead with how space would become so readily available - so to date I've ripped my 200+ CD collection first at 160kbps, then a couple of years later 192kbps, and then a couple of years after that v0. I'll probably go through the whole process again in a few years to finally have them as lossless flacs.

make sure you make backups. i did this once and put all my cds as flacs onto an external HD which was one of those mybook wester digital ones that is designed to stand upright. it's also fairly heavy. one decent bump into it and it falls over hard and i lose everything. i had no idea such a thing could happen, at least not that a single fall could cause an instant loss. i lost some things i was working on, but also my ripped cds. so i had to go through the process all over again and it took several days.

 

after i found out how vulnerable those things are, i couldn't believe that they would design an external with little rubber legs/feet on it for it to be stood upright, knowing that if it fell it would likely be done. and not at least have a big warning telling you about knocking it over. if i knew i would have only ever laid it flat. guess they sell more externals that way. but the next i bought from them was very begrudgingly.

 

so make sure your collection is on at least 2 separate drives after you've ripped it.

  On 6/27/2013 at 2:43 PM, MisterE said:

so make sure your collection is on at least 2 separate drives after you've ripped it.

Oh yeah, good point - definitely this !

  On 6/27/2013 at 2:41 PM, mcbpete said:

made a mistake of not really thinking ahead with how space would become so readily available - so to date I've ripped my 200+ CD collection first at 160kbps, then a couple of years later 192kbps, and then a couple of years after that v0. I'll probably go through the whole process again in a few years to finally have them as lossless flacs.

 

This.

 

I'm currently ripping all my CDs (1000+) for the third time due to another ipod death and I tend to rip at 192kbps as it means I can get more on there. The first time I did it I couldn't actually keep a back up as my ipod had more storage than my hard drive lol.

 

But now that I'm almost 3/4 done, I'm thinking hmmm. Maybe I should do them lossless too

  On 6/27/2013 at 2:46 PM, mcbpete said:

 

  On 6/27/2013 at 2:43 PM, MisterE said:

so make sure your collection is on at least 2 separate drives after you've ripped it.

Oh yeah, good point - definitely this !

 

 

I've been meaning to pick up another external to clone my original external for just this reason. Getting paranoid as it's a few years old now...

  On 6/27/2013 at 2:43 PM, MisterE said:

make sure you make backups. i did this once and put all my cds as flacs onto an external HD which was one of those mybook wester digital ones that is designed to stand upright. it's also fairly heavy. one decent bump into it and it falls over hard and i lose everything. i had no idea such a thing could happen, at least not that a single fall could cause an instant loss. i lost some things i was working on, but also my ripped cds. so i had to go through the process all over again and it took several days.

 

after i found out how vulnerable those things are, i couldn't believe that they would design an external with little rubber legs/feet on it for it to be stood upright, knowing that if it fell it would likely be done. and not at least have a big warning telling you about knocking it over. if i knew i would have only ever laid it flat. guess they sell more externals that way. but the next i bought from them was very begrudgingly.

 

so make sure your collection is on at least 2 separate drives after you've ripped it.

to be entirely fair to the manufacturer of the hard disk, mechanical hard disks have always been fragile.

 

this is one of the benefits of moving to entirely SSD based storage. but there is a massive cost involved there

  On 6/27/2013 at 2:50 PM, oscillik said:

this is one of the benefits of moving to entirely SSD based storage. but there is a massive cost involved there

 

Fo'sho.

 

I'm getting a new Macbook soon and I considered the SSD one but it's a chunk more cash for less space.

  On 6/27/2013 at 2:50 PM, oscillik said:

this is one of the benefits of moving to entirely SSD based storage. but there is a massive cost involved there

As a backup device SSD is definitely the way forward (though I'll give it a few years for prices to drop), though I've heard there's a bit of an issue with using it as your day-to-day boot drive due to constant read-write cycles causing (I think it's called) NAND failure - http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923.html. I've just picked up a hybrid ssd/spinning disk which sounds like the best of both worlds (cheap price, but fast data-access)

Further info: I've been using EAC over the last few weeks using user-defined encoder settings for FLAC, and it works a treat. With a little initial configuration, I can ID-tag stuff with ease, and produce cue and log files where necessary. I have kept up a consistent library of my CD rips at 320k mp3s over the last 3 to 4 years (after obliterating a lot of old 128k rips - shudder), but from a backup perspective I feel happier going down the FLAC route now, especially with the cost of storage being at a reasonable enough level to make doing it a little easier on the pocket than a few years back.

 

I'm very much aware of the need for data redundancy. I had a massive data loss 2 years ago (pro-tip: when formatting a hard drive, be sure exactly which drive you're formatting). Fortunately I used some pretty hardcore software and manage to reclaim about 90% of the data... but it took weeks to do! However, in a way I'm glad it happened, as it opened my eyes to my lackadaisical approach to storing data. Since then, I've set up RAID solutions, home server, and so on. It makes me facepalm when I think of friends/family members who have no clue how easily they could lose all their precious documents/treasured photos, just because they only keep it all stored on a single drive in their laptop, and expect it to last forever. I gave up trying to educate people, because it's always 'hmm... but that'll cost money' or 'sounds a bit technical for me'. Anyway, a topic to discuss for another day, perhaps!

  On 6/27/2013 at 3:00 PM, mcbpete said:

 

  On 6/27/2013 at 2:50 PM, oscillik said:

this is one of the benefits of moving to entirely SSD based storage. but there is a massive cost involved there

As a backup device SSD is definitely the way forward (though I'll give it a few years for prices to drop), though I've heard there's a bit of an issue with using it as your day-to-day boot drive due to constant read-write cycles causing (I think it's called) NAND failure - http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923.html. I've just picked up a hybrid ssd/spinning disk which sounds like the best of both worlds (cheap price, but fast data-access)

 

all SSDs do have a finite amount of writes (reading is fine, it's writes that kill SSDs), but depending on which chipset you get depends on how this effect is exacerbated. SandForce based SSDs (the vast majority of them out there) are the most susceptible.

 

But as long as you're getting a modern one (made in the last year or two) and you take precautions to turn off things like disk caching and things like that, you're good to go.

 

I bought one of these for my recent computer build, and after using SSD I won't ever go back to a mechanical hard disk as a boot drive, and I'm strongly considering getting a larger capacity one solely for my games.

Edited June 27, 2013 by oscillik

Ooh, fun topic. Sounds like you're on the right track. The only thing I've found is, it's very worth it to follow the guides out there for setting up EAC for 'perfect' rips. Checking the CRCs, using AccurateRip and secure mode, etc.

 

All rippers are not created equal, and EAC is a good one, but since Redbook audio has no built in checksums and a spinning disc is a somewhat chaotic system, it's possible for a single instance of a rip to be 'bad' (as in, some bits were read wrong), and in that case you'd want to redo it. This can frequently be due to scratches on the disc, etc, but not necessarily.

 

What I do is basically what you are describing (I use EAC and XLD, depending on what OS I'm in), but the most important step is right after the rip, before you spend a bunch of time tagging or archiving files, read the log and make sure the rip was 'perfect'. I find about 1 out of every 5 times I have to give the disc a second go, just for chaos theory reasons.

Edited June 27, 2013 by Ascdi

  On 6/27/2013 at 3:09 PM, jasondonervan said:

Further info: I've been using EAC over the last few weeks using user-defined encoder settings for FLAC, and it works a treat.

 

Good choice in using EAC I've used EAC to backup a few dozen CDs of mine, though I ripped them in .wav which was probably overkill. (I suppose I could convert them to .flac to save space. I mean, it's technically just as lossless correct? Just a more efficient algorithm?) EAC is awesome at indicating any errors as you're copying it as well.

^Ascdi - Good point, and yes I have been checking the logs fairly diligently. The Pioneer disc drive I'm using is less than 12 months old, so I have good faith that the laser is doing it's job correctly.

 

 

What's really pushed me over the edge to go all in with FLAC is that I've got myself into a position where I can satisfactorily play the files back from:

 

- main PC (using foobar) via wired connection via switch to home server;

- UPnP-enabled AV receiver - again, using the same connection method as the PC;

- iOS devices using TuneShell.

 

On a side note, I'm still not entirely convinced about whether or not I'm genuinely perceiving a quality increase - but it does feel like the stereo field is wider? I dunno, could be a load of cobblers/all in the mind, but no danger in pressing on with the lossless revolution

Edited June 27, 2013 by jasondonervan

Sounds like you're on the right track JD... although the quality increase you perceive is completely placebo! (lossless is lossless after all, think about ordinary zip compression of data for example). I've archived some 200+ CDs to flac over the past couple of years w/ EAC and have a good handle on the workflow, and definitely echo the recommendations on backing up your files.

 

The best/most important tool to verify that you're getting "perfect" rips is to use EAC's AccurateRip feature, which compares the CRC's of your tracks against a database of others who ripped the same disc. You can even rip in burst mode instead of secure mode (much faster), and so long as AR confirms that all tracks were ripped accurately you're all set.

Thanks Bob. I'm using AccurateRip, it's reporting in the logs so I think I've got that sorted.

 

I had a minor breakthrough earlier - I had been manually adding DISCNUMBER, TOTALDISCS, TOTALTRACKS fields (yes, I'm fussy), but dug around and managed to sound out the correct command-line options to pipe in alongside all of the other field names. It worked! So now it's just a case of bung a disc in, hit the freedb button and if all looks good, away it goes.

  On 6/27/2013 at 9:02 PM, Bob Dobalina said:

Sounds like you're on the right track JD... although the quality increase you perceive is completely placebo!

Definitely, I used to happily rip to LAME V2 back when hard disk space was an issue for me. The real benefit of lossless is that you have a CD quality backup that you can transcode to any current or future lossy format (e.g. Vorbis if you have devices that support it) without introducing generation loss (because a 320 MP3 or q10 Vorbis will sound perfect to anyone nearly all of the time, but transcode one to the other and chances are it will start sounding like shit). Or you can transcode them losslessly if or when a more efficient lossless format comes along.

 

  On 6/27/2013 at 9:02 PM, Bob Dobalina said:

The best/most important tool to verify that you're getting "perfect" rips is to use EAC's AccurateRip feature, which compares the CRC's of your tracks against a database of others who ripped the same disc. You can even rip in burst mode instead of secure mode (much faster), and so long as AR confirms that all tracks were ripped accurately you're all set.

Burst Mode + Test & Copy is faster and arguably more secure than the Secure Mode as long as you have a look at the result. If AccurateRip gives the okay you're done, otherwise just visually inspect the CRCs for the Test and the Copy (in EAC or the log it produces) for mismatches. If that fails you can still switch to the slower Secure Mode. Just use Copy then, because the Secure mode reads everything at least twice by default:

 

  Quote

In secure mode this program either reads every audio sector at least twice or rely on extended error information that some drives are able to return with the audio data. That is one reason why the program is slower than other rippers. But by using this technique non-identical sectors are detected. If an error occurs (read or sync error), the program keeps on reading this sector, until eight of 16 retries are identical, but at maximum one, three or five times (according to the selected error recovery quality) these 16 retries are read. So, in the worst case, bad sectors are read up to 82 times! But this effort will help the program to obtain the best result by comparing all of the retries.

This is also why Burst Mode + Test & Copy is arguably more secure. Burst Mode reads the track in one go and it's highly unlikely that over two rips a couple of bad sectors would produce errors in a way that results in the exact same CRC across the whole track. Whereas with Secure Mode, every single problematic sector is read up to 82 times, and if any set of 16 reads contains the same error 8 times, Secure Mode will let that sector pass. Edited June 27, 2013 by manmower

The problem as I see it with relying solely on AR is that for more obscure discs there may be like, 1 or 2 AR db entries, and I've run into occasions where they were just dead wrong, including the dreaded "different pressing" issue.

 

So what I've personally decided upon is AR on, test and copy always on, and then if there are a lot of AR results available, I use burst mode. If there are very few AR results available, or if burst mode is barfing for some reason, I switch to secure mode. IMO there's no harm in using test and copy with secure mode, and considering the number of times I still get freaky one-off bad CRCs from secure mode rips, I'm happy with this method.

 

Also, if you get new releases fairly regularly (as most of us do), there may be very few or no AR results in the db. Just what works for me…

Edited June 27, 2013 by Ascdi

  On 6/27/2013 at 2:50 PM, oscillik said:

 

to be entirely fair to the manufacturer of the hard disk, mechanical hard disks have always been fragile.

 

this is one of the benefits of moving to entirely SSD based storage. but there is a massive cost involved there

 

maybe so, but why did they put rubber feet on the end of it so people would sit it standing upright? its an external so its still going to be something people plug in and unplug and move around which makes it more likely to be knocked over. the new one i have is a my passport which you can really only lay flat. i think they still sell the my books though, and i don't see why they would design something like that to be stood up considering how heavy they are. if it falls over with just a nudge on a solid floor, good chance it's done.

  On 6/27/2013 at 3:00 PM, mcbpete said:

 

  On 6/27/2013 at 2:50 PM, oscillik said:

this is one of the benefits of moving to entirely SSD based storage. but there is a massive cost involved there

As a backup device SSD is definitely the way forward (though I'll give it a few years for prices to drop), though I've heard there's a bit of an issue with using it as your day-to-day boot drive due to constant read-write cycles causing (I think it's called) NAND failure - http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923.html. I've just picked up a hybrid ssd/spinning disk which sounds like the best of both worlds (cheap price, but fast data-access)

 

ssd as backup? i don't know about that. i would consider backup as something i'm not going to access too often, and just put stuff on every once in a while and keep it somewhere safe. ssd doesn't have the same capacity unless you are willing to spend out the ass, and its super fast access times arent really needed if its just for backup anyway. as far as i'm concerned, HDD is still the more sensible option for backup. a good (western digital caviar) HDD will prob last you at least 10yrs if you only use it for backup. and you could get 3tb for dirt cheap.

Edited June 27, 2013 by MisterE

The quality of the Disc Drive you're using to rip the CDs is another factor that may be worth considering. It's preferable that a drive not cache audio data and if it does it's important that you turn on EAC's option to defeat the audio cache. I have a Blu-Ray drive made by 'Lite-On' and it has been a great drive for my rips! DAE snobs have traditionally sworn by drives made by Plextor and they are not wrong; Plextor made some excellent drives back in the day but I don't think there are any new enough to have a SATA interface.

Here's a silly idea: why go through all the burden of backing up your collection, if there's a cloud where there are backups ready available?

I mostly use what.cd as a back up. It's there right? Why on earth would you have to rip your own cd's as well? Completely redundant.

I ripped my entire CD collection to lossless a couple of years ago. Was about 500+ CDs and did the whole EAC proper rip thing. Took awhile but now I have all of it digitized.

I ripped my cd collection to flac years ago. I use eac for ripping cds, or dbpoweramp on the rare occasion that eac doesn't work for a particular cd. pro-tip: once you get eac set up just right for a particular cd drive, save the configuration file to something like dropbox. if the cd isn't in the freedb database yet, I'll usually use the discogs tagger add-on for foobar2000 to tag the album after I've ripped it, unless I feel like entering the fields manually. the great thing about flac, apart from the sound quality, is that since it's lossless, if a superior (e.g. more compact) format comes out in the future, you can just convert your flacs to that format.

  On 6/28/2013 at 9:47 AM, nene multiple assgasms said:

since it's lossless, if a superior (e.g. more compact) format comes out in the future, you can just convert your flacs to that format.

 

This is mainly why I'm doing it.

So you're giving away your CDs? Unlike cool people, I buy CDs instead of vinyls, hence I am interested! Do you have your collection listed on discogs or somewhere else?