[Closed] Help me get rid of my CD's. Digitizing help please...

nothing ventured nothing gained, so ive selected to rip to my portable HD. only problem i can see is that even tho its a genuine cd, its all listed as track 1, track 2, no info etc so i may be onto a loser after all. yep i could go through each file afterwards renaming but not sure whether i can be bothered.

ah thatd be handy, thanks for that, ill look into it when ive got a few done. speaking of which.....

ive got 5 ripped now, been watching them complete so i thought id take stock and look at where theyve gone, what theyre called etc.
i can only find the first one! ive got a folder on HD that bluray must have created called MD and its gont one 'unknown album' in there, i played it and its the first one i did. so, where have the others gone? ive had a look at all other folders (which i created for other stuff) and they dont seem to be anywhere.

also as expected for a bog standard bluray player, i dont get any choice in how i save them, so no flac, its only mp3 and it says at 192kbps. i cant change that, it is what it is. is that a decent quality or am i better off just binning the idea?

thanks

EDIT: just seen what its doing. theres the one unknown album and everything is going in there, so for the different albums ive got track 1, track 1(1), track 1(2), track 1(3). cant be doing with that, looks like its a no-no unless i could have got the bluray to find the info prior.

ah well, thanks for your help anyway.

CD's with NO print over the foil side degrade badly, they get "holes".

Printed ones tend not to.

ive tried around 20 cds now, all the same. just been on live chat with samsung who say theres a fault and i need to pay to get it fixed. naah, dont think ill bother :-/

ah well, nice idea while it lasted....

anyone know if its possible to load a cd into bluray, then rip it using the firestick plugged into side of tv? cant see any other way of me being able to rip my music, thats my only cd drive in the house (we all have chromebooks).

Borrow a machine and rip them all, a laptop maybe. Then save to an external HDD and then move them files around with the Chromebook?

richmars - Member
If you're concerned about shafting the artist, buying a CD, ripping it, then selling the CD is worse than Spotify.

Shafting the studio maybe. They feel you should be buying the digital version on top of the CD. The amount an artist gets as a share of CD sale is so miniscule, depriving them of a digital sale isn't going to make a difference to them.

Someone else commented that Spotify only paid a small amount of royalties. I was making the point that even this small amount is better then ripping and selling the CD. The studio/artist/whoever is out of pocket.

A free Google music account lets you upload 50,000 tracks

[url= https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/4515411?hl=en ]https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/4515411?hl=en[/url]

Someone else commented that Spotify only paid a small amount of royalties.

IIRC Pitchfork were reporting that artists make more from [i]vinyl[/i] sales than spotify....

ETA: sauce - http://pitchfork.com/news/64345-vinyl-sales-made-more-money-than-free-streams-last-year/

EDIT: just seen what its doing. theres the one unknown album and everything is going in there, so for the different albums ive got track 1, track 1(1), track 1(2), track 1(3). cant be doing with that, looks like its a no-no unless i could have got the bluray to find the info prior.

Borrow a machine and rip them all, a laptop maybe. Then save to an external HDD and then move them files around with the Chromebook?

just fired it up and am starting to rip using windows media player to 320kbps mp3 onto my 1TB portable HD.

hopefully thisll chip away at my collection. dont think i can be bothered to rip to flac and then mp3 after (plus WMP doesnt seem to offer flac as option anyway), so high quality mp3 should be good enough.

thanks

Media Player on Windows 10 rips to FLAC.
Can someone tell me that its just as good as other programs for this, as I'm just starting to work my way through a pile of CD's.

just fired it up and am starting to rip using windows media player to 320kbps mp3 onto my 1TB portable HD.

Great. Can you really not save or replay AAC? It is a better sound, just. Also, don't forget to back all the digital media up if you divest yourself of the CD's. 🙂

Great. Can you really not save or replay AAC? It is a better sound, just. Also, don't forget to back all the digital media up if you divest yourself of the CD's.

cheers

Rip to iTunes sync with Google audio whatever it's called and it's available for iPod and android. You can choose what remains in the cloud or download.

I tried to keep up with ripping and organising all my CDs but when I gave up and signed up to spotify it was a massive relief. You can set playlists and 'make available offline' and my car has a Spotify app so I can control the songs through the car! It's excellent.

does media player copy dvds too? or if not any recommendations? not after a copy per se, just the video footage.
i know i used to copy them back in the day, keeping menus etc but that was to er.... 'make a copy'. now id be happy with just a big mp4/avi file of a gig or whatevers on the dvd (think youtube vid), as they will just be files on a HD much the same as my cds.

cheers

I went through similar recently.

Ripped them using iTunes while i was doing other stuff, not too painful that way.

Bought a chromecast audio to plug into the back of the existing amp/speakers (TEAC/Rega stuff, nice sound so why not), cost £20.

Bought a fleabay NAS (2 bay synology, 2TB) for under £100. You can get new from ebuyer for about double the cost. The NAS supports a DLNA media center and all kinds of other clever stuff. If you wanted to do more clever stuff there are better NAS around (eg video transcoding), but for a bit of audio streaming, time machine etc etc this is fine.

I also installed google play music which seamlessly uploaded all my itunes library, so its available on my phone, laptop etc etc etc. In reality 95% of the time I end playing it using google music over the chromecast audio, its just too easy.

richmars - Member
Someone else commented that Spotify only paid a small amount of royalties. I was making the point that even this small amount is better then ripping and selling the CD. The studio/artist/whoever is out of pocket.

Depends on the point of view. You've bought the CD, whoever it is gets paid. That you sell the CD is none of their business. Second hand sales are perfectly legal and there is no obligation to reward them twice for the sale of the same CD.

That you've kept a copy is another matter, but copying any CD in the UK still remains illegal anyway even if you own it. Regardless they've not been deprived of income as the second hand sale isn't going to provide any and you clearly weren't going to be buying it again as you've sold it, so copy or not, there's was no loss.

It's like the whole argument of money "lost" due to piracy. The figures they come up with are daft as the majority of pirates were unlikely to buy the thing in the first place, so nothing really has been lost.

Not that I'm into that sort of thing, plus I don't bother selling the CDs I rip, they just collect dust. My main beef is being told I have to pay twice to transfer CDs to some other format so I can play it on other devices.

RIP to FLAC.

Not that I'm into that sort of thing, plus I don't bother selling the CDs I rip, they just collect dust. My main beef is being told I have to pay twice to transfer CDs to some other format so I can play it on other devices.

I don't think that's the case now. I think (but could well be wrong) it's legal to rip CD's you own.

I don't think that's the case now. I think (but could well be wrong) it's legal to rip CD's you own.

This might have changed again since the last time i saw it but it was illegal, then it was legal for about 9 months, then it was illegal again.

[url= http://www.digitalspy.com/tech/news/a659052/its-illegal-to-rip-your-cds-again-just-nine-months-after-law-allowing-it-was-introduced/ ]Bit more info here[/url]

Easy way to do this - pay someone else!

I used ripcaster.co.uk to convert my CDs (now boxed up in the loft). Ok it was a few hundred quid but having converted some myself in the past (some itunes, some db poweramp + many other tools) I had a real mix of formats and rates.

Just wanted them all in FLAC + MP3 for car/ipods and paying someone else was the simple solutions to get it done in a standard way.

RIP to FLAC.

So how does someone with no knowledge, do this on a 2yr old laptop running Windows 10?

Also is FLAC a no compression file? I assume to get it in to my car on a memory stick I would then need to convert to MP3...again how?

Ta

This might have changed again since the last time i saw it but it was illegal, then it was legal for about 9 months, then it was illegal again.

That's just stupid!!

 

Yep, It's as dumb as a dumb thing.

I had literally finished uploading all my files to cloud storage (as a backup) in the same week that the law changed back to making it illegal again which is why I remembered it.

Yeah, the industry put a lot of pressure on to reverse it, and now we're back to where we were.

FunkyDunc - Member
So how does someone with no knowledge, do this on a 2yr old laptop running Windows 10?

Also is FLAC a no compression file? I assume to get it in to my car on a memory stick I would then need to convert to MP3...again how?

FLAC is a compressed file, but it's lossless, meaning uncompressed it's identical to the original. Unlike MP3 where there is some degree of loss.

FLAC I use particularly as an archive format, knowing that I have an exact copy of my CDs. Then I can convert to what I like for portable devices or stream as FLAC to HiFi etc.

Ripping - I use EAC and there's some options in there to rip to FLAC instead of MP3.

Converting to MP3 I use Foobar2000, although I can't remember how I set it up. There's some guides somewhere.

Thanks everyone. I've not checked this in a couple of days so a lot to read through. The B2 machine looks ace but out of budget.
I might look into ripping them to Google music cloud as I like that idea but need to check what quality it will rip at.
I nearly bought the Seagate box but it has mixed reviews.
As for all the Spotify/deezer comments, I do subscribe on and off to Spotify and sometimes Google play but as others have said a lot of my CD's arn't available and my listening habits are sporadic.
Someone asked about the Mac book. It's a 2009 Mac book pro with 150gb HD. I would ideally like to get away from iTunes etc.
Thanks again for the responses.

FunkyDunc - Member

RIP to FLAC.

So how does someone with no knowledge, do this on a 2yr old laptop running Windows 10?

Also is FLAC a no compression file? I assume to get it in to my car on a memory stick I would then need to convert to MP3...again how?

I'm a complete numpty, and the laptop I used was more than two years old! It really isn't that difficult - it's time consuming,and I suspect using an older laptop adds to that, but once you get started it's a simple and repetitive process.

As mentioned before, I used the free version of MonkeyMedia to 'rip' the CD in the CD drive to a folder on the hard disc I called 'ripped Music'. Once the CD is ripped MonkeyMedia ejects the CD and you put another one in - it remembers the target folder, so you just select 'rip CD' from the drop down menu and off it goes. The only thing you need to watch out for is the tagging - that's capturing the name of the CD, artist, track names, artwork and genre of music. It seems to do that automatically on newer CDs, but on older ones you need to force a search from the drop down menu and sometimes it finds multiple options and you need to select the right one.

Once the FLAC files are on your drive you can copy and move them as any other file and they'll play on any device that supports FLAC. For the car etc you'll probably need to create MP3 versions - I used Flacsquisher, another free download.

Just create another folder on your hard disc called 'MP3 files' and then in the Flacsqisher box put the name of the folder with the FLAC files and then the folder for your MP3 files and set it off. It takes ages if you've got a reasonable number of CDs, so I started it when I went to bed and let it run overnight!

Putting either the FLAC or MP3 files onto a NAS drive is actually a separate subject - if all you want is to add music to a USB stick or phone for the car or gym don't bother.

However, if you do buy a NAS drive it's really cool! (or at least I think so) basically you can access your music anywhere - which still amazes me. A couple of weeks ago I was in the US and using a media player on my phone I could scroll through my entire CD collection and play whatever I fancied from 3000 miles away!

Slightly of topic, I have FLAC on my NAS which is setup as a DLNA server and a Chromecast audio device into a DAC then to my HiFi.

Whats the best Android App for viewing my library and streaming FLAC to the Chromecast?

I've used BubblePnP which seems OK, just a bit clunky.

The Kodi GUI is great and I think i can configure to stream to Chromecast but the config is a fraction torturous.

I would ideally like to get away from iTunes

Once you've got everything ripped then use whatever you get on with but I wouldn't discount iTunes from being useful for the ripping task, it does make it really simple. Most get tagged, with the correct artist, album title, track names and number automatically and it'll organise the folder structure of stuff you're ripping too into a MUSIC\ARTIST\ALBUM\TRACK format which makes good sense and saves a fair bit of time. This isn't a big deal as most software that you can use to do this will do all that too but you already have iTunes available to use.

I ripped all my CD's through iTunes but use a combination of software (iTunes, Plex, Synology and Naim) for browsing and playback.

still merrily getting through my cds, ripping both to flac and mp3s. this threads been good for me, cos im starting to think now of binning deezer and just playing my own music, a LOT of which i wont have heard for ages. but heres where you can come in and help me again...... 🙂

when im done, ill be left with all my music on a portable hard drive, say with 2 folders, one called FLAC, one called mp3. i also have a fair few tracks downloaded from t'internet from my favourite band which i paid for both FLAC and mp3 versions again. theyll be on my chromebook somewhere. so ill need to tidy all that little lot up too, drag and drop stuff from chromebook to HD.

then..... ill be left as before, 2 folders with flacs and mp3s on my HD. ill want to back it up, plus have the ability to 'shuffle' all my music so i never know whats coming next.
whats my best option? is it google play? upload all my music to my 1Tb google drive? should i buy another portable HD and duplicate the first so ive always got it all backed up, or will google drive be just as secure?

how would i shuffle my music, either at home, in the car, on my phone etc?

thanks

not sure im going about this the right way, could do with some advice please?

all my music is ripped to FLAC, mp3 and dvds to mp4. theyre all on my portable HD in respective folders.
ive just tried cutting and pasting the whole lot 300Gbish to google drive. it failed early doors,saying there isnt enough room, yet if i click the settings, it says i have 1Tb left.

do i have to go through google play music instead? i thought if i had it all on drive, i could access that on my phone and it would select the right player, suffle it, bobs yer uncle. apparently not.

what do i need to do?

thanks

bumpity bump please. struggling with this....

trying to upload through google play music, but it will seemingly only recognise songs not folders.
im on the upload box, it says drag or drop songs OR FOLDERS here, or browse to them on your pc. i point it at my music folder containing everything but its still greyed out. it only comes to life when i click through all the folders to a song. thats no good to me, i need to be able to upload the folder containing all the songs!

help please? :-/

This is but to do it.

https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/1075570?hl=en-GB

Edit: ignore me

gravity slave, followed all that, even updated chrome again first but the same things happening. i clicked to open the play music extension, clicked the 3 lines, upload music, 'select music from computer', but when i select a folder its greyed out. for example it will be all greyed out and unable to select all the way through 'music/mp3s/the fall/peel sessions 1984/' but then when i actually select a track it will come live and allow me to click it and i presume, then upload that track.
this is no good to me tho as i want to upload 300Gb worth of music, i cant be uploading just the tracks, i want the folder structure intact so the albums stay together.

thanks

Might be like the plex "issues" i had.

You've got too much file structure.

If it was just "peel sessions 1984" as the folder then the album it'll work. Google play music should then use the metadata to organise it all. (Artist etc)

I gave up trying to maintain my file structure (which wasn't amazingly valuable, just a way to store it on the PC), then updated all the metadata and let plex do it for me.

Do you have the metadata on each file?

If you use something like media monkey you can apparently just put in all your music files, no file structure needed. It then sorts it all out for you.

Haven't tried this though, bit too high risk 😉

You've got too much file structure.

If it was just "peel sessions 1984" as the folder then the album it'll work. Google play music should then use the metadata to organise it all. (Artist etc)

just tried the windows alternative on my sh1tty 'about to die' laptop and installed music manager. plugged in the HD, opened MM up, it asked me what i wanted to do, 'upload', pointed it at the HD and its now working! one nil to windows over google 🙂
not sure how its gonna pan out tho as it said theres 5000 songs or so to upload, i dont know how theyre gonna manifest themselves, hopefully in folders/albums 😀

another potential hiccup too is that it said its gonna check the google servers for songs the same and use those instead to save space/time?
thats hopefully gonna be ok for playback purposes, but i still wont have 'all my music somewhere safe' as a back up.

Do you have the metadata on each file?

used somethings called 'freemake video converter' to convert dvds to m4. not sure these'll upload to google play which i dont really expect, so this is why i still need some option to save the whole shaboodle somewhere else (google drive?)

thanks