Help me get rid of my CD's. Digitizing help please…

…currently have 400+ CD’s sitting on the shelf. I’d like away to digitize them all so that they can be accessed from our phones and played over Bluetooth or wi fi.

Absolute quality of audio not essential as my hearings slightly buggered anyway from too much loud music as an adolescent!

I’ve got an ageing Mac book with a tiny HD, two external HD’s, a couple of Android phones and the wife’s iPhone. Oh and a nice Bluetooth speaker. So I’m guessing I’m going to need to buy some hardware but not sure what. Maybe a NAS or a mini PC. Any help or experience appreciated.

Max budget £450 but the cheaper the better.

Thanks in advance.

Have you tried spotify? Not sure i could be arsed to rip 400 cds

same. i got loads too and it seems a shame to chuck em but the fact is ill never play em again its just so easy to use deezer/spotify instead.

I’ll say the same thing I always do when this comes up, Spotify is not even close to being a replacement. Ripping isn’t difficult, for that money you could easily get a drive and something to run it from be it nas or enclosure plus backup. Rip to at least variable bit rate mp3 if not flac, quality might not mean much to you but if others have to hear it they’ll thank you.

The trouble I have with Spotify etc is the constant never ending payment/subscription and it kind of feels like I’d be paying again for what I already own. Although it’s a good point that ripping the CD’s would be a pita.

If anyone is binning CDs or selling them, post up here. I’d love to get more.

After ending my spotify subscription, I’m going to build up my CD collection again

Either or both of:
1. Rip it all to iTunes and play it out of your PC through a USB DAC to your amp for top quality sound – much better than through the headphone jack
2. Spotify and a Google Chromecast Audio – £10 is not a lot to pay for Spotify and the higher quality steam you get for being a paid subscriber is as good as CD

Sell all your CDs on Music Magpie to provide funds for any new kit you buy – but all the above are easy to find cheaply

If anyone is binning CDs or selling them, post up here. I’d love to get more.

i can give you a list in 2 or 3 days time if youre interested, mainly punk/indie stuff if thats your bag?

Sadex- sounds good, thanks!

no probs, at work til monday, ill sort it out then and mail you.

2. Spotify and a Google Chromecast Audio – £10 is not a lot to pay for Spotify and the higher quality steam you get for being a paid subscriber is as good as CD

Useless in a car, or anywhere where there’s bugger-all phone network, which is very large parts of the entire planet.
Sod renting what you’ve already paid for, don’t be lazy, rip the CD’s at 320Kb, variable bit-rate, then you can set up playlists, stream to different rooms, copy selected tracks to the phones, etc.
Spotify also pays the artists absolutely sod-all, many artists are now making more money from their vinyl sales than they get from Spotify!
Don’t support a system that’s shafting the artists, support one that pays them a decent return, download tracks directly, or buy the cd, RIP it then sell the CD on to someone else.
I still buy CD’s, bought five during the week, and I’ll often get them signed as well, they get ripped and choice tracks go onto my phone; currently there’s around 200Gb+ on my Mac Mini, more being added all the time.

Remember to rip as lossless folks. ALAC for Apple users? Somebody please correct me if I’m wrong.

I’m going through a similar process and I just sit down and bash through 10-20 a sitting. Soon get through them.

Once ripped (lossless don’t forget) then do make sure you back them up.

Then kick back, get on head-fi.org and see how you can make an iPhone sing like an angel. I’m a big convert to headphone listening.

I also subscribe to Deezer so I can discover new music without buying yet more CD’s to replace the ones in managing to get rid of but agree a streaming service does not replace ripping.

Countzero, this is what I was thinking.

Maybe one of these is what I need?
http://www.seagate.com/gb/en/external-hard-drives/home-entertainment/media-sharing-devices/seagate-central/

Don’t support a system that’s shafting the artists, support one that pays them a decent return, download tracks directly, or buy the cd, RIP it then sell the CD on to someone else.

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

Maybe one of these is what I need?
http://www.seagate.com/gb/en/external-hard-drives/home-entertainment/media-sharing-devices/seagate-central/

POSTED 7 HOURS AGO # REPORT-POST

That’s exactly what I ended up buying. I used Monkeymedia to rip about 1,000 CDs to FLAC format. There’s no getting away from the fact its a right pita, took me about a month off and on. The real pain is the tagging older CDs.

But it’s worth it, works fantastic.

Once all your music is so instantly visible and accessible its amazing how much more you listen to, so do all the family. You can build p!aylists just like Spotify, it’ really worth the effort.

I then used Flacsquisher to create an MP3 library. You can then copy the MP3 files to portable media for the car, running etc.

I’d just get google or spotify, If you like music, you’ll likely use it to find other stuff so it’s not really paying for what you already own.

Personally, I couldn’t be arsed with CD’s, I haven’t since napster came out! 😆

I ripped all my CDs to FLAC a while ago, and they sit on my NAS. I’ve got a posh streaming player attached to my amp.

Since the streaming player has been upgraded to work with Spotify, I barely use the NAS.

Do it right and do it once.

Rip the CDs to FLAC – FLAC is lossless and open source. From the FLAC format you can always create a copy of your collection in other formats – want MP3s – just export them, want to play something in Apple’s walled garden? – just export them.

Spend the £450 on a Qnap or Synology NAS so that you can make the music available to all your devices.

I used MediaMonkey to rip my CDs – it is nice and easy to use. There are plenty of other options of course.

I put a pile of CDs, well, several piles – there were about 450 of them – next to my PC and processed them whilst surfing/doing other more interesting things – this way you can get down the pile fairly quickly without the ripping becoming too much of a chore.

My suggestion [and I have ripped “a few” CD’s].

Assuming you have a decently fast machine, you’ll be ripping discs in 2-4 minutes each.

Install iTunes. Set import settings to either [choose]:

a – 256kbps AAC – sounds great for compressed audio
b – 328kbps AAC – near as dammit CD quality, not much bigger
c – Apple Lossless – As CD but smaller. Not compatible with every device.

Set the Preference to “Rip CD when inserted”

Ensure you’re online so iTunes can pull the track names* etc.

Feed it CD’s. You can just do it while you browse.

Done. Share via windows network etc.

*If the names are wrong, just hit stop and edit the info in the iTunes window, CD section, which will then import with the correct names etc.

gofasterstripes – your suggestion is fine, but I was quite certain I didn’t want to rip into an Apple format – I don’t use iTunes, so for me ripping into FLAC initially first made most sense. As Cranberry says from there you can reach any format you want easily enough at a later date.

Beej – I use Spotify as well and it’s my main source for browsing and new music, but I still use the NAS for accesing my library. Also having the music outside spotify is useful for other tools, such as mixing lists for the gym etc.

I’m a big fan of Spotify, pay the monthly fee etc, but I can’t ever see a streaming service only being the answer for me – probably an age thing!

AAC = MP4 audio
Apple Lossless = FLAC

Apple like to pretend they invented things.

http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/%5B/url%5D is a great free app.

It doesn’t take that long to rip the CD’s, just start with a pile and work your way through them with your laptop.

My audio nerd friend said EAC was the way to go too. I’ve not felt the need myself though.

+1 if anyone is selling CDs, please post up/email a list. Am always interested..!

EDIT: I agree with those who say to rip at the highest bitrate. You can always compress for a specific device later. I use iTunes, so all my CDs are ripped as Apple Lossless/ALAC for streaming at home. For portable music, I use 256kb on my iPhone.

400 might seem like a PITA. I have a few more CDs (1200-ish), so would grab a pile and place them by the computer. Every time I walked by I’d load up another. Or, if I was using the computer, I would multitask and do a batch. 400 will only take a relatively short time this way and PITA levels aren’t too high.

That seagate drive looks good

I’m going to have to pull my finger out and get one

This may seem like a stupid question, but I have an old NAD amp and decent Mission speakers, is there a way to use these via streaming?

Yes, you can use them. Sonos or Apple Airport Express are v easy routes, but there are lots of other devices that will speak to your streaming software (via Ethernet or wifi) that then plug into your amplifier.

Because I’m a Mac user I use Airport Express and stream from iTunes over wifi (using Apple’s AirPlay functionality). Absolute doddle to set up and use. I believe Sonis is similarly user friendly.

Chrome audio is my audio streaming solution of choice. Either that or i might try a pi. Maybe.

Unfortunately i got carried away with ripping. So my estimation of around 650GB of lossless (home use) plus 150GB of mp3 versions (for streaming to mobile devices) then filling in the rest of my musical needs with spotify has turned into 3TB of music, DVDs and Blurays. And I’ve only got about half way through the music and ~1/3 of the way through the movies.

Should have done one of two things, 4 bay NAS or 6TB drives! (2 bay and 3TB just isn’t cutting it!) 4 bay and 6TB might be considered excessive. I understand this underestimation isn’t unusual! (Have colleagues who have done the same)

And just using spotify/deezer/Google is dependant on the music you have being available. A lot of mine is georestricted by the streaming services, or simply not available.

Rip to FLAC. Open format, cross platform, no DRM and not proprietary to Apple etc who may do something in the future that could lock you in, or you’re already locked in via iTunes.

I use EAC myself as it’s been reliable and in the early days it was one of the few tools that actually ripped accurately. A lot would rip from analogue as the CD played and picked up skipping and jumps. Things have moved on with other tools now but EAC does an accuracy check on known signatures, and is fast to use. Doesn’t rely on iTunes or such rubbish, just dumps out files as MP3, FLAC or whatever.

Then I store the FLAC files on my NAS.

I also chuck a load of them in my OneDrive storage. Windows Phone’s music player can stream music you have in OneDrive, or can download to play offline. Not sure if MS have a similar app for other phones. Possibily you can do similar with Google Drive, plus there’s Amazon’s storage I think you can upload all you music to and probably stream from.

Spotify, yeah the most annoying thing is the geo/licence restrictions. I play music by album and have come across many where one or two tracks are unavailable due to regional licence restrictions. Ruins the play for me.

How old is the macbook? It might be posible to swap out the hard drive for a bigger one (i did an iBook years ago which was a pain macbooks and macbook pros are somewhat easier). If not then I agree with getting an external HD and sticking your iTunes library on there.

for those asking for a list of my cds, ive just put em up in the FS ads rather than a loooong list on this thread.

cheers

My old man just bought a Brennan b2 to ditch all his discs. Works great

My old man just bought a Brennan b2 to ditch all his discs. Works great

was just googling that, thought yep, its perfect. then saw the price…..£525!! yikes :-/

I know someone who ripped about 2000 CDs, but they geeked out and first wrote their own CD ripping program (morituri) and then bought enough Lego Mindstorms to build a ripping robot that can take CDs from a spindle, put them in the drive, take them out again when ripped. He left it running and went on holiday for a week. 🙂

I’ve personally ripped about 300 CDs the old fashioned way by having a good ripper that has a good source of metadata (anything using MusicBrainz is superior to the commerical CDDB which is superior to the cesspit known as FreeDB). I’ll admit that I wrote that ripper many years ago though (Sound Juicer). The good thing about CD ripping is that you can do something else at the same time and assuming the metadata is good (see above) then it’s about ten seconds between CDs.

As for Spotify, it seems like a good idea but we’ve been reviewing out CD collection recently (about a third is in the “to sell” pile so far) and I’d say that from our collection of music which isn’t that eclectic about a fifth of it isn’t actually on Spotify. It’s convenient, but I wouldn’t pay for it and consider it a replacement for CDs.

I have used this as described above..pile of cd’s next to the PC while doing other stuff.. After a lossless rip to flac you can then do an mp3 or other format from the lossless file.

https://www.dbpoweramp.com/

id be tempted to rip before selling but…. im a chromebook user now, no cd/dvd drive.

I’m in the process of emigrating and getting rid of my cd collection. Not willing to sell them to music magpie and the likes for 30p each. If any of you are interested I can collate a list and would take £1 a cd.. 🙂

I wouldn’t sell the CDs, they’re effectively a high quality and lossless backup copy, once ripped

CD’s can degrade though, I’ve had a few do it over the years that were just sitting in their cases. It’s rare but it does happen.

I did around 400 CDs recently. For me, it was worth buying DBPoweramp. It streamlines the process, has a better lookup process than EAC, and it also includes a batch ripper programme, so you just have to stick another CD in each time it finishes and close the tray, no screen checking and button pressing. Very handy if you want to do something else at the same time. I had two drives in my PC, and it can run them in parallel.