Please dont hang me!

[swiftmick]

Ok here goes, at the risk of being shot. Can anyone tell me the best way of transfering all my CD's and Minidisc's onto a realy good hard drive without any compression? Is there such a product on the market?

Its needed because I will be laid up for some months after an operation and I want to access my music without compression and all the music I own in one place.

I own approx 500-550 CD's and about the same amount of Minidiscs.

Looking forward to any advice...Thanks

 

[Anonymous]

Firstly I hope all goes well and you're back to normal ASAP - sounds like it's pretty serious.

Basically there are a number of programmes that use lossless compression, ALAC (itunes) FLAC and the like, but they still use minimum compression. However, the impact on sound quality is minimal if at all, as they don't actually compress the music. It seems to be accepted now that lossless through a dac is the equal of, if not better than, the original. I use iTunes with Apple lossless, and it's absolutely fine.

If you want to store without compression, that means essentially copying each CD manually into a directory, which will take up a lot of space and time for no real benefit.

The downside of all this is that it takes ages to rip your CDs, and with 550 you're looking at a fair investment of time. Nevertheless, it is worth it, and you may find the CD rips sound better than the original.

Take care.

P.S. Macmini + itunes plus dac is a good way to go, as you can use the iTouch or iPhone to access your music remotely, which might be a thought.

 

[Dan Turner]

Tarquinh:
If you want to store without compression, that means essentially copying each CD manually into a directory, which will take up a lot of space and time for no real benefit.

That's not quite accurate: rip to AIFF or WAV - both uncompressed file formats. AIFF is best from a convenience standpoint as it has full support of metadata and artwork, which WAV doesn't. Both would be bit for bit identical rips of the original CD though.

 

[idc]

You want a music manager, of which there are many. Itunes, Windows Media Player, Media Monkey, Foobar2000 are well known examples. Have a look yourself and see which format you like the most and then download the programme. Most, but not all are free. Then get importing your CDs and I presume minidiscs will work the same way. I was off work for a month and happily imported my CDs whilst posting album reviews on itunes.

 

[Anonymous]

You're right, of course, apologies. Different encoding to the original, but uncompressed as you rightly say.

I'm too embarrassed to say what I use...

 

[mitch65]

Tarquinh:
You're right, of course, apologies. Different encoding to the original, but uncompressed as you rightly say.

I'm too embarrassed to say what I use...

Ohh! go on tell

 

[Anonymous]

Begins with A...

 

[swiftmick]

Thanks for the info guys, its a great help. But I also need to know whats the best bit of kit to use?

Are these Sonos thingys any good?

Or do you know of some other music servers that might be of benefit?

 

[The_Lhc]

Sonos is very good but it doesn't rip your cds for you, any pc or MAC can do that.

 

[Anonymous]

Some information that I hope is useful:

You only want to do the rips once, so go for a lossless format like flac (if you are a pc user) or aiff (if mac).

1000 cds/minidiscs would be about 300Gb space. Make sure that you have 2 HDs of at least this size - one for backup.

Ripping CDs is no problem - google dbpoweramp and exact audio copy. I believe they check your rip against a database so that you know if your rip is not perfect, eg due to scratches. I use media monkey for convenience. Also, getting the track information right can be a hassle if you have esoteric cds, or complex multivolume albums (like opera). These programs extract the track data from a database like freedb that is created by user input - so with inconsistencies - and add the data automatically to the file (title, artist etc). It will cost you quite some time though. I'd say 10 minutes for the rip per cd and if you are unlucky and a perfectionist another 10 to get all the track data right in the way you want it.

Minidisc is another issue. First you need to be able to get the data in a computer.Preferably not at realtime speed (such as by catching the digital signal while playing tru spdif input), but a lot faster. I guess that you would need hardware for this - no experience myself. Also, MD is a compressed format, but it probably is best to store a full 48k/16bits unpacked version, again as flac for instance, rather than compressing it from ATRAC (MD) to something else. And for MDs you need to type in all the extra track data yourself. Much more work than cd's!

Good luck!

 

[Dan Turner]

Pete10:
You only want to do the rips once, so go for a lossless format like flac (if you are a pc user) or aiff (if mac).

1000 cds/minidiscs would be about 300Gb space. Make sure that you have 2 HDs of at least this size - one for backup.

Flac (like apple lossless) uses lossless compression. Theoretically bit-perfect upon replay, but as the OP did specify 'without compression', then worth pointing out that AIFF is uncompressed, but will therefore take up the same amount of space as the original CD (the contents of the minidiscs will take up more space if they are extracted to full-size, which I agree with), so 1000 'CDs' stored as AIFF are could take up anywhere between 600 and 800 GB (depends on average CD size).

Sonos could be just what you're looking for. Great interface and can read stored music directly from a network attached drive, which means that you wouldn't have to have your computer switched on to play music.

 

[newaudio]

morning all....

has anybody got the Brennan kit for cds and the like? looks pretty cool and the price aint bad....it also has a 60w amp built in?

eamonn

 

[SteveR750]

FWIW I have used Exact Audio Copy for ripping lossless and uncompressed - this was a recommendation from Cyrus when I was talking to them a while ago.

 

[swiftmick]

Thanks everyone for the info. I think i have it sussed now. A little shopping me thinks before the operation in August.