Using CD Ripping Services

  • Thread starter QuestForThe13thNote
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QuestForThe13thNote

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Has anyone ever used one of these services when they've bought a streamer or gone digital to save time in ripping hundreds if not thousands of CD's to a PC or NAS etc. Or just when needing to rip a load of CD's

It seems there are a few doing it but as I understood it, it was legal and then this was reversed making it technically illegal to rip even your own CD's to a PC/NAS etc (although obviously the music companies no doubt turn a blind eye for personal use).

Ive thought about paying someone to do it for me when Ive changed file formats, or there is a need to burn additional cds etc, but it would have to be a whole lot cheaper. Ive seen some firms charging £1 per CD and with some CD's online, you can almost buy them for that. It would have to be 20p per disc and maybe £80-100 for 500 discs to make it worthwhile.

What do people reckon?
 
I'm not sure anyone would get out of bed to rip a disc for 20p. It took me around 3 weeks to rip around 500/600 discs (non stop evenings/weekends), and that was before double checking the artwork/tracklistings etc, as not all discs just rip perfectly with all relevant metadata. £1 per disc might sound expensive, but you're paying for time, overheads etc.

There's something strangely satisfying about ripping your whole collection and getting all the metadata and artwork 100%...
 
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QuestForThe13thNote

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Id hope that what you are paying for if you use this service is someone who has access to a robotic Cd mechanism / device, and proper metadata programmes etc, to take the labour out of it, so it shouldnt cost £1 per CD.

Id hazard an educated geuss that the reason why people arent doing it cheaper and in volume, is probably because the mass market demand for the service isnt there because of the illegality of the service. No scaled business would offer a service that potentially gets sued by those music industry assocations who got the judicial review on the change in the law in 2015.
 

Gray

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davidf said:
I'm not sure anyone would get out of bed to rip a disc for 20p. It took me around 3 weeks to rip around 500/600 discs (non stop evenings/weekends), and that was before double checking the artwork/tracklistings etc, as not all discs just rip perfectly with all relevant metadata. £1 per disc might sound expensive, but you're paying for time, overheads etc.

There's something strangely satisfying about ripping your whole collection and getting all the metadata and artwork 100%...

Never a truer sentence was written than your last one David.

In terms of the metadata and artwork automatically found (in different places) then none of my discs ripped perfectly. I seeked out the highest resolution artwork and corrected all metadata sequences / spellings for each of 1000+ discs. It took me months.

Before doing it, I saw the price of a ripping service and thought it was expensive. All I can say is that if I was asked now, to rip a similar collection, to the same standard, nobody would pay my price.

Can you imagine the personal (unofficial) collections on the hard drives of some of those doing these ripping services? Not that they'd have to rip every disc - a percentage of many collections (the popular, Michael Jackson Thriller types) could just be dragged over ready-done in seconds.
 

Native_bon

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I bought so many rare compilations from world music to jazz, acidjazz, Latin to Asia music that came free with magazines. Really come to think of it the magazines were expensive, so wonder if there were free in the sense of the word.

Ripping these kind of CD can be a right pain to get metadata & all info. These are the ones that would be a real challenge to any ripping services as suppose to just dragging and dropping. Had to do the hard work myself.
 
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QuestForThe13thNote

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I found the really lengthy part of it was taking the discs in and out, waiting for the rip on a single drive. And the bits like changing from 'Wolfgang Mozart' to 'Mozart' etc, and getting the album art as per your cover. But I found the longest part was waiting for the rip and replacing discs, but I've seen some of these ripping services use robotic type duplicators (in reverse as rippers obviously) with 4-6 drives, which I bet can rip 100 CDs per hour. So if they've got software to prompt them on the correct album art, or settings like the way classical composers are listed, they ought to be able to do it a damm site cheaper than £1 per disc. Maybe they just spend hours with the metadafa as no software to prompt them and easily make corrections in batches, rather each time it comes up, slowing down whole robotic process.
 
D

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So you expect all this investment in hardware and software to be available to the average punter at a service price of 20p per disc, including the extra time it would take to address incorrect metadata... dream-on.
 
D

Deleted member 108165

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Gray said:
davidf said:
I'm not sure anyone would get out of bed to rip a disc for 20p. It took me around 3 weeks to rip around 500/600 discs (non stop evenings/weekends), and that was before double checking the artwork/tracklistings etc, as not all discs just rip perfectly with all relevant metadata. £1 per disc might sound expensive, but you're paying for time, overheads etc.

There's something strangely satisfying about ripping your whole collection and getting all the metadata and artwork 100%...

Never a truer sentence was written than your last one David.

In terms of the metadata and artwork automatically found (in different places) then none of my discs ripped perfectly. I seeked out the highest resolution artwork and corrected all metadata sequences / spellings for each of 1000+ discs. It took me months.

Before doing it, I saw the price of a ripping service and thought it was expensive. All I can say is that if I was asked now, to rip a similar collection, to the same standard, nobody would pay my price.

Couldn't agree more with both of you, well said.

It would appear that you both suffer from the same level of OCD as myself *biggrin* . Big problem with me is that I get within ripping the last 50 of my collection only to purchase another 20 this year, so now I've got 70 to rip and I have to be in the right mood for it.
 
D

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tino said:
Ripping CDs is a darn sight easier than vinyl ... Been there, done that and have the scars ...

Now you're talking... nothing compares to ripping vinyl, it's pure torture. I've been attempting it for the last two years and still haven't mastered it.
 

gagagaga

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1. These services will keep a store of all the discs ripped, so chance is that 99% of your discs won't be touched - they'll just match to the previous rip and include a copy of that. Fine if they physically match the disc, not too good if matched on title and you get a copy of a different edition. Also be careful - you can pretty much guarantee they will rip at max speep with no accurate rip validation

2. Ripping at home can be slow as some drives are purposely slowed down (riplocked). Google - you can identify those that aren't that will rip at 10-12x (securely) rather than 2.4x on some drives

3. Use EAC etc to get a safe/validated rip.

4. speed up with 2 or more drives. You can get good USB portable CD/DVD drives for less than £20 - match the drive model to one identified in (2). 2 of those and you'll be flat out whilst one rips and you check the track names on the other. You can get through 12-15 discs an hour this way. Quite satisfying!

Did this en mass (1500+ CDs in all) about 15 years ago (possibly longer). Great times listening to albums i'd not touched for a decade whilst I did it.

Remember to get (at least) 2 external drives for backups, or 1 plus online storage - onedrive with office 365 etc lets you store a TB per account and you can get the home version with 5 accounts for £40-45 a year. If you've got family near by, store one there.

Remember to validate after ripping/making a copy - FooBar2000 (other players are available) will let you run decode checks against your entire collection in one go (mine takes more than 24 hours flat out each time I run this...).
 
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QuestForThe13thNote

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DougK said:
So you expect all this investment in hardware and software to be available to the average punter at a service price of 20p per disc, including the extra time it would take to address incorrect metadata... dream-on.

no I wasn't expecting it I was just postulating it should or could possibly be cheaper I thought. I think the people who will do well out of it, aside from having the capital to buy the industrial ripping machines using automated drive reloading, will be people who can write the code and software to avoid all that repetitive stuff going in and adding album art pictures and changing artist names and all that other stuff us amateurs do on our own PCs. If these people could do that, it should cut down a lot of the time needed and make the price better. But frankly I wouldn't pay something going on an hourly rate to do that, as it stands like I messed about with things I mentioned, as it wouldn't be value to pay someone to do that in the way I have. What's value is spending 100 plus hours taking one cd in and putting another in, that a machine or machines can do in 10 hours.
 
D

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davidf said:
Convert Technologies' Plato system removes any existing hassle with regards to ripping vinyl - it's now virtually as easy as ripping a CD :)

Hmmm... £4350 to rip 50 cherished albums... think I'll keep trying the hard way *smile* Perseverance is the key!
 
DougK said:
davidf said:
Convert Technologies' Plato system removes any existing hassle with regards to ripping vinyl - it's now virtually as easy as ripping a CD :)

Hmmm... £4350 to rip 50 cherished albums... think I'll keep trying the hard way *smile* Perseverance is the key!
That's hardly a fair breakdown! On board digital storage? Network streaming? TIDAL streaming? Internet radio? MM and MC phono input (with adjustable parameters)? Digital and analogue inputs (with adjustable parameters)? Digital and analogue outputs (with adjustable parameters)? Kindle Fire as remote control? Touch screen interface? HDMI output for on screen mirroring? Amplification? Any colour you like? Ability to work in an enclosed space? :)

PLUS you just plug in your turntable, set the recording level, press a button and you're recording, with full metadata and artwork.
 
D

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davidf said:
That's hardly a fair breakdown! On board digital storage? Network streaming? TIDAL streaming? Internet radio? MM and MC phono input (with adjustable parameters)? Digital and analogue inputs (with adjustable parameters)? Digital and analogue outputs (with adjustable parameters)? Kindle Fire as remote control? Touch screen interface? HDMI output for on screen mirroring? Amplification? Any colour you like? Ability to work in an enclosed space? :)

PLUS you just plug in your turntable, set the recording level, press a button and you're recording, with full metadata and artwork.

Not disputing that it's a nice piece of kit David, but can it remove pops and clicks as well? *biggrin*
 

DIB

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Over the years I've ripped all my CD collection (1500+ and counting) into FLAC files awaiting the time when I might stream them from a NAS or suchlike. Not got to that stage yet, I might never do, but it's there if I do. It is used primarily for putting music onto my phone's SD card.

I've used dBpoweramp over the years for all my ripping needs, so much quicker than EAC in my experience. These days I rip each new CD as I buy them so it's no big chore. I did have plans a few years ago to rip my modest (450 ) LP collection using the excellent Audacity programme but gave up after about 30 LPs because it was proving to be so time consuming to do it right and I had a life outside of listening to a bit of music in my spare time.

.
 
DougK said:
Not disputing that it's a nice piece of kit David, but can it remove pops and clicks as well? *biggrin*
I'm not sure I would want to. Have these circuits for removing crackles and pops ventured any further than a frequency filter? (genuinely asking the question, I don't know)

Personally, I'd rather not be taking anything away just to reduce nanosecond noises that you tend to ignore once you're listening to the music.
 

Andrewjvt

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davidf said:
DougK said:
Not disputing that it's a nice piece of kit David, but can it remove pops and clicks as well? *biggrin*
I'm not sure I would want to. Have these circuits for removing crackles and pops ventured any further than a frequency filter? (genuinely asking the question, I don't know)

Personally, I'd rather not be taking anything away just to reduce nanosecond noises that you tend to ignore once you're listening to the music.

The only pops I've ever heard is when my old Hegel h360 went from flac to DSD and back again but never when just flac
 
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QuestForThe13thNote

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What price is reasonable do you reckon,, definetely not £1 per cd. But I'd say something like 30-50p is reasonable maybe.
 

Andrewjvt

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QuestForThe13thNote said:
What price is reasonable do you reckon,, definetely not £1 per cd. But I'd say something like 30-50p is reasonable maybe. 

I'll do all your collection for 50p a disc excluding delivery charge and mileage (45p/mile)
How many discs do you have?
 
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QuestForThe13thNote

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I've got about 1500 but I've got friends I know who want theirs done as well. I think all in its about 20,000 CDs. I'll need it done for a few months, otherwise off to a commercial business. Is that ok?
 

Andrewjvt

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QuestForThe13thNote said:
I've got about 1500 but I've got friends I know who want theirs done as well. I think all in its about 20,000 CDs. I'll need it done for a few months, otherwise off to a commercial business. Is that ok?

No problem
I'm serious
Are you wanting flac files?
 
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QuestForThe13thNote

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Thanks for the offer but someone just offered to do it cheaper. Competitive market and all that. Cheers anyway.
 

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