Soundtrack Collection DIGITIZE!

[#SnowyVernalSpringsEternal 10,265]

After more then a year I finally have virtually my entire collection digitized. Both in Apple Lossless and in 192 KBps AAC format.

This time I'll be keeping it on 2 external hard drives.

[King Mark 3,631]

The Elvisjones version of the TPM Bootleg

The Expanded ROTS bootleg

your versions are probably way obsolete

[#SnowyVernalSpringsEternal 10,265]

I now have upgraded versions.

[filmmusic 1,828]

Bumping this old thread, because I was thinking of starting a similar thread.

Have you digitized your collection?

I find myself getting bored going to fetch my cd and putting it in my blu-ray drive, and I'm searching for the music in youtube instead. 

I want to digitize at least my John Williams collection, but I find it involves a lot of work...

[Jay 37,359]

I started doing so in 2014 and it's a fun project. I made myself listen to every CD in my collection before I'd rip it. Was nice to revisit some albums I hadn't played d in decades. 

[Faleel 5,347]

My collection is at least 90% digitized.

[Marian Schedenig 8,193]

My entire collection (save maybe for a couple of very old CDs I simply forgot) is ripped to 874 GB worth of FLAC files. It's the only way I listen to it.

[Once 605]

1 hour ago, Jay said:

I started doing so in 2014 and it's a fun project. I made myself listen to every CD in my collection before I'd rip it. Was nice to revisit some albums I hadn't played d in decades. 

I did it the exact same way and still do!

[Gurkensalat 340]

I am only digitizing those soundtracks, I want to listen to while not at home. So when I want to listen to say Home alone during commuting and it is not already in the Music app, I digitize the CD in order to be able to transfer it to my Apple Watch (my music player of choice while on the road, no matter if bike, car or train) At home it is not more complicated to insert a disc than to start a music app. But of course, my digital collection is always growing since I am adding soundtracks from time to time in the way I described.

[Thor 7,504]

I also digitized my CD collection in the mid 2010s. Spent a couple of months, I think, transferring all of my 1000-ish CDs to the laptop and into my iTunes collection. I'm glad I did it back then, because laptops still had CD-ROM drives. My current laptop does not, nor does most new laptops, so I would have had to buy an external CD-ROM drive (which I still need to do, btw, as I don't plan to stop buying CDs altogether).

 

Obviously a lot of work - not only in transferring, but also adding in the meta data that I wanted. A couple of weeks ago, I also started my Grand Whittling Project, boiling down some 100-150 albums to listenable length, so now my iTunes collection of some 2500 albums is pretty much the way I want it. I only have to make sure to have proper backups (I have it stored on both an external hard drive and my dad's NAS drive), so as not to repeat the late 2010s disaster when I lost my entire digital collection in an accident.

 

All that being said, I still have plans to restore my HiFi system to a place where I can play CDs physically again. I miss the old ritual of picking a CD from the shelf, putting it on and displaying the cover on top of the speaker.

[Schilkeman 963]

At one time I had several hundred CDs digitized, then some stuff happened, and I lost it all. I've been slowly rebuilding a music collection, and I digitize every CD I get as soon as I get them. AIFF, because I can hear a difference between it and ALAC. I would also like to get a HiFi system again. I have nice headphones and a DAC, but I like sharing the music with other people, too. 

[Jurassic Shark 12,074]

My collection is stored as ones and zeroes on shiny discs.

[Richard Penna 3,687]

All CDs ripped to just over 400GB of flacs. I rip everything the moment I get it, partly because CDs are fragile things that can get scratched (terrible storage medium IMO) so I want the contents safely on my PC asap.

 

I haven't gone through some mass digitizing project because my collection started on the computer in the early 00s - CDs were just another way of obtaining the music.

[Thor 7,504]

16 minutes ago, Richard Penna said:

I haven't done through some mass digitizing project because my collection started on the computer in the early 00s - CDs were just another way of obtaining the music.

 

Aaaah.....kids!

[mstrox 6,651]

I digitized my collection in college in 2003 at fairly low quality so I didn’t have to move CDs around between home and dorm, and again in lossless somewhere around 2010, and Again in lossless after my spouse dropped my main music hard drive while cleaning a few years ago.  A pretty momentous task for what is now thousands of CDs.

 

Along with said hard drive went all of my iTunes metadata - play counts, smart playlists, etc.  A lesson in backing things up, which I do weekly now.  I’m relistening to everything and now, 2 years later, I’m nearly through albums that have a title starting with B.

 

If you’re ripping your CDs for the first time and you have no deadline, it’s not really time intensive.  Pop a CD in to rip and walk away, do something else.  The next time you’re near a computer, take 30 seconds and do it again.  Just make sure whatever program you use 1) pulls song information from an online database and 2) files your music for you as it rips.  iTunes does these things, and I’m sure most others do too - but those features will save you a loooooot of time.

[Richard Penna 3,687]

If I had to re-digitize it wouldn't be as simple as just re-ripping a load of CDs. So much of my collection is purchased downloads/sessions/boots/random stuff found on the net. (well, much less of the latter nowadays as so much stuff is released or expanded)

 

Hence my backup strategy is everything goes on an external HDD, and I'm sure my mp3 'curated' files are on another one somewere, so my CDs just become a collector item sitting on the shelf.

 

I'm so paranoid about the fragility of CDs actually, that if I'm receiving a release approaching grail status and there's a particularly crucial section or track, I rip that first so it's safely in flac and check the file's ok, then rip the rest.

 

Come to think of it, my quest to find high quality cover art (to display in my PC widget) is probably my equivalent of mass ripping CDs because it can take absolutely ages and there's always something somewhere I haven't upgraded yet.

[mstrox 6,651]

That recovery was thankfully fairly painless for me, as my purchases were all through iTunes.  You can basically redownload your whole account in one fell swoop (minus any custom tagging you may have done to the files).  The only thing I lost-lost were hundreds of middling live concert recordings (mostly audience, some soundboard) from rock artists who encourage tape trading, and since they’ve all also released official live albums in good quality,  I just opted not to rebuild that part of my collection as curation.

[Tallguy 3,386]

I can't really hear the diff between FLAC and whatever compression I have. But I occasionally have a thought of digging back into my CDs and re-doing them as lossless.

 

As an early-ish iPod adopter (post-Windows, pre-iTunes) I had most of my collection on the hard drive since the early 2000's . And there is never a CD that I buy that doesn't get ripped immediately.

[1977 1,743]

I started digitising my score collection around 2012 and it took me a good few years to get through everything. I had initially started using 160/192 kbps AACs but soon realised the benefit of using lossless for archival purposes, so had to go back and redo a bunch of CDs in ALAC.

 

I generally keep all albums in both ALAC and AAC formats, the former for archiving and the latter for use on my smartphone (due to the volume of music involved I need to compress further to fit everything onto my 512GB micro SD card. I've found the 192kbps (variable) level to be sufficient for this purpose.

 

I keep a full backup of my main music drive for added security and am considering subscribing to Apple Music to enable a cloud backup of my offline files for increased redundancy, albeit in lossy format. I've had some minor issues previously with certain tracks just disappearing from my drive, probably due to sector errors which highlights the necessity of keeping additional backups, although the administration of this can be time-consuming (ensuring backups are complete and in sync without overwriting older backups with newer ones that may have the aforementioned corrupted or missing tracks).

 

As Thor mentioned, a big challenge is dealing with metadata, including artwork, particularly as my OCD kicks in with consistency of album and track naming. I try to correct any metadata issues on the spot but have a bunch of albums with missing artwork that I need to look into.

 

At the moment I've developed a rather large backlog in ripping titles received in the last 4 years as it's not always possible for me timewise to rip a CD when I receive it.

 

Oh, and I also haven't touched my fairly substantial collection of non-score albums yet.

[Marian Schedenig 8,193]

2 hours ago, mstrox said:

If you’re ripping your CDs for the first time and you have no deadline, it’s not really time intensive.  Pop a CD in to rip and walk away, do something else.  The next time you’re near a computer, take 30 seconds and do it again.  Just make sure whatever program you use 1) pulls song information from an online database and 2) files your music for you as it rips.  iTunes does these things, and I’m sure most others do too - but those features will save you a loooooot of time.

 

Fixing all these ghastly tags from online databases (or sometimes the official CD TEXT) is what makes it time intensive.

[Tallguy 3,386]

Oh, I forgot to mention: When I started I had to tag all of my tracks BY HAND. Ouch.

[Thor 7,504]

Yeah, metadata editing can be a hassle. And people who put the film's name or the composer's name in the tracks themselves need to be imprisoned for life.  

 

As for sound formats, I've never been too fussed about it, to be honest. First, I have tinnitus and can't really glean the difference between a high-end mp3 and a flac/wav/what-have-you. Second, I want ALL of my collection on my laptop's hard drive. It's 1 TB, and that was no easy feat when I bought my current laptop some 3-4 years ago. The store didn't really have laptops with that capacity, as most people have external hard drives or clouds. I wanted to say "Well, fuck you!", but I didn't, LOL. Instead, I found one with the 1 TB I needed (my current music collection counts 280 GB). So good quality mp3s are always preferred by me. I know I'm the odd one out there, but that's OK. If I want the super HiFi experience, I'll put on one of my CDs (when my stereo system is up and working again).

[Tallguy 3,386]

14 minutes ago, Thor said:

Yeah, metadata editing can be a hassle. And people who put the film's name or the composer's name in the tracks themselves need to be imprisoned for life.  

 

As for sound formats, I've never been too fussed about it, to be honest. First, I have tinnitus and can't really glean the difference between a high-end mp3 and a flac/wav/what-have-you. Second, I want ALL of my collection on my laptop's hard drive. It's 1 TB, and that was no easy feat when I bought my current laptop some 3-4 years ago. The store didn't really have laptops with that capacity, as most people have external hard drives or clouds. I wanted to say "Well, fuck you!", but I didn't, LOL. Instead, I found one with the 1 TB I needed (my current music collection counts 280 GB). So good quality mp3s are always preferred by me. I know I'm the odd one out there, but that's OK. If I want the super HiFi experience, I'll put on one of my CDs (when my stereo system is up and working again).

 

I will occasionally add the film title to something like Main Title. Although I almost never do.

 

Yeah, I had a 2TB drive on my laptop which was perfect. Then for various reasons those became hard to find and my current laptop has 512GB. Which really sucks when a decent game comes along and eats 1/3 of that. So yes, I keep the music on a 1TB thumbdrive and then backups to elsewhere.

 

I might get a new 2TB SSD in the near future.

[mstrox 6,651]

1 hour ago, Marian Schedenig said:

 

Fixing all these ghastly tags from online databases (or sometimes the official CD TEXT) is what makes it time intensive.

I think it’s the case if you’re anal about metadata (and I am - I spent a lot of time lately standardizing album titles and adding album art, and I’m going through now and slowly adding composer data and even song lyrics as a long-term project).  But if you are making a first time switch from CD (which doesn’t include any of that metadata) to a digital format, album title, track title, and track/disc number are all you really need!

[Marian Schedenig 8,193]

Considering the time it would take to re-rip my collection, I'd never keep the master copy on a laptop drive. Mine resides on a RAID 1 on my NAS (and even then I figure I should probably draw a manual backup to one of my old unused HDs).

[Holko 9,526]

5 minutes ago, mstrox said:

album title, track title, and track/disc number are all you really need!

And these horrid online databases have shit like no album art, no discnumber, putting the discnumber in the album title, year is the expansion release year instead of the music recording/movie release year, misspelling shit in the track titles...

[Marian Schedenig 8,193]

3 minutes ago, mstrox said:

I think it’s the case if you’re anal about metadata (and I am - I spent a lot of time lately standardizing album titles and adding album art, and I’m going through now and slowly adding composer data and even song lyrics as a long-term project).  But if you are making a first time switch from CD (which doesn’t include any of that metadata) to a digital format, album title, track title, and track/disc number are all you really need!

 

Oh, I'm anal with regards to tags, alright, but even without that - I've had plenty of cases where the album title and artist were totally off, the disc numbers/years/genres weren't set, or simply the entire album wasn't available in the database at all.

[mstrox 6,651]

One of my pet peeves is the tagging on TV show albums - some people put the episode titles and production numbers on the tracks - so on something like The X-Files or Batman: The Animated Series, there are huge banks of tracks that start like “HEART OF ICE 3x01 - Main Title” instead of just the track titles.

 

Usually in iTunes there’s an option to switch databases or move to a different imprint of the CD, so if it’s a mess I just move to the next one.  The only time a CD hasn’t shown up for me is when it’s a very new (and not major label) release - i think I was the first one to enter/submit the recent Friday the 13th Part 3 release from LLL.  Which is fine, it means I could enter it to my standards and not include things like the asterisks that denote which tracks are new, haha.  I’ve never had the problem with disc numbers being missing or awry, but I do always check before I rip.  I sometimes catch the odd misspelling or typo.

[Richard Penna 3,687]

1 hour ago, Thor said:

So good quality mp3s are always preferred by me. I know I'm the odd one out there, but that's OK.

 

Not really - I can't tell any difference between mp3 and flac using my equipment (PC, reasonably good headphones, dedicated sound card).

 

I'm starting to shift some (less important) purchases back to mp3 where normally I wanted flac - primarily due to cost, i.e. why pay another £2-3 for inaudible benefits.

 

19 minutes ago, mstrox said:

One of my pet peeves is the tagging on TV show albums - some people put the episode titles

 

I did that for series 5 and 7 of Who, which are my only untouched double Who CDs, and for the sole reason that with that much music, I wanted some sort of narrative clue as to what I was listening to. For the single CD releases/playlists, I just let the concept play...

 

--

 

My main CD ripping problem is that CDex, my chosen ripper, doesn't contact remote DBs any more so I usually end up just typing in manually unless I can somehow get some other online source to work. However, I so rarely buy CDs these days that it's just a minor faff I encounter a few times a year. And all I'm talking about is the album, artist and 'album artist' (PowerAmp goes ape shit if that's not there). I don't care about the other fields.

[Erik Woods 555]

16 hours ago, filmmusic said:

Bumping this old thread, because I was thinking of starting a similar thread.

Have you digitized your collection?

I find myself getting bored going to fetch my cd and putting it in my blu-ray drive, and I'm searching for the music in youtube instead. 

I want to digitize at least my John Williams collection, but I find it involves a lot of work...

I started digitizing my entire collection the moment the first iPod was announced. As of today, I have over 7100 albums, 145,647 tracks for a total of 297.5 days of listening 24/7.  

21 minutes ago, mstrox said:

One of my pet peeves is the tagging on TV show albums - some people put the episode titles and production numbers on the tracks - so on something like The X-Files or Batman: The Animated Series, there are huge banks of tracks that start like “HEART OF ICE 3x01 - Main Title” instead of just the track titles.

For me, stuff like that is a really easy fix in my tagging app called THE TAGGER. I can just easily use the FIND & REPLACE function and get rid of anything I don't want in a tag or in a file name. 

 

-Erk-

[Chewy 2,391]

21 hours ago, Schilkeman said:

I've been slowly rebuilding a music collection, and I digitize every CD I get as soon as I get them. AIFF, because I can hear a difference between it and ALAC.

 

That's not possible.

[Schilkeman 963]

2 hours ago, Chewy said:

 

That's not possible.

It shouldn’t be, but I can. It might be the age of my phone and the processor not being up to snuff. Whatever it is, AIFF sounds more natural to me. FLAC is worse than ALAC, but why bother when storage is cheap.

[Stark 312]

I don’t know a lot about ripping CDs, outside of iTunes (which I’m trying to move away from). Why are there all these ripping softwares? It looks like I can just go to the CD in the finder window and copy the raw tracks off the CD (but I assume that bears some downside?)

[Marian Schedenig 8,193]

3 hours ago, Schilkeman said:

It shouldn’t be, but I can. It might be the age of my phone and the processor not being up to snuff. Whatever it is, AIFF sounds more natural to me. FLAC is worse than ALAC, but why bother when storage is cheap.

 

FLAC is lossless, so the format itself can't sound worse than the source. Has to be your phone or a software issue.

 

1 hour ago, Stark said:

I don’t know a lot about ripping CDs, outside of iTunes (which I’m trying to move away from). Why are there all these ripping softwares? It looks like I can just go to the CD in the finder window and copy the raw tracks off the CD (but I assume that bears some downside?)

 

Three main reasons:

• Better tagging support
• Better support for organising the output files in your collection (in my ripping software, I've set up a profile that automatically converts to FLACs and stores the files on my NAS, in a folder named after the album artist, a sub folder named after the album, and with the file name containing the disc and track numbers and track title.
• Better handling of ripping errors. Becomes relevant when the disc (or drive) is damaged and a single read yields faulty audio.

[Tallguy 3,386]

54 minutes ago, Marian Schedenig said:

Better handling of ripping errors. Becomes relevant when the disc (or drive) is damaged and a single read yields faulty audio.

 

This is the biggie.

[Faleel 5,347]

Which databases do you guys use when importing tags these days?

[Marian Schedenig 8,193]

17 minutes ago, Presto said:

Which databases do you guys use when importing tags these days?

 

gnudb.gnudb.org. Last time my previous setting (whatever that was) stopped working, this was the best I could find.

 

1 hour ago, Marian Schedenig said:

ThreeFour main reasons:

 

My ripper also supports Replay Gain and can automatically calculate and store Replay Gain levels during ripping. This allows me to automatically normalise tracks on playback so that a) all albums are played at the same level or b) all tracks are played at the same level. Useful e.g. for party playlists, although I usually forget about the feature.

[Thor 7,504]

51 minutes ago, Presto said:

Which databases do you guys use when importing tags these days?

 

I don't. I type in manually in iTunes. I've tried to import from iTunes' own database now and then, but the results aren't quite in line with my preferred style.

[Faleel 5,347]

I have been using Discogs (I think) with MP3Tag.

[Marian Schedenig 8,193]

4 minutes ago, Presto said:

I have been using Discogs (I think) with MP3Tag.

 

Does Discogs have a CDDB server?

[Erik Woods 555]

When I'm re-tagging, The Tagger will draw from Discogs.  MusicBrainz Picard takes tags directly through it's own website which is quite comprehensive. 

 

-Erik-

[enderdrag64 624]

12 hours ago, Marian Schedenig said:

 

FLAC is lossless, so the format itself can't sound worse than the source. Has to be your phone or a software issue.

 

Well technically it depends on your encoding settings - I just learned recently that exporting audio in Audacity in FLAC isn't always 100% lossless in that it can apply dithering to the exported audio; essentially added white noise that's supposed to drown out the rounding errors that come with converting from 24-bit to 16-bit.

 

Technically the FLAC file is still "lossless", but it's not a 1:1 conversion of the input file since it has additional noise. You can disable dither in settings though

[Faleel 5,347]

2 hours ago, enderdrag64 said:

Well technically it depends on your encoding settings - I just learned recently that exporting audio in Audacity in FLAC isn't always 100% lossless in that it can apply dithering to the exported audio; essentially added white noise that's supposed to drown out the rounding errors that come with converting from 24-bit to 16-bit.

 

Technically the FLAC file is still "lossless", but it's not a 1:1 conversion of the input file since it has additional noise. You can disable dither in settings though

IIRC @Datameister brought this up way back in the day.

[Marian Schedenig 8,193]

11 hours ago, enderdrag64 said:

Well technically it depends on your encoding settings - I just learned recently that exporting audio in Audacity in FLAC isn't always 100% lossless in that it can apply dithering to the exported audio; essentially added white noise that's supposed to drown out the rounding errors that come with converting from 24-bit to 16-bit.

 

Technically the FLAC file is still "lossless", but it's not a 1:1 conversion of the input file since it has additional noise. You can disable dither in settings though

 

I think that only applies when downconverting from a 24 bit source to a 16 bit FLAC? In which case you're lossy by definition (not because of the format, but because your target format's *properties* differ from your source's). You'd lose quality either way, but dither probably makes the loss more smooth (compare downsampling a 24 bit image to 8 bit, where without dithering you'll get excessive banding).

[Jay 37,359]

Yes saving a WAV to a FLAC of the same bit depth and bit rate should always create a 1:1 identical copy unless you are using bugged software.

Dithering could be introduced if you're starting with a 24/48 wav and saving it to 16/441 flac or something though