Audio on Nanikore

Ripping CDs for Fun

Sun, 30 Dec 2012 13:09:53 +0000

OK, maybe fun is not the right word, but over the last few years, I’ve been ‘digitally archiving’ a few items - it started with some old photo prints and negatives (that’s ongoing), and then I tackled my DVDs, and now I’m looking to sort my CD collection out (I think it’s ~400 discs).

So why do this? It’s a combination of convenience and sound quality really. I want to hear the music as I paid for it, but it’s a bit difficult to have all those CDs available around the house, and keep them away from the kids. Also, I have ripped all my CDs once, usually into iTunes, and over the years they’ve been in a smorgasbord of bit rates and formats, from 128kbps AAC and MP3, up to newer ones which are VBR ~256kbps AAC.

Now I’m doing this final rip to a lossless format, I can then simply transcode to whatever size/quality a target needs in the future, and enjoy that ‘CD quality’ of this master.

How am I doing this? For the rip, I’m using Exact Audio Copy which is a nice piece of freeware, and rips the audio from the disc using a variety of methods to try to make sure that what you get, as its name suggests, is an exact copy of the disc. It’ll then save this, with all the meta-data it looks up online as either .WAV files, or several other formats you can set up. I’m using the FLAC encoder, so it’s losslessly compressed, and is quite widely supported across players and platforms. This is also open source, so I should be able to play/convert it well into the future.

With even my lowly Windows machine, this takes only a few minutes per disc, including meta data tweaks I need for some of the non-English discs, so it’s more a case of just feeding the machine than anything else. As for size, FLAC, depending on settings, brings most of the CDs in at around 350MB, about half their native size, but obviously nowhere near the ~65MB AAC or MP3 would give you - alas the price you pay, but given disk space costs, it’s not a deal killer.

When at my PC, I tend to listen on my Sennheiser HD-555 headphones, via Foobar2000, which I find to be a nice, simple sound app. The hardware, for what it’s worth, is a Creative X-Fi Xtreme Audio PCI Express card, which I find to sound better than the onboard Realtek codec, or the HDMI audio feed. On the Mac, it’s the built in Intel HD audio, which sounds acceptable, but the Creative card shows why there’s still a little more benefit in a separate sound card.

When not using the headphones, I have some ancient Sony SRS-Z750PC computer speakers which are fine for podcasts, background music and game effects, but aren’t great. In the future I may get a better set of speakers and even a separate amplifier for my computers, but that’ll have to wait a bit. (A real home music system for the living room is higher up the agenda!).

Is it worth the time? Actually, I think it has been - some of my very old rips always sounded a bit harsh, and going back to listening to the CD equivalent makes it all the more difficult to live with, and its been good to listen to all that music again.

Original Comments

Comments from the original WordPress blog post.

Terrano Spirit — 2013-04-17

I have been reading out a few of your posts and it’s pretty clever stuff. I will definitely bookmark your website.

AirTunes

Tue, 21 Jun 2005 14:11:27 +0000

Last week I bought myself an Apple Airport Express. It’s a fairly regular wireless 802.11b/g access point amongst other wireless functions, it’s very small, stylish box, and, being from Apple costs a bit more than other slightly less well designed rival products.

The only wireless product I own right now is my PSP. So now I can get game downloads on my PSP! Great! Hang on, I could do that from hotspots around Tokyo anyway. So why?

Actually, both of the above, but also because of Airtunes. Airtunes is an extension of iTunes which basically pumps out a stream to Airport Express which then pumps it out through it’s small optical/3.5mm jack socket on one of it’s sides and from there into the back of my stereo. The benefit is that in my apartment there’s a wall mounted network port just behind my TV / stereo which my Airport Express is wired into. Thus, I can send my huge iTunes library to my stereo for almost 10 days of continuous songs!

Old Audio Laid to Rest

Sat, 13 Nov 2004 06:34:20 +0000

The digital music revolution, many believe, was sparked by the MP3 format, and is now transforming into a DRM/paid for download market of iPods, Windows Media, AAC and a whole raft of other things which may or may not be a good thing for artists and home users and their rights.

However, it was interesting to me in the last few days to see 2 old apps from simpler days effectively disappear from active development - Winamp and Audion. Actually, I should qualify that - Winamp will continue, but all of the original team has now left the parent company and it has been in a state of lacklustre development for a while. Audion, on the other hand, has been officially put into retirement and is now officially freeware.

I used Winamp in about 1998 when I was working for a ‘digital media’ company [sic] - with it’s llama themes demo track and it’s different skins Winamp really was a nice way to listen to MP3 and CDs at the time on Windows - add in visualisations and it was a nice little app. Unfortunately, it (Nullsoft) was bought by AOL and it seems the bloat began - the small app added more and more windows and popups. Version 3 wasn’t as good as 2 and as if to admit this, version 4 was skipped and the next one was (to me) the equally disappointing version 5. Added to this that other players in the Windows market such as Microsoft, Real, MusicMatch and even Apple with their iTunes had better apps it was obvious that Winamp had become an add-in to AOL and not much else, as mentioned here as the last Nullsoft person has now left the building.

Audion was around since OS 8 (and still works on 9 I believe), and I used it a lot, and even licensed version 1 - it was a nice app, and the company who made it - Panic - are a great bunch of coders who have released a lot of very cool applications. I bought it, and the N2MP3 encoder and between the two of them, put in as many MP3s from live recordings I made in Japan’s live bars as I could on a Powerbook 190 (68K processor running at 66MHz on a 1GB hard drive). I liked Audion - it’s faces were cool and it did what you wanted - had simple functionality and was nice to look at, but faded into the background when you needed it to. What happened? Well, the long and the short of it was iTunes, the iPod and the Music Store. Panic founder Cabel Sassar has written an amazing page on this situation, and I encourage everyone to read it - and to click on the pop-up links - there’s some great things in there. Ultimately, iTunes and it’s iPod and store were just too big a juggernaut to overcome. I commend Panic for retiring the app though to conserve a small company’s resources to move on and live to fight another day. Another Panic person, Steve Frank has put some more thoughts on his Blog here.

Ultimately it shows how a market place can change and how competition truly works. Winamp I think was the victim of a corporation and a startup just not understanding each other, whereas Audion seems to have been the victim of the market convergence between a player, an encoder, hardware and a music shop.

Beer = Ogg

Sat, 22 Feb 2003 13:17:25 +0000

The weekend … you have to love it. Well, after a night on the beers last night in Nihonbashi" first as it’s a classic. I’m using Audacity as the recording software. Whilst all this is going on, I think I’d better clean my balcony. The fun never ends.