MP3 Ripping Software

[Jonas]

A collection of .wav files on disc in addition to the original CDs stored safely provides a backup of each there is bit rot on the disc, I have the copy on disc. If there is bit rot on the disc, I have the CD to re-rip. If both get destroyed, there is always the option of re-purchasing.

You need a lossless backup of the CDs to back up the music, then you need a backup of the lossless backup to back up the labor.

...and that is why I at the moment have all my cd's ripped into lossless compressed files, with all metadata, as artist, album, year etc (and my own inserted bpm's and comments etc), which I have on my main hard drive, and then I have a backup of that on an external hard drive, now that hard drive space is so cheap.

I'm not bothering with having both wav's (for archiving) and mp3's (for dj'ing) as many seem to do, but using my lossless compressed files for both dj'ing (easy because of great metadata capabilities, and as good or better sound quality compared to mp3) AND archiving (works because I can burn original quality copies of my original cd's since I use lossless compression).

I use Apple Lossless by the way. I know, it's not open source like FLAC, but it fits my needs as of now, and if I want to change to another format somewhere along the line, I just have to convert my files to that other, "better" format, without any loss (at least in theory).

/Jonas

[GemZombie]

I too would rather just do an .iso backup.

[david]

I too would rather just do an .iso backup.

.iso is for data CDs. For audio CDs you need a copy of the audio data and the CD table of contents and optionally the CD-TEXT info etc. So a wav/cue combination will do the trick. Or a flac file with an embedded cue sheet.

[julius]

...and that is why I at the moment have all my cd's ripped into lossless compressed files, with all metadata, as artist, album, year etc (and my own inserted bpm's and comments etc), which I have on my main hard drive, and then I have a backup of that on an external hard drive, now that hard drive space is so cheap.

Do you use the external hard drive with a laptop for DJing, or is the main hard drive in your laptop just really, really unbelievably gigantic?

[Mr Awesomer]

I too would rather just do an .iso backup.

.iso is for data CDs. For audio CDs you need a copy of the audio data and the CD table of contents and optionally the CD-TEXT info etc. So a wav/cue combination will do the trick. Or a flac file with an embedded cue sheet.

All CDs are "data CDs." Jesse is in the optical media biz, hence I'm fairly certain an .iso backup is correct.

[lipi]

I too would rather just do an .iso backup.

.iso is for data CDs. For audio CDs you need a copy of the audio data and the CD table of contents and optionally the CD-TEXT info etc. So a wav/cue combination will do the trick. Or a flac file with an embedded cue sheet.

All CDs are "data CDs." Jesse is in the optical media biz, hence I'm fairly certain an .iso backup is correct.

in particular, yellow book (data cd-rom) is an extenion of red book (audio), and strictly a super-set, i believe. though i've always been a bit hazy on this, so i'd be curious to hear jesse confirm it.

[Jonas]

...and that is why I at the moment have all my cd's ripped into lossless compressed files, with all metadata, as artist, album, year etc (and my own inserted bpm's and comments etc), which I have on my main hard drive, and then I have a backup of that on an external hard drive, now that hard drive space is so cheap.

Do you use the external hard drive with a laptop for DJing, or is the main hard drive in your laptop just really, really unbelievably gigantic?

Actually, I'm not laptop dj'ing right now, still on the cd side, but preparing for the switch. I only have a very old 80 GB internal hardrive in my desktop computer (and then an equally sized external for backup), but since I've only been deejaying for three years, I don't have a HUGE amount of cd's yet, so 80 GB is enough space for me.

Julius, I guess you have a few more cd's than me (how many thousand do you have?), but I'm slowly getting there

I'm eyeing a laptop with a 200 GB internal hard drive (which is somewhere around where the market is at right now for maximum storage in a laptop), which should be fine for me a long time into the future, to go with a equally sized external, which is really cheap at this moment.

Since I'm mostly a vintage jazz guy (late 1920's-1940's), with lossless compression I can compress the files a lot, so a 3 minute song will be around 10 MB, which makes room for around 7 000 songs, that would give you room for 350 cd's with 20 songs each on a 80 GB hard drive.

Granted, my disk space is running out with only 80 GB, but when I very soon have saved enough money to buy a laptop, it will come with that 200 GB hard drive, and then I'll have room for something around 18 000 songs, or 900 cd's with 20 songs each, and the size of hard drives will probably continue to grow at least in accordance to my rate of buying new cd's (probably faster), so the next time I upgrade, maybe 500 GB internal is no joke. I remember someone hoping for 1 TB on a memory stick on this forum, maybe it's actually gonna be here someday. I've read articles on laptops with 20 GB memory sticks, taking away the hard drive altogether, don't know if they're on sale yet.

If I ever run into the problem of having too many cd's compared to my storage space on internal hard drive, I see two solutions.

1. One would be having a bigger archive externally and a smaller "dj sample" on the laptop, probably the way most of you guys in the laptop scene already do it. I'd keep two RAID:ed external hard drives with RAID 1, which means that they are mirrored, so that if one of them crashes, it's no problem, since the other one has the same information stored, so I'll just have to replace the crashed one and keep going. Once again, with todays low prices, I would have no problem buying for example two external 500 GB hard drives for my archiving, and then have my favourite sub-200 GB songs on the laptop. Another big plus with only a "dj sample" on my laptop would be that I don't have to waddle through all the songs I'd probably never wanna dj (once again, I'm sure this is what you laptop guys already do).

The difference to having wav on external and mp3 on laptop, instead choosing lossless compression for all locations, means that I'll never have to insert metadata again once done, especially those of bpm and comments (session info, like players and similar). Since bpm and comments don't come with freeDB or CDDB, going through a wav archive means that I'd have to manually insert that metadata everytime I convert from wav to mp3 (or whatever) again, right?

2. The other would be to actually keep ONLY the "dj sample" songs ripped to hard drive, since there are many songs on my cd's which either have too bad sound quality (yes, I'll admit that, even as primarily a vintage guy, I find that there are many songs that I'll never dj, because I can't stand the hiss), or plainly just SUCK for swing dancing (how about the massive amount of Pha Terrell or Jimmy Mitchelle vocals with Andy Kirk and Erskine Hawkins respectively?). Since I see little point in "saving" those songs, why should I back them up? If I ever want to listen to them or maybe, maybe even dj them, they are on the original cd, and should that cd be damaged or lost, so I can't retrieve that sucky song, well, I'll take that risk...

With that solution, I can still keep a smaller hard drive both internally and externally, as I do now. Sure, I can't produce an exact copy of the original cd, since there would be tracks here and there gone, but what would really be the point of reproducing the exact original cd?

/Jonas

[david]

I'd keep two RAID:ed external hard drives with RAID 1

Using RAID for this is probably overkill, since a simple sync/backup from your main disk to the secondary, done regularly, will keep your data happy, and will make the two disks less dependent on eachother.

In another subthread, the reason i protested about calling audio CD rips ".iso", is that I believe that suffix comes from the use of ISO 9660 filesystems on data CDs.

[GemZombie]

I'd keep two RAID:ed external hard drives with RAID 1

Using RAID for this is probably overkill, since a simple sync/backup from your main disk to the secondary, done regularly, will keep your data happy, and will make the two disks less dependent on eachother.

In another subthread, the reason i protested about calling audio CD rips ".iso", is that I believe that suffix comes from the use of ISO 9660 filesystems on data CDs.

It's semantics. Most people say ".iso" and all they mean is "create an image". That's how I was using the term. Technically iso 9660 defines the iso file system on the CD, and a music disc is "Redbook" which defines just a bit more than a file system (such as the audio format/bitrate and such). So an iso file is technically an image of the 9660 file system. UDF is the file format for DVDs, but when you create an image of a DVD most people don't call it a "UDF", they still call it an ISO, which it's not.

Semantics.

So anyway, you can backup a CD disc to a disc image, it's just not technically an "iso" image, I guess it's a "redbook" image. Or even better, it could just be a raw data image which would be independent of the structure, mostly. Using our product (Roxio), it backup up to what they call a "Global Image", or .gi.

I just did it, to make sure I wasn't talking out my ass too

[GemZombie]

I too would rather just do an .iso backup.

.iso is for data CDs. For audio CDs you need a copy of the audio data and the CD table of contents and optionally the CD-TEXT info etc. So a wav/cue combination will do the trick. Or a flac file with an embedded cue sheet.

For the record, most software abandoned the wav/cue method for doing image backups of audio discs... at least from a interface point of view. The whole bin/cue exposure method sucks.

[GemZombie]

.iso is for data CDs. For audio CDs you need a copy of the audio data and the CD table of contents and optionally the CD-TEXT info etc. So a wav/cue combination will do the trick. Or a flac file with an embedded cue sheet.

All CDs are "data CDs." Jesse is in the optical media biz, hence I'm fairly certain an .iso backup is correct.

in particular, yellow book (data cd-rom) is an extenion of red book (audio), and strictly a super-set, i believe. though i've always been a bit hazy on this, so i'd be curious to hear jesse confirm it.

That's correct I believe. It's different from .iso. Again all of this is semantics. People knew what I meant when I said .iso. I was just using the generally accepted term. Sorry to derail the thread... I'll be sure to say "image" next time.

"I too would rather just do an image backup." (which means a single file representing the entire CD that can be restored to a CD without losing data or quality).

[david]

For the record, most software abandoned the wav/cue method for doing image backups of audio discs... at least from a interface point of view. The whole bin/cue exposure method sucks.

Living in the Linux world, I'd say that most software I've seen still uses the bin/cue (or bin/toc in the cdrdao case) format. I agree that it kindof sucks, but I haven't seen any other standard formats.

But I must also admit that I haven't looked that hard.

[patrik]

Anybody using iTunes or Max for their ripping and encoding activities?
I do, on my laptop which is an PowerBook G4.

[Lawrence]

Anybody using iTunes or Max for their ripping and encoding activities?
I do, on my laptop which is an PowerBook G4.

No, definitely not. The ITunes Proprietary format limits your use of the file to only 5 machines. I personally use three computers regularly, and what happens when they crash or are replaced? Or if I switch offices at work and thus switch machines? Or if I change jobs to a different office and different computer network, altogether, and want to load my music on the computer for background music? Or if I want to listen to the song at my girlfriend's place on her computer? Or if I'm travelling and want to take just a flash drive with me and listen to certain songs on a friend's computer while I'm there?

Even if you don't "illegally" share the file with others, the file become obsolete within a few months or years of normal activity, unless you take some drastic and sophisticated measures that, with MP3s, are wholly and entirely unnecessary.

I also just don't trust ANY proprietary format. If it keeps track of the number of machines I can use it on, it can likely surreptitiously keep track of other things that I just don't want companies to know. And if I happen to (M'GOSH!!! THE HORROR!!!) share a song with a friend, if only to let him or her sample it before they buy it (or because it is out of print and unavailable anywhere), I don't want to help them know about it.

[Mr Awesomer]

No, definitely not. The ITunes Proprietary format limits your use of the file to only 5 machines.

I believe only songs "bought" from the iTunes Store have that limitation. They only "sell" crappy 128kbps files anyway, so any self respecting music lover doesn't get their music that way.
You can however use iTunes to rip your own stuff to mp3 or Apple's AAC format (and a couple other formats, I forget which) and do what ever you like with them.