CD ripping / multi room music systems

[John D]

Hi

Has anyone used or could recommend any of the online companies that rip music CDs into MP3 format. I've got about 300 CDs to convert and don't have the time to do it myself. Interested in price, quality and service.

 

The above is step 1 in getting a full multi room set up in the house. I am aware of Sonos but what are the alternatives?

 

Any comments appreciated.

 

Cheers

 

John

[Torres]

If you bought them from Amazon, check out their AutoRip service.

[EastleighSoulBoy]

What price do you have in mind? What are you going to store them on in the interim and what quality do you want? (320kbps ?)

[Sidney Fudpucker the 3rd]

My advice would be to rip them to a higher quality than mp3. If you rip straight to mp3 all the quality has gone and there's no getting it back. However, if you rip to a lossless format like FLAC then you've got a high quality format on your hard drive that you can the create a mp3 from easily.

 

Sonos is the best value for money system on the market. Reliable, well supported by their superb online technical dept and has music streaming services such as Spotify natively built in. The streaming systems from the likes of Linn, Naim and Cyrus are far superior but not cheap. To be honest, it's not worth buying anything above Sonos if you only intend on streaming mp3.

[SaintsAhoy]

Hi

Has anyone used or could recommend any of the online companies that rip music CDs into MP3 format. I've got about 300 CDs to convert and don't have the time to do it myself. Interested in price, quality and service.

 

The above is step 1 in getting a full multi room set up in the house. I am aware of Sonos but what are the alternatives?

 

Any comments appreciated.

 

Cheers

 

John

 

It doesn't take long to rip 300 cds

[John D]

Thanks for all the feedback.

 

Re Amazon - thanks for the heads up I will try that as it will probably take into account more recent CDs but not the ones I bought from Our Price back in the early 90s.

 

Quality / format: Clearly I am showing my lack of knowledge on the subject. Basically I will be looking to play the CDs on the existing Iphone I have and also through a multi room system - probably Sonos. If there is a better quality than Mp3 then I would look to rip to that. Am also now looking at the Sonos playbar for the lounge

 

Re Price/time: It has taken me about 3 years to do about 150 CDs - I don't have much spare time with a busy job plus kids so I was thinking if I could pay around 50p a CD then I would just get in finished in one go.

 

Thanks again for the feedback

[PaulSaint]

I set one of these up for a customer and ripped his CD Collection to it. Works well and sounds good! Took about 50 hours though?

 

http://www.richersounds.com/search/Brennan

[saintbletch]

Hello John, I started a business in digital audio many, many years ago as a slide-line. At about the same time, my own consulting business took off so I couldn't really dedicate the time to it. I do however still have the CD ripping and audio conversion equipment that I built. My son's home from university at the moment and I mentioned this project to him. He'd be happy to rip your CDs for you.

 

You mentioned that you didn't understand this area of technology so here are my thoughts/advice.

 

Regarding format, what I would advise is that you rip the CDs to what is called a losslessly encoded format such as FLAC or WMA. And then convert that format to the MP3 size of your choice.

 

Lossless encoding means that you take all the ones and zeroes from the CD and compress them without throwing away any of the musical information. The resulting files are very large; too large to realistically use on your phone/MP3 player. But if you are going to use a high-quality music server/multi-room system, then those files will yield the highest level of musical fidelity.

 

You would then also take the tracks that have been ripped to a lossless format from your CDs and then convert those files to a lossy (where some musical information is lost) MP3 encoding. These files are small enough for you to use on your mobile devices.

 

You could skip the lossless step and go straight to a high bit-rate MP3 encoding. Something like 320 Kbps would include practically all of the information that MP3 can encode. Whilst the file size of the individual tracks will be more portable, they are still quite large. It's a trade-off.

 

Just a word on what you'll be losing if you go down the MP3 route and not going with lossless files. MP3 uses a branch of science called psychoacoustics. It basically works on the assumption that the human ear can only hear certain frequencies, and that when two or more frequencies are present in a recording, some of the frequencies will be less audible. MP3 achieves the space saving by discarding this less audible musical information. The lower the MP3 bit-rate, the more aggressively this less perceptible information is removed.

 

So is this a problem?

 

Well, when you're using a mobile phone with average quality headphones in a space with background noise, then you can argue that this lack of detail is not as important. If you are spending some cash on a good multi-room system, and perhaps even feeding a really good quality stereo amp at some point, then I'd argue that you need your musical files with none of that detail missing.

 

I've done a lot of research on this area and if you feed a really good quality amp with losslessly encoded music versus high bit-rate MP3s (320 Kbs), the difference is really significant.

 

As you can probably tell I'm a bit anal about my music quality, so this advice may not be for everyone, but I'd recommend you rip the CDs to both Lossless and Lossy. Having your music in a lossless encoded format, also protects you from the protectionistic behaviour of technology companies who may in future years restrict the portability of their own file formats.

 

If you think my son can help, please let me have an email address/phone number (or pay your fiver and accept private messages you cheapskate!).

 

He would rip your CDs to a lossless encoding, convert those files to a lossy format such as MP3 192Kb/s, download associated album art and copy all the files onto DVDs. Alternatively, he could deliver them on a portable hard-drive.

 

Good luck.

[John D]

Hello John, I started a business in digital audio many, many years ago as a slide-line. At about the same time, my own consulting business took off so I couldn't really dedicate the time to it. I do however still have the CD ripping and audio conversion equipment that I built. My son's home from university at the moment and I mentioned this project to him. He'd be happy to rip your CDs for you.

 

You mentioned that you didn't understand this area of technology so here are my thoughts/advice.

 

Regarding format, what I would advise is that you rip the CDs to what is called a losslessly encoded format such as FLAC or WMA. And then convert that format to the MP3 size of your choice.

 

Lossless encoding means that you take all the ones and zeroes from the CD and compress them without throwing away any of the musical information. The resulting files are very large; too large to realistically use on your phone/MP3 player. But if you are going to use a high-quality music server/multi-room system, then those files will yield the highest level of musical fidelity.

 

You would then also take the tracks that have been ripped to a lossless format from your CDs and then convert those files to a lossy (where some musical information is lost) MP3 encoding. These files are small enough for you to use on your mobile devices.

 

You could skip the lossless step and go straight to a high bit-rate MP3 encoding. Something like 320 Kbps would include practically all of the information that MP3 can encode. Whilst the file size of the individual tracks will be more portable, they are still quite large. It's a trade-off.

 

Just a word on what you'll be losing if you go down the MP3 route and not going with lossless files. MP3 uses a branch of science called psychoacoustics. It basically works on the assumption that the human ear can only hear certain frequencies, and that when two or more frequencies are present in a recording, some of the frequencies will be less audible. MP3 achieves the space saving by discarding this less audible musical information. The lower the MP3 bit-rate, the more aggressively this less perceptible information is removed.

 

So is this a problem?

 

Well, when you're using a mobile phone with average quality headphones in a space with background noise, then you can argue that this lack of detail is not as important. If you are spending some cash on a good multi-room system, and perhaps even feeding a really good quality stereo amp at some point, then I'd argue that you need your musical files with none of that detail missing.

 

I've done a lot of research on this area and if you feed a really good quality amp with losslessly encoded music versus high bit-rate MP3s (320 Kbs), the difference is really significant.

 

As you can probably tell I'm a bit anal about my music quality, so this advice may not be for everyone, but I'd recommend you rip the CDs to both Lossless and Lossy. Having your music in a lossless encoded format, also protects you from the protectionistic behaviour of technology companies who may in future years restrict the portability of their own file formats.

 

If you think my son can help, please let me have an email address/phone number (or pay your fiver and accept private messages you cheapskate!).

 

He would rip your CDs to a lossless encoding, convert those files to a lossy format such as MP3 192Kb/s, download associated album art and copy all the files onto DVDs. Alternatively, he could deliver them on a portable hard-drive.

 

Good luck.

 

Thanks, you have a PM. You should probably claim some commission on the £5 I have just spent too. Been meaning to re-subscribe for months but never got round to it

[saintbletch]

Thanks, you have a PM. You should probably claim some commission on the £5 I have just spent too. Been meaning to re-subscribe for months but never got round to it

 

I'll check out the small print of my Muppet Show loyalty card, but I think I am able to gain TMS reputation points for coercing you into handing over the fiver. I'll check it out with Spudgun.

 

Got the PM, with give you a call in the week to see if we can get those ones and zeros into your ears.

[Spudders]

Good work bletch +1 reputations point for persuading John to re-subscribe. Also good to hear your son is back out of prison after all the sorry business with the theft of those cds, oh sorry I mean back from Uni (wink wink).