Morning/Evening everyone
Now my Media Room and MacMini are all setup and running I’m about to start ripping approximately 1000 CD’s to my LaCie drive using DBpoweramp.
I note that the default “Lossless Level” is 5.
What should I be aiming for?
I assume the higher up the level you go, the slower the process runs and the more space the files take up.
Presumably uncompressed is the ideal, but are lower levels “good enough”?
Also, is FLAC the best option?
Sorry, a bit new to HiRes Ripping as I’ve only used iTunes to my iPod before, back in the day…
Thanks in advance for your recommendations/advice😊
If you have enough storage space I would go for wav at the highest resolution. It’s what I did eventually after starting with flac on a NAS but went to a dedicated music server.
I’m sure others will have a more technical explanation and reasoning for their choices.
FLAC is lossless, even with compression. Level 5 compression is “standard”, the device does the work. Time to rip will be unaffected by compression settings on modern hardware.
No need for WAV rips nowadays. WAV don’t support full ID3 tagging (metadata), which FLAC does.
Make your life easy - use defaults!
If, like us, you ever have an older naim Gen1 device (NDS,NDX,272 etc.) which prefer WAV you can set your media server to transcode on the fly. Modern streamers have no such preference.
Sounds good, thank you.
Eventually will be running the Mac/LaCie as a server for CD library through to my Streamer (probably ND5 XS 2) next year.
Should I rip with “After Encoding Verify Written Audio” switched on, or is the standard error checking during encoding sufficient?
I presume doing the verify takes a lot longer per disc🤔
@QuickSticks Have you setup accurip? That’s the most import thing, guaranteeing your rip is bit accurate against a public database of “known good” rips. This helps if you have damaged/dirty CD which introduce ripping errors.
When ripping our collection we had a lot of CD which didn’t pass accurip. So we got warm water and kitchen roll and washed/dried them gently. Post wash 99% of our dirty CDs ripped perfectly.
Modern CD drives are very fault tolerant. Most CD should rip first time no issue. Hold the CD up to the light - any large marks simply swipe off with a micro fibre cloth remembering to drag the cloth outwards from centre hole and never round the CD.
We had a lot of CD which had been used in cars - covered in grubby fingerprints, greasy marks and light scratches from rough roads. Those were the problematic ones.
A very few CD wouldn’t pass accurip on the cheap USB CD we were using, they needed ripped on another higher quality drive (we’re talking <10 CD from 1000’s).
I’ll be using my Apple SuperDive, which has been pretty reliable in the past. I first started this process using Apple Music, but my dealer told me to stop, drop the ALAC files and start again with DBpoweramp, which is where we are today🫤
Fortunately, I’d only done about 40 the Apple way…
Yeah, they are brilliant. They are one of the two dealers I use, as this is where my Dynaudio’s and Fraim came from along with my Exdemo NAPSC.
Mike put my entire system together, including building my Fraim, a few weeks ago.
Great bunch of “HiFi Nerds”…
If you use the paid version of DbPowerAmp, you can use multiple CD drives (if you have them). I had two CD drives linked up to a laptop (with an inbuilt drive) so was able to rip 3 CDs at a time - which significantly reduced time.
