Does anyone scan in their CD paperwork?

Whilst I love playing my ripped music, there are times when I wish I had the CD inserts available, e.g. to sing along, or read the notes. Other than the last 10 purchased CD’’s, the rest are stored upstairs in a cupboard. As I always have a laptop to hand, it would be ideal to somehow have a scanned in copy of the CD notes, but that is a massive amount of work.
So I was wondering if anyone here scans in all their CD paperwork, and if so how have they done it, OR is there a repository somewhere on the net for them all (unlikely I know)?

One of the reasons I hate CDs, naff little booklets and sublime artwork miniaturised.

Interesting question though.

Generally I’m simply happy with album/track metadata and a decent quality cover art image. It ought to be trivial to offer PDFs of CD inserts for downloads. Itunes sometimes do. Qobuz often do generally for classical/opera though.

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Interesting, so something Amazon could quiet easily do when you buy CD from them or download it.

Yes, I can’t see why not.

Haven’t purchased things from iTunes for some time but occasioannly got the inserts as PDFs and for classical Qobuz often provide them, for example a current freebie:

I think it’s the kind of thing you could waste time scanning only to find down the line it’ll be a streaming norm in a few years but realistically how often do you look at those booklets - if often simply keep them, perhaps separate to CD storage.

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First manufacturer or record label or streaming software to get this sorted will win basically. I tend towards the view that it’s pathetic none have addressed the matter.

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Ripping 1000 CDs was a chore, I won’t even think of scanning the booklets page by page, cropping, adjusting color :anguished: So I am keeping the CDs at hand, they have an ok shelf in the living room and 1000 is not too bad. Was thinking that maybe at some point I’ll pay someone but haven’t worked out the maths.

It’s a shame they don’t come as downloads, but even if they did for new ones, no chance for many of my CDs

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It’s probably about time lyrics were embedded into the metadata as standard then the app playing the music could display them

I scanned those that I felt I would want to view at time - maybe 10-20% I guess.
Operas with their libretto booklets are the only ones where I think the CD booklets themselves are worth keeping, and so those still grace shelves in the music room.

Not perfect, but Roon has a lot

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Often this info is available on Rovi. The lyrics at least. My single gripe about the Android app is the lack of Rovi integration.

Re CD versus LP liner notes, I think CD wins hands down. Yes the cover art is small and therefore inferior. But the real estate offered by the CD booklet far surpasses what you get on even the nicest gatefold LP. With all but a few exceptions, there’s more to look at and read with a CD.

Scanning hundreds/thousands of CD liner notes? That’s for the retired or unemployed.

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I did a big rip of all my CDs circa 2015-16, once Roon showed me I wouldn’t be listening to CDs much longer. I didn’t scan CD inserts.

From about 2019 with newly purchased CDs I do scan CD inserts (if they have anything worth scanning above what Roon will have anyway)

I (rather ironically really ) use a program called NAPS (not another pdf scanner) which really makes the cropping and leaflet manipulation relatively easy.

I usually save them as photos and pdf to give me maximum flexibility in the future. I probably will go back and do the work inserts from albums like ACE compilations at some stage.

When it comes to box sets I’m caught between scanning them or just not sending them to the attic and having them in my music room to flick through.

For standard CDs it’s quite easy to scan the inserts while the CD is ripping.

.sjb

I often wish that the LP sleeve format had been retained with a cd mount in the middle. Too late now, all history. I use Wikipedia for sleevenotes now :frowning:

As far as reading the lyrics and singing along is concerned, you could open up Sound Hound, or similar, and get the lyrics that way, turn the sound off on your iPad so you don’t hear the track through that. Or use your phone, if you are using your iPad to control your streaming.

Not an elegant solution, but it will work.

Funnily enough, it’s a bit old hat these days, but Sound Hound has become very useful lately with the plethora of new series with good soundtracks, like Small Axe, for example. I managed to discover some interesting new music.

I do as @Sloop_John_B for new CD’s including using the rather excellent NAPS software! This software will split a PDF file into separate image files which works well in Roon which can display both.

It’s possible to grab PDF booklets from the likes of QoBuz if you are a subscriber and also Hiresaudio even if you are not.

There are also booklet scans available on Musicbrainz. Some ae quite decent and some are not worth bothering with. They do take a bit of searching as each CD can have multiple releases so you have to trawl through them to find a complete booklet. I keep a record in a spreadsheet as to where I am in my collection and download a few if I am up early before the family on the weekend and have an hour to spare in a quiet house.

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What’s essentially being said here is that none of the current solution to lyrics, booklets etc. are elegant or especially competent. Thus there remains a void for someone to step into. No evidence whatsoever that will be Roon as they or focus has been on integrating rather than innovating. So…

One of the nifty features of the App with the Core is that if you can’t find any suitable cover artwork then you can easily just take a square picture with your smartphone or tablet of the CD cover and use that. The App makes this very simple to do, and I’ve done this on a number of occasions with great results. It has of course occurred to me that it wouldn’t take much more effort to do the same for the entire booklet. Perhaps one for the feature request thread…

Which one of the Roon guys ran over your cat Mike?

.sjb

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@trickydickie @Sloop_John_B I like your thinking. Perhaps I’ll start with scanning in my latest CD, and see how that goes. I’ll also lookup NAPS although I’m quite happy with using my scanner, then Photoshop. I am retired so I do have the time, but the worry will be how do you ever stop, which I suspect is the trap @trickydickie is now in. I’ll also check out Musicbrainz to see if that saves time.

It does seem a bit of a gap in the market, but if Musicbrainz has the data (albeit limited currently), then presumably apps can tap into that as they do already for basic metadata. The source of this data needs to be part of the production process of all newly created music.

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I’d imagine there are copyright issues that prevent this being harvested and there is the chance that what is labelled dsotm.jpg is anything but.

.sjb

For me, when listening to classical choral music and song, I find having the words available, with translations where the original language is one I don’t speak, a key part of my enjoyment. So for most such CDs I have scanned the words and stored them in iCloud. This means I can have them in front of me on the iPad I’m using to control the streamer. In a few cases, some of the download sites have the booklets available for direct download without purchasing the CD and that saves all the faff.

Opera librettos are just too long to bother scanning, so I have removed the booklets from the CD boxes and stored them on a small bookcase in the hall.

Roger