New dBpoweramp Update

It might appear basic to operate, and so it should be, but dig deep and you will find a lot going on.

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Agreed, thanks Mike. Out of interest, what setting do you/others use to rip CDs. I am just using their Level 5 FLAC lossless encoding as it recommends.

We ripped all our CDs on level 5, nothing else special applied.

Tried uncompressed FLAC and could hear no difference - FLAC decompression is very efficient so doesn’t load up modern streamers.

All rips passed AccurateRip checks.

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Thanks Iain. I am finding that every other CD I rip has 1-2 accurate rip errors, but if I persist in re-ripping them, most eventually pass.

Are you cleaning before ripping?

Only if my wife makes me.

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:laughing:

Thought you might like that :joy:

Thanks for the link, I have a micro fibre cloth so I will definitely try this :+1:

By the way, I must admit the best sounding music on my system comes from CD rips played via upnp in the Naim app.

Hi again, I set dBpoweramp to FLAC level 5.
No mater what comp level you use, all get fully unpacked for streaming.
The unpacking process does not audibly affect SQ with my system.
NB: to rip FLAC to be uncompressed you need to set to “Uncompressed”
Level 0 has is the minimum compression level, but is still compressed.

I wipe all CD’s with an antistatic e-cloth, even if new.
If I get a dirty CD I use a Tile & Glass cleaner & kitchen paper, then e-cloth
But given a choice these days, I opt for 24bit downloads over 16bit CD

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Thanks Mike, yep agreed on downloads. I am just ripping a couple of boxes of old CDs to get them onto my NAS. It is a job I have been meaning to do for about a year!

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I note you have an Asustor Flashstor 6 NAS, an unknown on this forum.
Also its a 6 bay, thats a lot of disks for just music, what else do you have on it, I assume games an stuff?

HI Mike, it was a new purchase a few months ago. I believe it is the first of its kind - an NVMe NAS. It is completely silent and the NVMe disks are SO fast it renders movies and videos instantly. It is also proving very good as a music server with Minim server installed.

NVMe 4Gb disks cost a lot less than SSDs too and have read/write speeds that put them to shame.

Indeed, because of the nature of FLAC the same compute effort is required to decompress level 0 as level 8. The difference in the compression effectiveness, and therefore compute effort is all at the encoding end. Unless you have a slow computer that does the ripping there is no reason not to compress at level 8… which is what I do. Sure it’s diminishing returns in terms of storage saved, but when you have many hundreds of CDs it all helps, and the other settings were really for the computers of yesteryear.

Hi, What is your NVMe NAS?

Interested as I will need to moved my main NAS from 10TB to 12TB disks and the 10TB to the primary backup NAS, as the current 8TB volume is full and only 0.5TB left on the secondary backup NAS.

All are RAID0 volumes (correction RAID1)

The last move to the 10TB disks on the main NAS, passing down 8TB etc was 8 years ago, so the expansion of my library has slowed considerably, as the previous move to 8TB from 6TB & 6TB from 4TB & 4TB from 2TB was every couple of years.

I had begun looking at a multi-bay NVMe enclosure to use with 4 4TB SSDs and use this as DAS, but the overall cost is still more than 2 12TB disks (same with 2 8TB SSDs), plus my access and rsync backups are all network based, so a NVMe based NAS would be a solution.

Raid 0??? If one disk fails you will lose the lot!

Yes, sorry RAID1
Disks running in mirror as one volume.

I have a off-line backup which is 2 6TB disks running RAID0
I take a snapshot of the Music Library directory once every 6 months or so, and ensure that 3 copies are identical.

Hey guys, a bit of thread drift from dBpoweramp???

How about starting a new thread on the pro/con of NVMe vs SSD.
… apart from cost & speed, how do NVMe compare with reliability

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I’ll do that now Mike with the name of my NAS :+1:

Edit - now done. Thread is called - Asustor Flashtor 6 NVMe NAS