I’ve inherited a large collection of ripped vinyl and radio recordings. Putting aside the legality of these rips, I would like to transfer them to my streamer. I’ve considered using a NAS or DAS and have played about with dbpoweramp on my laptop then copying the files to my music server. I was wondering if there was any other approach as I no longer have a cd player?
I’m a tad confused. You say ripped vinyl - are they flac files or on CDs? Where is your music stored at the moment? Do you have a NAS?
All good questions … simply put my music is on an Audiostore music server with copies on a couple of NAS devices. The music I’ve inherited is on home produced CDs in aiff format, which I think is an Apple creation. The original music was ripped from a Thorens deck to computer, some was recorded from the radio.
AIFF files are lossless and should be playable, you just need to copy the files onto your Audiostore music server, try an album and see what shows up.
Do you know if the files have metadata? If they do then things should get easy as Roon will probably identify them correctly if a basic Artist/Album tag is set. It amazed me when setting up Roon how little was missing.
If the files don’t have metadata then you can either set some basic tags before copying using DbPoweramp or similar or use Roons ‘Identify Album’ feature, find the album and let Roon do the hard work for you. Setting some metadata now means that if you ever move away from Roon you won’t have a big job on your hands but it will be much quicker using Roon but of course Roon won’t update your files with the information.
It might be interesting to use MusicBrainz Picard on a sample album and see if a scan using the acoustic fingerprint works in finding the album for you. If it does it will populate the metadata for you.
For the radio programs, Roon (or anything) won’t recognise the content so you would need to set some metadata for these. At least a title, artist and a running order for the tracks. You might want to find a suitable tag to identify it as a radio recording.
I’d suggest being disciplined as to how you organise the rips on your server, i.e setup a hierarchy of Artist/Album as it will make it easier to find the files later.
Thanks for that. Hopefully you’ve now got everything you need from Richard’s post. He is far cleverer than me on this stuff, especially as regards Roon, about which I have no idea.
1 Like
Thanks for the advice. As far as I can see the files have a toc but no metadata, so I am using metadatics to add track names, album name, etc. I will try MusicBrainz Picard as well.
As you advise I’m copying with dbpoweramp onto my laptop under a dedicated folder for this CDs. I don’t know how many but there are two boxes of them; at least Fred listed the tracks on most of the paper sleeves.
1 Like
MusicBrainz Picard seems complex at first, I don’t know if you have used it previously. If you haven’t then below is a pointer.
If you choose add folder and let it load the files you then cluster it into an album (click the cluster button). Then select the folder and click Scan and see what happens.
If you are lucky and the acoustic fingerprint is recognised the tracks will magically appear in the title section with completed metadata. You can then select individual tracks or groups of tracks and then edit the metadata.
1 Like
I ripped all my vinyl some years ago, and absence of metadata was not an issue when I played the rips with ND5XS (Naim remote, FLAC files stored on NAS with first Twonky and then Logitech Media Server, and later stored on Mac Mini with Serviio file server) - the files were stored nested as tracks (all numbered and named), inside folder named with the album name, that nested in the artist folder, and that in a genre folder. The player simply browsed/searched according to that file structure. However when I changed to Audirvana as renderer instead of ND5XS it wanted metadata, and struggled, there was a work p- around, and although not ideal that’s how I’ve played them ever since.
With several hundred albums like this, plus a sprinkling of ripped CDs and downloads with incomplete or inconsistent metadata (ripped and downloaded while I had the ND5XS and was oblivious to metadata), it is a huge and will-to-live losing task to try and fix manually. I had heard somewhere that Roon could do it automatically, hence my first trial of Roon …which simply didn’t find them! Several members have kindly suggested best software to try with, but I haven’t done yet. I just don’t understand why library/payer software providers can’t provide a browse/searcg by file structure facility in addition to or as an alternative to metadata, as, after all, it is such a simple thing, and there must be a lot of people with music methodically stored but without metadata…
Good luck with it!
1 Like
Thanks very helpful - it was daunting to look at. I’ll persevere.
This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.