Ripping The CD Collection

I’m not an audiophile, but I want the music to sound right. What comes out of my iPhone through the Bose QC20’s noise-cancelling earphones is right for the purpose, but what comes out of the headphone socket through my hifi is muffled and tiring. Same signal, different context. Hence all my fussing around with Dragonflys and Jitterbugs earlier this year. While not quite up to the DAC in my Marantz CD player, the combination is close, and the sound isn’t tiring. And I fall asleep to music from the Bose Colour Sound fed via Bluetooth from my iPhone streaming via WiFi from the NAS.

I was not ripping the CD collection for backup. That would have meant copying the discs. And then buying another NAS to backup the backup, because NAS can fail more frequently than a CD. Anyway, there is a CD backup service: it’s called Amazon, or Foyles, or any number of other online retailers. This won’t work for compilations of obscure composers by performers whose careers never lived up to their early promise (British Piano Music of the 1980’s where art though now?) but then, well, how often did you listen to it when you had it? Classic performances that you really want tend to be re-released. Or surpassed.

I ripped the collection because I stream more than I do, and may stream more, especially with the Sonos in the front room, and because I do put some of it on the iPhone and the Nano for portable use from time to time. And I’ve only got 128GB on my Air SDD. Which is my way of explaining why I used the iTunes default of 192kps M4a.

Why did I use iTunes? For one thing, Hans Beekhuysen mentions it as one of three which are decent rippers. Since one of the others is Roon, that’s a pretty good recommendation. iTunes is good at getting song titles and parsing the artist / composer, no worse than any of the others at getting album art (I tried Clementine: it won some, lost others) and once you accept its quirky little ways is pretty good at managing the library. It’s not Roon. But neither is the price.

So the workflow looks like this:

0. Create an Album Artwork directory on your Mac. Open a new music library in iTunes and point it at your NAS. Save.

1. Put CD into drive

2. Choose the album title that a) isn’t in Japanese, and b) doesn’t say it’s Disk 3 of some ‘Best of Bach’ collection when your CD is a stand-alone

3. Let iTunes do its thing

4. While it is, if you ripping a jazz or classical CD, copy the CD title, paste it into the Amazon search box and see if they have a decent copy of the artwork. Almost always they will, but if not, use Google. I did so on less than one in thirty CDs. Paste the CD title into the the ‘Save As’ name and save it to your Album Artwork directory (*).

5. When the CD is done, eject it, and right-click for Album Info. Here I put in the artwork, change the Album Artist to the composer for classical music, and get rid of the [Disc 1] that often appears in titles. Sometimes, as with the 22-CD Stravinsky set, the disk number is useful, but not for double-albums.

6. Untick that damn Album is compilation of songs by various artists box. Otherwise it winds up in a Compilations directory. And you won’t find it when browsing with File Explorer.

7. Press OK and find something to do while iTunes does its thing with the music files over the WiFi to the NAS.

It’s tedious. It’s best done while doing something else, pausing to deal with the album info, eject the disc, put another one in. I did it in batches of about twenty, one day at a a time, until it was over.

8. Review the results and edit. How much work you put into changing what iTunes (or any other organiser) found is up to you. Filling in the missing artwork, un-compiling compilations that aren’t really, making sure that J S Bach is spelled and spaced like that in all the albums so it’s easier to find when browsing outside of iTunes… just how anally-retentive are you? (Turns away as if this doesn’t concern him…) The day you see me changing genres, I really will have nothing to do.

9. Accept that the music catalogue is a case of progress not perfection. I’m going to make tweaks every now and then when I notice something.

Because some of the files I have were ripped earlier, under different versions of iTunes, there were permission issues, and I needed to refresh the library in the way described in a future post. It was worth it. A library with every bit of cover art and all the double-albums put together is a thing of delight.

(*) WHY THE FRACK DON’T JAZZ and CLASSICAL CD’S HAVE ARTWORK? I load a progressive house CD, it has artwork. I load a Mahler box-set, I have to get the artwork myself. Digital music libraries and organiser programs have been with us for over a decade, and iTunes, Roon and all the others aren't going to disappear. How difficult can it be for a record company to package all its artwork up and send the zip to Apple? And how difficult would it be for Apple not to charge the record company, in the name of giving us all a better experience? Not even Amazon restrict the number of times we can find and download artwork. (Because they’re smart: every time you get some artwork from them, they get some more goodwill, and you might buy something.) Music industry, get your freaking act together on this.