I need to rip CDs. A lot of them.

Saragoldfarb

So yeah, I've been going through the attic and I still have hundreds (close to 4K) audio CDs stored from when I was younger. I want to get rid of them as I don't even own a player anymore so they're of no use... If it weren't for the fact:

Most if it are unique studio and live recording. It's not stuff you can easily find with steaming services and about half of it are demos and recordings from when I was working for recording studios, soundchecks, interviews from when I was on the road. It's unique material.

I don't want this to be lost forever so need a way to preserve it.

Now I was thinking about ripping to flac files, then store them on YouTube music. This way I could easily access them and if/when needed can get to the original flac file.

Downside... Dependency on Google... Pondering about getting 2 large storage dedis with a couple of drives, hardware raid to be sure. Mirroring the files. But that gets costly and you'd still have to set up streaming. Maybe a NAS?

Usually I would just use software to rip the CDs but since it's a lot... That might be a nuisance to do manually. Gonna take a while no matter what but don't want it to be too much of a dreadful undertaking

Any thoughts about how to handle this most time and cost efficient? I thought I'd ask here as some of you might actually remember what a CD is

ascicode

Wouldn't it be better to rip in wav than flac?
The quality is bad anyway on old disks.

davide

When I checked my collection of hundreds of CDs after 20 years in the basement, most of them had become unreadable and ended up in the dumpster. Taking care of them costed me only one large trash bag.

If your 4,000 CDs are still readable, they could be ~200 GB encoded in vorbis / mp3.

There used to be auto-loader machines for CDs that would feed one disc at a time from a stack into a reader. Might be cheap today.

cornercase

Redumper then upload to archive.org. Keep a local copy and upload to your dedis, should be plenty of backup. Stream from local and/or the dedis with Jellyfin. Biggest time vampire is that since it is mostly self-created and unreleased stuff that doesn't exist elsewhere you will need to create your own metadata. I don't know what (if any) format archive uses, but you can use .nfo files for Jellyfin (and generating one from the other should be quite possible even if you have to get an LLM to write something to do it).

@ascicode said:
Wouldn't it be better to rip in wav than flac?
The quality is bad anyway on old disks.

FLAC is basically zipped WAV and old CD's have the same quality as new ones.

Saragoldfarb

@davide said:
When I checked my collection of hundreds of CDs after 20 years in the basement, most of them had become unreadable and ended up in the dumpster. Taking care of them costed me only one large trash bag.

If your 4,000 CDs are still readable, they could be ~200 GB encoded in vorbis / mp3.

There used to be auto-loader machines for CDs that would feed one disc at a time from a stack into a reader. Might be cheap today.

I randomly checked and so far they seem fine. Borrowed an external drive so that shouldn't be an issue.

An autoloader sounds like a promising idea. I'm not against putting some time in it but that should speed up the process. Not against investing some money also within reason, will look into that. Thanks!

Saragoldfarb

@ascicode said:
Wouldn't it be better to rip in wav than flac?
The quality is bad anyway on old disks.

Doesn't really make much of a difference. Think of flac as lossless compressed wav.

To save data I would also consider high bitrate encoded MP3. I don't think it's that far apart from lossless in terms of quality, decent enough to preserve an archive.

Saragoldfarb

@cornercase said:
Redumper then upload to archive.org. Keep a local copy and upload to your dedis, should be plenty of backup. Stream from local and/or the dedis with Jellyfin. Biggest time vampire is that since it is mostly self-created and unreleased stuff that doesn't exist elsewhere you will need to create your own metadata. I don't know what (if any) format archive uses, but you can use .nfo files for Jellyfin (and generating one from the other should be quite possible even if you have to get an LLM to write something to do it).

@ascicode said:
Wouldn't it be better to rip in wav than flac?
The quality is bad anyway on old disks.

FLAC is basically zipped WAV and old CD's have the same quality as new ones.

Fair point about the metadata! I will look into LLM to create that as it would be a bitch to add it manually.

Didn't know you could upload to archive.org. that would be amazing! Cheers!

FAT32

First things first, don't think about having to rip everything in one go. The sheer volume can be very daunting.

I have done something similar before with around 1.5k discs (yes, manually inserting them one by one). One of the biggest time-savers is having more than one disc drive. I had one CD drive and one DVD drive back then.

You also have to be prepared to lower the read speed to 1x or 2x for discs that may have degraded over time, so you can try to extract as much data as possible.

Anyway, make sure you prepare some scripts to detect when a new disc is inserted, automatically rip it, and eject it once done. If you have the capacity, I would also suggest taking a photo of each disc cover so you can easily map it back to its corresponding folder later.

All the best, and perhaps you can get some ripping done while F5-ing this Black Friday!