Ripping Problems

[RobertR 847]

I have plunged into a big project lately, but am having trouble. The job is to rip my entire CD collection to computer hard drives. It should be straightforward, though tedious. Tedious it is; straightforward it certainly is not.

 

The ripping is simple. The problem lies in getting the track titles and other information to load off the internet. The results are terribly inconsistent, inexplicably so. Every third disk or so simply doesn’t work right. Either it is proves to be completely unknown, or the proper title comes up but there’s no track information, or no album cover picture, or no artist name, etc.

 

There seems to be absolutely no pattern to these screw-ups. Big label or small, old recordings or new – no correlation.  As often as not I will have three volumes of the same composer’s music, same label, same series, same artists, etc. Two will copy OK, but one will have no information at all, or maybe just the CD name. In another case, within six CD’s of the same person’s albums perhaps half work, half don’t. In one instance Volume One ID’s as Volume Two, including the cover picture and track titles for the wrong CD! Tried on another computer with same results, so have to figure that it’s a general problem, not just my own junk. Some albums ID correctly but give all the wrong songs. In one case (so far) I had a piece that IDs as a different label’s version of the same work, with different album picture, conductor, timings, and orchestra.

 

So what the hell is going on here? I have simply too many disks and not enough time to type in every track. Just the ripping, if it were straightforward, would take me  months. I’ve been using Windows Media Player for the job. Would some other program be any better? Or is the information online simply that spotty and screwed up?  

 

Computers hate me

RobertR

[Nahash5150 9,952]

Some of the info on the net is not accurate - and with classical, I'd imagine it's worse! Someone just had a similar question a few days ago...lemme see if I can find that thread.

[Nahash5150 9,952]

Here it is:

 

Check this thread out

[RobertR 847]

Thanks Greg - I'll check it out.  I'm afraid that a lot of the info simply isn't on the intenet, so no program can find it.  But still it seems strange that info for different volumes of the same series of CDs would sometimes be available, sometimes not.

 

RobertR

[B-Man 4,763]

As much as I hate to admit it, I use iTunes to rip CD's. With that said, I will qualify:

 

A. I have the quality set to the highest possible setting;

 

B. I have the default ripping format set to MP3;

 

C. I don't allow it to download the album art automatically.

 

It is rare indeed that iTunes returns an "Album not found" message when it accesses the Gracenote DB. I would take a few of the discs WMP couldn't find info for and try it with iTunes and see what happens.

 

FWIW, I have just shy of 1,000 CDs and iTunes correctly identified about 97% of them on the first try.

 

iTunes is a free download too. I am not a fan of the interface but it is the free, easy way to put my music on my iPod. 

 

 

[maskinisten 59]

I suggest you try either ''dBpoweramp'' or ''Exact Audio Copy'' for ripping CD's to flac, also a copy of ''Mp3tag'' can come in handy to get the correct tag info on some ''problem cd's''

 

 

 

[_Xanvier_ 28]

My personal choice when needing to rip then tag my music collection, I would use "Exact Audio Copy" to rip the music then "Tag&Rename" to give me my tag info.  It supports almost every audio format that has tags and multiple ways to retrieve info for those weird/rare discs, as well it has batch modes for renaming and re-tagging.  Just my 2¢, best of luck finding something that suits your needs.

[Papajoe 220]

Boy, I don't know about putting all my CDs on a hard drive. I have had toooooo many of them fail when they feel like it. I would imagine that some of those high capacity ones cost quite a bit. Do you employ a 'raid' systems to protect them? Then you need twice as many hard drives. Maybe you save them on one of those internet backup sites? Also, how many CD/DVD drives will you go through before you get them all on the hard drive, doing them one at a time could be a 'daunting' task. Beside when you rip them, it is sometimes does not sound as good as the original CD. Maybe I am just 'too old fashioned' , the sound of a CD being played off a hard drive is a far cry from one being played on a high end player especially through an all Carver system.

The big question for me would be " what do I do with all the cds that are now on hard drives?" The answer "save them just in case all other fails".

[RobertR 847]

My HD is a one terabyte that I bought in Taiwan for around $100.  I certainly would never dispose of the original CDs; just don't want to haul them to Florida every winter.  I plan to back it all up in another drive, just in case.

 

The project is on hold for a while, though, since in trying to download some software for this I managed to snag a nasty, immovable, invasive virus.  My next move will be to empty this computer and write zeros on it's hard drive.  So I'm signing off for now, for as long as it takes.

 

RobertR

[zumbini 6,138]

Sorry to hear that Robert. I know what a pain that can be.

I recently spent a week immunizing and then reformatting my PC only to have the 1 year old HD fail.

Thankfully I had done a full backup to my son's 2 TB Go-Flex external drive just prior to reformatting.

[SteveFord 1,059]

Aren't computers splended devices?

As I spent 6 hours with MicroSoft remote services having them try and fix my computer I asked the tech about viruses.

He said that their objective is to steal your credit card information and then they destroy your computer for good measure.

I dumped that AVG anti virus stuff and went with Microsoft's Security Essentials after a good going over with the free download from malwarebyes. 

Good luck to your, RobertR, I feel your agita!

[RobertR 847]

What a fun 8 hours of work and worry.

 

In my quest for answers to what this thread started to be about, I was going to first try to edit Window Media Player's settings according to a geek forum person's advice, but it didn't even show up in my start menu's programs list,  so I thought it must be flawed, I'd best reload it.  Big mistake, turns out.  Before anything I asked for was loaded, a lot I didn't ask for was.

 

"search.conduit" and "appbario8" both arrived together.  They take over your search engine (I had to search for Google!), add toolbar crap, ads pop up, etc.  You cannot uninstall them, or in the latter's case even find it.   Conduit gives the appearance of being uninstallable, but it's all lies.  The scan that Windows contains ran 75 minutes and found NONE of it, in over 300,000 files. Malwarebytes got a lot of it, but not the last 36 files - for that I had to go pretty deep, guided by a forum,  and zap them one at a time.  It worked, finally.  But pretty nerve wracking.

 

I got rid of appbario8 simply by following the same forum's advice and uninstalling, then reinstalling Firefox, my default browser.  And even then, at the last second the bastards tried to sucker me into retaining it.  But it all seems to be gone now.

 

BTW, Explorer, Google Chrome, and others are just as vulnerable, I'm told.  A couple of very well designed pieces of treachery.

 

RobertR