True Lossless CD Audio Ripping, ideas?

[Willard]

Hi folks,

I want to digitize my music collection, consisting of several hundred CDs. I have two major objectives in mind:

• Integrity: My CDs will get ruined by age; I want to preserve the data that I paid for.
• Accessibility / Portability: Popping a physical CD into a drive to hear digital music playback is stupid, annoying, cumbersome and unnecessary.

Which file formats should I go for, and which applications and means to you recommend to produce them?

(is there an ISO format I can use? Should I use BIN/CUE? FLAC/CUE? UDF? Pack everything into a Matroska container?)

I have some constraints; I have looked around on the Web to see what others have done, but from what I see, most people are contempt with storing a lossy audio encoding, or to just store FLAC files. However, in these approaches, important information on the CD is lost. For instance:

1. I want playback to be gapless when the artists intended it to be, as in the transition to a track from its intro track (example: artist: "Dimmu Borgir", album: "Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia", tracks: 1 and 2). This breaks immersion.
   
2. I also want the silence between tracks to be exactly like what the artists intended. Sometimes, artists let a song fade out, give a moment of pause, and then start the next track. If this moment of pause is omitted/shortened, the next track feels "sudden", again breaking immersion.
   
3. I want the waveforms to be unchanged in my digitization of the CD. For instance, there used to be a song "Prevail" by "Kreator" on YouTube which, after the brief moment of silence at 3:17, had the waveforms amplified, compared to the CD version, for a fraction of a second (EDIT: this YouTube rip of "I C?m Blood" by "Cannibal Corpse" has this issue, particularly prominent at 2:31). This literally sent me flying out of my seat when I heard it because I thought someone had suddenly, sneakily, cranked up the volume of my speakers. I also don't want my digitization to introduce clipping. On Spotify, on "King of the Grey Islands" by "Candlemass", track 1 leads into the lower-volume track 2, resulting in an experience not nearly as overwhelming as the artist intended.
   
4. I want hidden tracks to be present.
   
5. Sometimes a music CD comes with multimedia content on a separate track. Just doing an ISO copy of the CD is thus insufficient. However, I would like to back up this multimedia information as well.

What comes closest to what I desire is what is described in this 6 years old thread. However, in his approach, benbruscella's reproduction of a digitized CD did not yield a CD which was identical to the original. Is this impossible? Will each read of a CD be different for mechanical reasons?

Thanks,
Willard.

[sidzen]

Check this link to CDDA out. See if you like it. It's easy and configurable.

[boydrice]

I rip all my music into FLAC and mp3 using abcde might be an option for you.

[nothingspecial]

Thread moved to Multimedia & Video.

[andrew.46]

If you experiment with abcde, as suggested by bodyrice, you will see that abcde has an option to rip the entire cd as a single track. This would cover some of your requirements?

[Willard]

Check this link to CDDA out. See if you like it. It's easy and configurable.

I'll check it out.

I rip all my music into FLAC and mp3 using abcde might be an option for you.

I started ripping my library once, one track on each CD into its own FLAC file, using this approach (abcde is an incredibly simple tool), and stopped when I realized I was losing CD structure information this way (my points 1 through 5).

If you experiment with abcde, as suggested by bodyrice, you will see that abcde has an option to rip the entire cd as a single track. This would cover some of your requirements?

Ah; and abcde also has the feature of extracting a CUE sheet. I'll play with this.

So, FLAC + CUE seems to be the best way to go.

Do you know of music players (preferably headless ones) which can play specific tracks inside a whole-CD-as-one-FLAC file with help of the corresponding CUE file, or could I need to have one-{FLAC,OGG,MP3}-per-track alongside my backup?

[shantiq]

Audacious qmmp and xmms all play from cue



also nvlc from commandline 19.jpg cd to folder and enter

nvlc *.cue

XMMS is the most rational with cue as it has cueinfo which lets you stack many thus and pick your track[s] from the cueinfo with up and down arrow you see there






as regards ripping i would suggest pacpl or rubyripper rubyripper does cue pacpl does not but is fast


also here info on automatic ripping

[shantiq]

just worked out a nice way to play all cue file in nvlc [looks good in Guake]

Guake!_002.jpg

for i in */
do
cd "$i"
nvlc *.cue
cd ..
done

save as nvlc.sh and make executable and save in Music

cd Music

[assuming all your music folders containing cues are in Music if not change obviously]

enter

./nvlc.sh

it will open and play your first cuefile


CTRL +C takes you to the next cuefile
n and p take you to next and previous track in current cuefile
SHIFT b lets you navigate all your folders on your computer
h TO SEE ALL OPTIONS
c to go black and white