it really is overwhelming how exciting it is to actually live my life. To whit: My hard drive with all music my died a few months back, and now I’m spending a decent chunk of memorial day weekend re-ripping my disks. Ooh the excitement!!
Besides setting up a restorable backup in the cloud (CrashPlan, unlimited storage, approx $90 for two years) so I’m not sitting here again doing the same thing in a few years, I’ve found some very good ways to make the process less painful if not less boring.
for starters: Bad metadata (track info, artist info, composer info, genre etc.) is a pet-peeve of mine… I’m quite anal about it. Stupid tools like iTunes or Windows Media Player provide no real fine-grained control over metadata and they suck at retrieving things like album art. The thing is, all it takes is some drunk college kid to type in crappy info about a disk and then people like me are married to it. The other reason I won’t use those tools is that I keep my collection in lossless FLAC-based format, which works nicely with the Sonos system in our house. I have a couple of amplifier + speaker setups where a lossless source has a noticeable difference in quality.
Roight. The best tool for the job (on Windows) is dBpoweramp. It supports a wide array of codes for ripping (including Apple Lossless and FLAC) and supports multiple metadata sources such as AllMusicGuide and FreeDB. It lets you tweak metadata (such as missing composer info) before you rip. It gives you a regex-style grammar for specifying how to create folders and filenames for music in your library (which is terrific for collections). And perhaps best of all, the reference version ($36) supports batch ripping: Right now, I’ve got three CD-ROM/DVD drives simultaneously ripping my disks securely (‘securely’ here means a guaranteed translation of bits on the disk) which is a huge time savings for me, and the CPU is barely breaking a sweat. It also gives me detailed reporting on failed disks or tracks. I have a lot of older and roughly-handled CDs which makes it useful to see where I have problems.
The last thing that dBpoweramp does is automatically-transcode my library into a lossy format (like MP3) for portable players. Keeping a transcoded shadow library for a large library of music is very useful, primarily because the standard players such as iTunes absolutely suck at transcoding.
[UPDATE: Originally I wrote]
When paired with a powerful music player such as J. River Media Center, it is pretty much all you need for digital music.
But this is, well, totally wrong. For a couple of reasons.
First, the more observant among you may have thought to yourselves: “What the devil are you talking about, you old fool? Nobody buys CDs any more! What’s a ‘CD’ anyway?”
And you’d be part right in thinking that. Less and less music is consumed on little plastic disks these days, much less LPs (unless you’re a Brooklynite hipster or DJ). Most of it is streamed to devices or downloaded in (often very lossy) MP3 format. And you know, if the way you consume your music is through little ear buds on the subway or whatever, that is totally fine. It is good enough for your car, the bus or wherever you have lots of ambient noise and don’t have access to a decent amp & speakers. Lots of babies were happily conceived next to crappy little transistor radios, back in the day.
Besides this, streaming music has a terrific advantage that CDs and the like will never have: Discovery. I don’t think it is overstatement to say that services such as Pandora, Last.FM or Rhapsody have helped me discover lots of great new music over the past few years; even pure streaming radio such as Soma FM is a great service. For example, I use Last.FM for working out nearly every day, and Soma.FM while I’m working. And we listen to Pandora around the house. They’re great services, and they hook me up with a huge community of like-minded listeners. The more that radio fades in importance (KEXP , KUOW and C89.5 notwithstanding) the more important these services become.
The end result, of course, is that me and everyone else buy many fewer CDs than before. These days I only buy the ones that I come back to and want to own the highest-fidelity copy of. Someday that means the cost of a CD will be higher, but I’m OK w/that…. it is a good trade for the convenience and freshness of a wide network of aficionados.
