Do you have any tricks you can share on how to rip a large library of CDs? It would be nice to semi-automate the ripping process but I haven't found any tools to help with that. Also the MusicBrainz audio tagging library (the only open one I am aware of?) almost never has good tags for my CDs that don't have to be edited afterwards.
I’ll be honest, this was around 2005-2008 — it was a long time ago and at the time I really enjoyed the ritual of it all.
The main advice I can give you is to use ripping software that integrates with AccurateRip (XLD, EAC, etc) and use a widely supported lossless format (like FLAC).
Also — I can’t remember all the details, but there’s a way to store a CUE file, along with some metadata alongside your rip such that you can recreate an exact copy of the original physical media.
At least for now, I’ve moved on to streaming services, but I’m happy to know that I have a large library of music that I ripped myself to fall back to using instead, should I ever choose to.
I never had it fully working because the last time I tried, I was too focused on using VMs or Docker and not just dedicating a small, older computer to it, but I think about it often and may finally just take the time to set up a station to properly rip all the Columbia House CDs I bought when I was a teen and held on to.
In the distant past iTunes was great at this (really). Insert a disc, its metadata is pulled in automatically, it’s ripped and tagged using whatever coded settings you want and when it’s done the disc is ejected.
Watch a show do some other work and when the toast pops out a new one in.
Ripping DVDs with HandBrake was almost as easy, but it wouldn’t eject the disc afterwards (though it could have supported running a script at the end, I don’t recall).
It really was. In the early 2000s I had a stack of Mac laptops doing exactly this. Made some decent cash advertising locally to rip people's CD collections!
I was ripping my CD's with KDE's own KIO interface, which also does CDDB checks and embeds original information to ID3 tags. Passing through MusicBrainz Picard always gave me good tags, but I remember fine tuning it a bit.
Now, I'll start another round with DBPowerAmp's ripper on macOS, then I'll see which tool brings the better metadata.
