How to Rip 5000 CDs to the Cloud Without Tears.

October 8, 2015 6:23 PM

A family member has recently moved to assisted living and has no room for his large collection of CDs. What's the best way to rip all these CDs so he can access them online (and so he doesn't have to continue paying for storage space)?

(I searched the archives but didn't find a recent solution/consensus opinion on this, or maybe I'm not searching right.)

He's on an iMac. I'm on a PC with Windows 7.

I want to find a way that he can listen to his music on his computer. I think Google Play might be the solution (opinions on that? Other solutions?) but I still need a simple way to digitize all these CDs and upload them. They're mostly classical/opera.

Once they're ripped, it looks like interface is a pretty simple drag and drop. And I and/or his other relatives can upload the ripped files and create playlists for him.

I want to rip them with tags, so Google Play can recognize them and substitute higher quality files if they have them? Am I understanding this correctly? Are there other issues I'm not aware of?

Hope me, please and thanks.

posted by chocolatepeanutbuttercup to Technology (26 answers total)

Perhaps something like this and then upload to Google Music? I found that by searching for "CD ripping service," and there are other similar options.
posted by 4ster at 6:39 PM on October 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

There are several services that will do all this for you, but with 5000 CDs, it probably won't be cheap.
posted by Salvor Hardin at 6:39 PM on October 8, 2015

Whoa. I missed how many cds you have. My solution may not work.
posted by 4ster at 6:42 PM on October 8, 2015

How much is your time worth? If he'll have a reliable Internet connection and these CDs aren't rare, you might consider paying for a subscription service like Apple Music.

If you assume you can rip and upload 5 CDs per hour, and your time's worth $10/hour…you can pay for a lot of months of a streaming service.
posted by brentajones at 6:44 PM on October 8, 2015

Response by poster: I work at home and sit in front of my computer for at least five or six hours day, so I'm thinking some of this time can be parallel to my actual work time?
posted by chocolatepeanutbuttercup at 6:48 PM on October 8, 2015

Loss-lessly ripped, this would be a bit under over 3TB, so you don't need to go to the cloud.

Were it me, I'd rip with iTunes and the fastest CD drive(s) I could connect. iTunes won't rip from multiple drives, but it will queue them up, and it ejects as each disk finishes, so it's easy to just sit and rotate discs in.

The fastest CD drives are something like 52x, which means 5000 discs would take about 16 or so 8-hour days. iTunes will automatically poll CDDB for metadata.

Once you rip into iTunes, sign up for iTunes Match or iTunes Music with your relative's Apple ID and the music will sync to the cloud. After the sync, all of the music will be available (what they match and what is uploaded that you ripped) to any of their devices which sign in with that AppleID.
posted by tomierna at 6:49 PM on October 8, 2015 [8 favorites]

Adding to my answer, you can do this on iTunes on your Windows machine or their Mac, but if you do it on your machine make sure it's not linked to your AppleID if you have one; just rip to the local library and then sign them up on that machine.

You can change the ripping settings in iTunes to loss-less if you like, but the default of AAC is pretty darn good.

It's possible to rip to a Windows iTunes library on an external drive and then convert that to a Mac iTunes library (and vice-versa) if you decide that the cloud isn't necessary.
posted by tomierna at 6:54 PM on October 8, 2015

just FYI, i ripped 10,000 CDs at work back in 2008 and it took me a year and a half. i was at work for about 9 hours every day (ate lunch at my desk) and had a job that easily allowed me to swap CDs and get the next one going.

you will never get 52x ripping speed if you use error correction (which you should)- best case is usually in the 10-20x range. i went further and made sure my hash for each track had a match in whatever database i was using at the time. if it didn't have a match i ripped it a second time to confirm a match so that i knew there were no glitches in the track.

btw- the metadata for classical CDs is going to be a pain in the butt. the free databases have some of it, but not all of it. the quality of the stuff it does have is going to vary heavily.
posted by noloveforned at 7:09 PM on October 8, 2015 [7 favorites]

If you go the iTunes Match route, it really doesn't matter much if you rip it in low quality, because they aren't actually storing your file. Once they confirm that you have ownership of a certain song on your computer, they just use their own copy and add it to your account.

iTunes determines which songs in your collection are available in the iTunes Store. Any music with a match is automatically added to iCloud for you to listen to anytime, on any device. Since there are more than 43 million songs in the iTunes Store, chances are your music is already in iCloud. And for the few songs that aren’t, iTunes uploads what it can’t match (which is much faster than uploading your entire music library). Even better, all the music iTunes matches plays back from iCloud at 256-Kbps AAC DRM-free quality — even if your original copy was of lower quality.

I agree that that's a good option for you, if you expect your family member to continue to use Apple devices.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 7:11 PM on October 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

There's an automatic solution: Vortexbox. There are a number of caveats. This box rips audio automatically using a CD / DVD reader to FLAC and can optionally mirror to .mp3, so you must calculate your storage needs carefully; it doesn't rip at anywhere near 52x, more like 4x, popular-enough music gets (well) tagged but oddities end up in "Unknown Artist" and it is a Fedora OS that's accessorized with a bunch of audio and video programs and tweaks. It can be difficult to set up, but that's if you do what I did and get a very small fanless PC and load it yourself.

Once running right the machine is pretty well bomb-proof. I run it headless and if it pitches a bitch - which it does every time I listen to NRK Jazz (Norway) - I reboot it by turning it off then on again.
posted by jet_silver at 7:24 PM on October 8, 2015

You can post this as a job to MeFi jobs or maybe find somebody locally through Craigslist.
posted by theora55 at 7:42 PM on October 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

I think by Google Play you mean Google Music. The cool thing about the Google Music route is that a free account lets you upload 50,000 songs which may or may not be enough for the 5,000 CDs.

I'm not sure how Google handles bit rate quality when you upload your own music. Someone experimented and uploaded an 83MB album and when they later downloaded it (a feature Google Music lets you do, but I think they limit every album to two downloads) it was only 80MB.

Since Google just limits you on the number of songs, and not space, I'd say have a heyday and rip at whatever bit rate you want. I'd recommend v0 or v2 VBR (variable bit rate).

I would probably just look up how to rip (and adjust bit rate) with iTunes.
posted by shmup at 7:55 PM on October 8, 2015

Decent CD ripping software will rip, encode, look up tags for you in some online database, eject when it's done, and start the next one automatically when you insert it. So you just sit at your desk working away and when a disk pops out you throw it on your "done" pile and insert the next one off your "to-do" pile. Totally mindless and compatible with working on something else at the same time. At worst you may be left with a small pile of your most obscure stuff that needs manual tagging.

Admittedly when I did this I had a collection in the hundreds not the thousands.

Later I uploaded the whole thing to Google, and now I mostly play it via phone or Chromecast. That's worked OK for me.
posted by bfields at 8:05 PM on October 8, 2015

Getting this professionally done will cost you a fortune.

Doing it yourself will cost you several years of your life. Furthermore, trying to actually use your computer while CD-ripping is going on is just utterly unfun. And where are you going to keep the CDs while you're doing this work?

People may own 5,000 CDs but I suspect 4,500 were listened to once and will never be listened to again.

(As these have all presumably been legally purchased, and are for private use by an individual, I guess I'll be the guy to suggest you just torrent the blasted things. However...)

Firstly, I would catalog these CDs. That in itself will be time consuming and unfun but all you need is the artist/composer/singer and the album name.

Will you be visiting your family member regularly, or otherwise keeping in touch with them on a regular basis (such as weekly)? Give that list to the family member you speak of. Tell them you can provide them with [number] of albums with each visit/communication, after you have determined your own method for ripping/uploading (how long it takes, how successful it is, etc.).

This of course tacitly suggests that you are committing to a) keeping in touch and b) doing this ongoing work for free. Or just introduce them to the incredible world of free internet radio.
posted by turbid dahlia at 8:29 PM on October 8, 2015 [2 favorites]

How about getting a ripping robot? Load up 100 at a time and leave it alone.
posted by Sophont at 9:22 PM on October 8, 2015

Ok, so i've thought about this. My work actually did this. They used to have 200 and 300 disc changers, and decided to move ENTIRELY to zunes(this wasn't this year, obviously). It was probably 1/2 to 2/3rd this many disks.

Buy one of these, or something listed as supported here

Load 200 discs, or however many the thing you buy holds.

Start it, and make sure the auto disc ID is on(OH GOD)

The huge HUGE HUGE advantage to the sony is that it doesn't have to physically _pick up_ the discs. This is something most of these fail at and randomly jam/drop discs/etc. Those sony units are VERY reliable.

I advise setting up a shitty system, even if it's just something super cheap like this or from a local refurb shop JUST to run this on, not a computer you use for anything else.

This is going to take weeks, maybe even months. A faster computer wont really speed it up.

Loading 200 discs is going to be a chore, definitely have a filing system on both sides for unripped/ripped discs.

Have fun. The ~$300 you'll spend on hardware will be cheaper than ANY service. Be prepared to rip the same 3 discs over and over like 10 time while you get the process locked down.

And kill windows update, and disable sleep and hibernation, etc etc etc. You could also run the system headless and just use RDP/terminal services to control it, which i probably would do. Then you could even check progress from your phone.
posted by emptythought at 9:58 PM on October 8, 2015 [5 favorites]

Seconding the iTunes to Google route. Setup iTunes to rip automatically on insert and eject when finished. I believe there's a setting in Google Music to automatically pull new stuff right from the iTunes folder as you add it, simple!

Watch your storage space on your hard drive! You might have to add and cull in batches. I'd definitely ask your family member to pull out some faves to do first.
posted by Nosmot at 10:46 PM on October 8, 2015

It's simply not worth the time. How many of these CDs are thye going to listen to again? Buy a Spotify subscription instead.
posted by gorcha at 1:09 AM on October 9, 2015 [3 favorites]

To be honest, I wouldn't do it. As a compromise, I'd ask him for his top 50-100 CD's - explain that the time, manpower, and money involved to rip all 5000 CD's would be too much. Like someone said upthread, it's likely he purchased 4500-4900 of those CD's to listen to only once. Maybe rip 50-100 CD's (or the amount you're willing to rip at a maximum), then the family could pitch in to buy him some kind of gift card or subscription service so he can download any other songs he wants to.

5000 CD's is ungodly. I wouldn't impose that on anyone! Then again, that's just me.
posted by dubious_dude at 6:24 AM on October 9, 2015 [1 favorite]

If the problem you're trying to solve is a matter of big media collection in a small storage space, would ditching the cases and putting all the discs in a series of giant CD wallets make sense?
posted by enfa at 7:22 AM on October 9, 2015

The ripping piece has been well-covered, but there's also playback to consider.

FWIW - Microsoft OneDrive has the same 50,000 song limit as does Google Music. I believe Amazon goes up to 250,000 songs, but you have to pay for a subscription to upload that many.

Also, when you're done ripping all this music, buy an external hard drive or two and make copies. If one of the online services is discontinued for some reason, you DO NOT want to have to re-rip all that music.

In fact, you might consider buying two external drives - one for you as a backup and one for the family member, and just have her play the songs locally via iTunes. You can backup your rips inexpensively through Crashplan or a similar provider.
posted by cnc at 10:42 AM on October 9, 2015

This was mentioned once in passing upthread, but I'll call it out again: if some substantial fraction of these CDs are classical, their match quality in CDDB or Gracenote or whatever is really not very good.

People have idiosyncratic ways of tagging their music, and even for my small classical collection, I ran into severe difficulties when ripping them. Do you really want the artist to be listed as J. S. Bach because iTunes hides the composer field? Is Rubinstein (soloist) or Bernstein (conductor) more important to list as "artist"? Why does this CD have every composer tagged as Mozart, when it was just the first track? Do you want the Bach cello suites listed as 6 items (1 per suite) or 36 (broken out into Prelude, Allemande, Courante, etc.)? Should you even bother, or subscribe to Apple Music or Spotify instead?
posted by RedOrGreen at 12:09 PM on October 9, 2015

Consider Murfie.
posted by 4midori at 1:02 PM on October 9, 2015

To be honest, I wouldn't do it. As a compromise, I'd ask him for his top 50-100 CD's

Alternatively, i'd take a week or two of afternoons entirely searching which albums are and aren't available on spotify or other streaming services. You don't just want to avoid not ripping stuff you can't stream, but getting rid of discs that are completely unavailable in the secondary market.

My partner owned several cds(which i lost, ugh) that you literally can't even buy, nowhere stocks them. They're not on ebay, etc. There is likely some stuff in that big of a collection you're going to HAVE to rip.

Similarly, you have to weigh the pros/cons of the fact that irritatingly and like netflix, the libraries of those streaming services change and stuff goes away.

I'd probably ask the favorites question also and rip those just in case even if they're a major artist because huge artists, or their estates, have gone "get all my stuff off of streaming" before in recent history.

Conveniently, if you do end up keeping 100-200 CDs... you can just keep them in said CD changing drive. It also works as a decent cd player that can even handle disc/track info on its screen for navigating the library(AND it can handle, as i remember, selecting a specific disc/track from a computer and loading it!)
posted by emptythought at 1:39 PM on October 9, 2015

I recently completed ripping a collection about 1/10th this size. Yes, it takes a while but the actual human interactive part once you've set up the software is to see that the last one had between ejected and insert a new one. Definitely try to prioritize to digitize the good stuff first.

The next step for me is to copy to NAS (probably WD) but that's to share between devices. Maybe that's overkill here and a USB drive would suffice.
posted by Horselover Fat at 7:05 PM on October 9, 2015

A friend of mine ripped his entire library a little while back and paid his son to do it, worked out well for both!

I did mine many years back and it was indeed a painful process, only a few hundred CD's at that.

Good luck!

H
posted by silsurf at 7:28 AM on October 13, 2015