John Walkenbach started with the idea of having a commercial service rip his CD collection for him but has since given up on that idea:
After doing some more research, I decided to abandon the idea of using a company to convert my CDs. As it turns out, the total number of CDs is closer to 1,000, and I failed to take shipping costs into account. All told, this project would cost about $1,000 — definitely not worth it. Plus, the idea of removing all of those CDs from their jewel boxes, shipping them, and then returning them to the correct jewel box is not at all appealing.
Wise decision. Actually, I did a similar project last fall (800 CDs) and it took less than two weeks. I used Windows Media Player 10 and configured it to rip automatically as soon as it recognized a CD. (You can choose WMA or MP3 format in bit rates as high as 320MB.) It was able to identify and correctly tag well over 95% of the tracks, downloading the album art in the process, and each CD took no more than a couple minutes. Anything that wasn’t immediately recognized I put on a stack for later handling. I did a couple of marathon sessions over one weekend, doing a few hundred CDs each day as I watched baseball games and dumb movies that required little concentration. Mostly, though, I just got in the habit of keeping a stack of CDs by my desk. I’d stick a CD in and (ahem) let ’er rip. I didn’t really need to do much more than pop out the old CD and insert a new one, and I was able to continue working on other projects throughout. All in all, it turned out to be pretty simple.
The more tedious part came later, when I went in to review tags. There were a fair number of errors and omissions that I wanted to fix. I found the eMusic Tag Editor indispensable for this task.
If you plan to do a similar project, I recommend you get two external hard drives and keep a duplicate copy of your music collection on the second drive. Don’t believe me? Just imagine the feeling in the pit of your stomach if that first drive grinds to a halt someday and you have to go through the process of ripping and tagging all over again.
Update: Based on some interesting questions from Ken in the comments, I’ve posted some follow-up thoughts in a separate post: What’s the point of digital media?
Ed Bott 
I too am currently engaged in a similar project. My collection is much smaller but I find its going quite well. My weapon of choice is iTunes. It does a great job of the ripping and can fly through a disk in a few minutes. It also tags almost all files correctly. For those that don’t tag right, I use Musicbrainz tagger.
What were you settings for the rips?
What kbps? 128, 160, 192?
Variable Bit Rate used?
What format? MP3 I would assume.
Actually, I specified WMA format. All the devices I use regularly (including Media Center 2005) work best in this format. For the most part, I ripped at 192Kbps, fixed, but I am now ripping new CDs at WMA VBR 135-215Kbps.
If I were using iTunes, of course, or if I owned an iPod, I would use MP3 format. I can’t imagine anyone using AAC as the native format.
Ed, educate me. I use my home computer primarily for e-mail, Internet browsing and research, word processing, the occasional PC game, and CD burning — but not CD ripping for the purpose of listening to music or watching DVDs on my computer (after all, I have a plasma HD television and top line DVD player, excellent stereo equipment in both my house and my car, et. cet. specifically designed for those activities). What, then, is the point of ripping CDs and saving them onto hard drives, other than having one additional copy of all your files in case something happens to your CD collection?
I know people do it, but I have never understood why. Even if I downloaded music from the Interent, I would rather burn it to a CD and then play it on equipment designed primarily to play music or video. What am I missing out on, if anything? TIA.
Ken
Good questions, Ken. I’m going to answer them in a separate post.
I use iTunes to rip (440 CDs and counting), but I have it create 192kbps mp3 files. It seems that when I used VBR some time back with the Windows Media Player Plus! add-on the files were not compatible with some portable devices.
Uh Ken – you obvioulsy have not heard of a little thing called an iPod. That isn’t wrong of you, but if you claim to be up to speed on the latest gadgets, try understanding the whole landscape, not just the slowsly dwindling world of audiophiles.
Wow, the most I ever did in a day was less than 100, but I always had to retype all compilation type CDs, as I have a naming/folder convention that has held up for 1,500 CDs.
So, I have found that if I have an arbitrary list of top-level genre folders, with each containing a “Compilations” folder and a folder for each artist. Then the CD Titles for a particular artist go underneath the artist folder. For example:
http://www.jukeanator.com/images/disk_layout_1.gif
Just wondered what other people thought about the notion of pigeon holing a CD to a particular genre, as some friends have criticized me for doing that. My response is then “so you propose having a linear list of 1,500 CDs then?”
Tom
Were you able to actually buy the eMusic Tag Editor. I’m just days away from getting my order canceled and my money back. Both myself and RegNow hasn’t received a single message back even though we have sent six message between us to them.
I’m not sure what’s wrong with them, but I don’t appreciate spending money for nothing.
As an update to my previous comment. I cancelled the order for eMusic Tag Editor and found and bought Tag&Rename (http://www.softpointer.com/tr.htm). A really nice program too.
When I first started ripping my 300+ CD Collection, I had and could use 2 seperate CD drives. One was my older CD-RW Drive, and the other was my new faster CD-RW. (I have since replace the old one with a DVD-RW) I used both drives and iTunes would go get the CDDB data as soon as you put the disk in, but would wait for the previous disk to quit ripping to start ripping that disk. Well, as you could imagine, this took the speed of the task down considerably, because anytime I stopped by the computer I dropped 2 CD’s in instead of 1, effectively reducing the time in half.
NOTE: I have since stopped being able to do this, some how it gets jammed on the first song of the second CD. Doesn’t seem to matter which CD Drive I start with either.
I found a service that is cheap enough that it will not be worth my time to do it myself. Plus take into account organizing ID3 Tags. http://www.musictodigital.com. This is the cheapest company out there and I was very please with the service.
Derek has the right idea; you need at least two drives to rip a collection. One is ripping while the other is accessing CDDB for track information. That gives you time to fix up the tags if there’s a problem with them. I ripped 2500 CDs in very little time.
You definitely want to use a large external drive for backup; I keet it powered down except when I want to do a backup; avoids the risk of losing data due to disk failure from power surge.
NOTE if you buy download music, and you don’t backup, you are asking to lose a lot of money. At least with CDs, you can re-rip.
To manipulate tags, I use iTunes, scripts, and a grep-capable text editor (BBEdit). In particular, I use a script to pull artist/album/date info into a text file, which I then convert to eBook format with chapters that I load onto my Palm; no more buying something I already have cuz I forgot I had it.
I just released my new project for things you covered here. The code name is TagTuner. You can not only find the tags for your mp3 collection like an Album Name, Artist etc. but also an album cover! Besides you can rename the media files by using the received information in the same window.
I hope it helps you to save your time and clicks.
The RIPing will be included later.
Please feel free to visit the TagTuner site and leave your comments at my feedback form.
Try [link removed] to do your CD conversion. I can’t speak for the others services. I was also stuck between whether to do it myself or pay someone else to do it. Some sites are charging over $1 per CD. I have 250 CDs and couldn’t find myself paying $250. A friend of mine got a coupon for 10% off and the service only charges 70 cents a CD. I was concerned about the quality but with the coupon I decided to try it. Everything worked out perfect and I am so glad I did it. I now have my entire collection on MP3 and everything was right on.
Two additional notes. If you are lucky to live within their local area (which unfortunately I was not) you can get your CDs ripped for 45 cents per CD which is a real bargain. Also at checkout time you can enter this code [blatant shill removed] and get the same 10% off I did. Another friend of mine tried it and it worked for him also. The coupon only says one per household. Good luck!
[post edited to remove shilling – see following comment for details]
JayPlay is a company plant…
Check out the SAME post, posted here TWICE…
[link removed after verifying – ed]
Honesty is the best policy… FAKE testimonals are LAME!
Thanks, Jason. For the record, I checked the domain originally posted in the comment and compared it to the different domain used in the original poster’s email address. Both websites trace pack to the exact same address. Imagine that.
Ed,
Hilarious. Thanks for verifying.
Some time ago I used Windows Media Player to rip my 150 CDs at 64 Kbps. Recently I upgraded my hi-fi and now I find that to do it justice I need to use rate of at least 128 Kbps. Is there any way for me to re-rip at a higher bit rate without losing my tagging including playcount and last-played?
I am backing up a 1000 cd collection and I am using a friends computer, i couldnt move the named music files from his library in wmp to my external drive, so I moved them from his documents and therefore I have hundreds of files that are unknown, my question is, do these tagging programs go through and name all those files for me automatically? I just want to know the best rout for this, i dont want to wast time without asking questions. Is there a program that does this for me or am I going about this the wrong way?any advice is great I’m not that savy to this
Have you actually listened to all the tracks you’ve ripped? I’m asking because I, too, am using WMP 10 to rip my 800+ CD collection (EAC took wayyyy took long, although it produces perfect copies) and have found than it at least one out every ten discs, there are significant skips and glitches. Don’t know what I can do to fix this, but it may just be the price I pay for speedy rips. Has anyone else had this problem?