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Re: Ripping, file format, playback, pics

Posted by pburke (A) on April 7, 2006 at 09:20:32

In Reply to: Ripping, file format, playback, pics posted by Soundripples on April 4, 2006 at 07:54:30:

here's my view on this - use with caution and remember - everyone likes this a little differently:

EAC is the tool to rip. Get a good transport that's known to work well with it. I did some research when my old 62X CD died and got a particular Lite-ON DVD mechansim. Works well, about 13X with high level of error correction (not the paranoid level, but then hardly any of my CDs are scratched anyway).

I rip to WAV, with cue sheets, since I listen to albums, not to "tracks". I then FLAC convert the large WAVs and edit the cue sheets (two ".wav" and "WAVE" become .flac and FLAC - all else stays the same). That is then played with Foobar.

The space needed is about 300mb per CD - I have about 1000 CDs worth of music - there's 350GB when it's all ripped. Planning for growth, I am going with a 4x320GB drive array (3x320 for 960GB room, and 1 drive for parity, plus a 5th drive as spare on the shelf). These drives are $130 a pop these days. I spent more money on a crappy Cambridge CD player a few years ago...

Anyway redundancy of the drives is a must. You can get 2 500GBs and mirror them in software with win2k or XP if you have a third boot drive. Don't every store data like this on a single drive that can fail. The time it takes to rip has to be well spent. If you have some extra cash, go for a proper RAID card and set up a RAID5 array. The cool thing is that you can add drives to them as you grow. An 8 channel SATA controller like the Broadcom Raidcore 5852 costs about $300 - now we're talking real money, but don't forget - you may be using IC cables that cost more than that...

The remaining problem with a file server like this is noise. I place the thing in my basement instead of even attempting to silence a chassis with 2 processors and 6 fans and 4 hard drives humming along. Then I hook up a KVM extender, so I can place the controlls with a flat screen in my listening area upstairs - 100% silent. USB to the DAC goes via optical extender - galvanically isolated from the PC.

DAC is a highly modded 16 chip DDDAC - can't do much better than that with computer audio.

no preamp, direct out from the DAC to the power amps. Foobar does the volume control. Databse in Foobar - well, it can be done if you want to spend a week figuring it out, but I feel that a simple set of playlists by artists or simply by letter. Like I said - I listen to entire albums, so a single cue sheet per album is easily found under the letter pertaining to the artist - drag into foobar and you're on.

Anyway, if sound quality is a concern, go FLAC or something else that's lossless, or just stay with the WAV files. FLAC can re-generate a WAV, so you can always go back and convert to something else if there should be a better format one day. I played FLAC and WAV of the same rip back to back in a blind test - cannot tell a difference - save the drive space.

Peter

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