Thread: Advice Needed: Most rapid way to read and rip CDs to RAW

I don’t have recent experience with CDROM drives. I’d pick one that looks like it will work with your computer system. Most have rudimentary USB connections, which are compatible with a wider set of computers. In most cases the optical pickup is the speed limiter. You will need one with usb C connection, or get a cable usb C to whatever the CDROM drive uses. The more expensive ones will have their own power supply, and more study transport mechanism. I have an older CDROM with separate PSU. It’s so old that it has FireWire connectivity. The much cheaper USB C drive I use at home is cheap, and just as fast. Perhaps a bit noisier in action. I only plug it in when needed.

I bought into the dbPower software a good while back, and it works well, and tags well. There are several free programs though. I grew up with EAC, which was hard to use, but one of the early “bit perfect” rippers.

Not sure what the RAW format is though. I rip to either ALAC, or FLAC.

Originally Posted by Davis White

Hi. I have just bought a Chord Hugo TT2 and MScaler and need to rip my CD collection to a NAS. I want to do this without error correction, as the new hardware works best this way. My platform is an Apple Macbook Air.

So I'd like:

* The most speedy external CD-R (and W if it's unavoidable), I guess 32X is the limit, and
* Mac software that will output RAW uncorrected audio files to a Synology NAS.

I don't want to spend a ton of money on this because after the initial period it will get regular, but intermittent use. Certainly less than $500. I would think less than $100 would be realistic.

Do you have any recommendations?

Thanks very much in advance.

Never heard of a Apple RAW audio file. There is however Apple ProRes RAW, BUT ! its for the import, edit, and grade of video with RAW data straight from your camera sensor. If its something new in Apples audio, I just haven't heard of it , maybe someone else knows

This is the best drive for ripping that I've used. It is a recent model by Pioneer marketed to people ripping their compact discs:
https://www.pioneerelectronics.com/P...ves/BDR-X13U-S

Then I would purchase dbpoweramp software which will allow you to rip the discs and confirm that the rips are accurate. There is associated metadata editing software that makes it easy to adjust some of the auto-generated tags that are on the internet or if you want to change anything to suit your browsing style. The software can automatically apply de-emphasis to early compact disc pressings mastered with pre-emphasis, too. It also can unpack HDCD discs to a 24 bit file. It does lots more, too, but those are the common features I use.

I use both on an Apple MacBook Air.

Originally Posted by Davis White

Hi. I have just bought a Chord Hugo TT2 and MScaler and need to rip my CD collection to a NAS. I want to do this without error correction, as the new hardware works best this way. My platform is an Apple Macbook Air.

So I'd like:

* The most speedy external CD-R (and W if it's unavoidable), I guess 32X is the limit, and
* Mac software that will output RAW uncorrected audio files to a Synology NAS.

I don't want to spend a ton of money on this because after the initial period it will get regular, but intermittent use. Certainly less than $500. I would think less than $100 would be realistic.

Do you have any recommendations?

Thanks very much in advance.

A bit of a contradiction here I think.

The faster you rip, the more errors there will be and your ripping software (including dbpoweramp probably) will either re-rip if it doesn't match the precise bit count it's looking for (after referring to 2 or 3 online databases), or it will save the rip with errors and either report the errors or not.

I used a RipNAS several years ago to rip my CD collection and this re-ripped a number of times if it couldn't get a perfect rip, or reported which tracks it may have failed to reach 100%. Then I could re-clean the disc or accept the faults. The RipNAS had all the software needed, a CD drive and hard drive so was independent of PCs and could be accessed by my streamer at the time, a Sonos.

If you have a large collection and can't be bothered to rip them yourself, I'm sure you could find a ripping service to do the job for you. Good luck

I had mine ripped by a service and it worked well. I have a small collection of about 350 CDs and it cost about $600, including the thumb drive they loaded them onto.


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Originally Posted by nicoff

My recommendation would be:
- Apple USB SuperDrive
- DbPoweamp Software.

I am not familiar with RAW format for audio. I am guessing that you meant to say WAV which is the native format in CDs. DbPoweramp allows output in many different formats including WAV. It can also be configured to save your files to a NAS.

The SuperDrive costs about $80. DbPoweramp is not free; you can find free software but the GUI is not as good.

I've also used XLD. And I edit metadata with Yate


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Originally Posted by nicoff

Not sure that FLAC is a good choice for the OP. He uses Apple and unless something changed recently, Apple does not support FLAC. For an Apple user, ALAC (Apple’s version of FLAC) would be a better option.

Fair enough. I’m not familiar with running the music control software on Apple. Wouldn’t it be the DAC/TT that matters though (in terms of encoding support)?

I use FLAC from my Apple system all the time. Mac Music app might not use FLAC, and I did encode to ALAC for a time. (FLAC and ALAC are both lossless compression algorithms, and produce similar resulting files) I grew out of Apple Music (way before it became a legitimate streaming service) and used Foobar for a while, before snagging Roon lifetime when that came out.

Most non-Apple Music software programs will happily read FLAC and ALAC, and many other formats.

Originally Posted by Bones13

I use FLAC from my Apple system all the time. Mac Music app might not use FLAC, and I did encode to ALAC for a time. (FLAC and ALAC are both lossless compression algorithms, and produce similar resulting files) I grew out of Apple Music (way before it became a legitimate streaming service) and used Foobar for a while, before snagging Roon lifetime when that came out.

Most non-Apple Music software programs will happily read FLAC and ALAC, and many other formats.

This makes sense to me. In fact, thinking about it more, I play FLAC through Roon client on my iOS devices all the time.

So I’m back to suggesting - I guess as long as your player is not Apple Music (and, eww) - encode to FLAC. Most ubiquitous and proven codec, I believe.