Storing CDs on a Hard Drive: Part I

[richardfinegold]

I'm not saying it's perfect but itunes works well for me. I think itunes is by far the simplest means of getting music from CD to hard drive. Just make sure that you specify where you wish your itunes/music folder to be (mine is directed straight to a 1TB external hard drive and then periodically backed up to another external hard drive and ipod). You can select the quality that you wish to copy - I use 320kbps as standard (and am aware of its limitations) but you may use Apple Lossless if you want lossless. As for metadata I use the following format that I have changed and amended over the years to something I am now happy with.

Album: 3 letter composer acronym e.g. Bbr (Barber) so: Bbr & Wtn Vn Con / Blh 'Baal Seem'
Album Artist: conductor and orchestra e.g. David Zinman (Baltimore SO)
Artist: main player (leave blank if symphonic) e.g. Joshua Bell
Composer: full name e.g. Samuel Barber

Individual track names as follows: (1) "BBR VN CON, OP.14 - I. Allegro" / (2) "II. Andante" / (3) "III. Presto in moto perpetuo" / (4) "BLH 'BAAL SHEM' - I. Vidui (Contrition)" / and so on

It works for me and if I wish to find the album I simply search "Zinman" "Bell" and it pops up.

Interesting. Will try it.

[richardfinegold]

The first and most vital thing to consider, for anyone thinking of storing their CDs, etc on a hard drive is: "How are you going to listen to the music?"

1) Linking the PC to your audio system using the PC's analogue outputs: you are reliant on the (almost universally) poor quality PC soundboards and on the stuff that Windows does to the sound (not ideal) - not to mention the noise of the PC and the trailing cables.

2) Linking the PC to your audio system using a PC's digital output: much better than (1) but still with drawbacks.

In both these cases, with Windows XP the sound is 'messed' with by Windows - e.g. resampling to and from 48 kHz. With Windows 7 (not sure about Vista) you need to set the "Sound Properties" for your output device to match the format of your music files, e.g. "2 channel, 16 bit, 44100 Hz (CD Quality)" for ripped CDs, otherwise everything is likely to be resampled to 48 Hz.

3) Using a music streaming device with Wireless and Ethernet (i.e. wired) options such as the (now discontinued) Squeezebox Touch (which also enables you to stream iPlayer, Spotify, Qobuz to your audio), or the more expensive Sonus (which is more limited in facilities). The advantage of these is that there are no cables (unless you decide to wire the system), the PC or NAS can be in a different room, the data is read from your hard drive and totally by-passes your PC soundboard and Windows Mixer, and the sound quality is at the very least equal to mid-range CD players costing many, many hundreds of pounds, and arguably some costing much more than that, especially when using the digital output.

4) Using dedicated hard drive music 'servers' such as the Linn and Meridian devices. This is much more expensive but you have the comfort of knowing the system is reliable and self contained.

Ripping.
The most recommended and reliable ripping programmes are dbpoweramp and EAC - full stop.

Tagging.
Most systems rely on the tags.

You need to decide on a tagging scheme. This is difficult at first and you will probably find that you change your mind about it as time goes by.

The scheme that you use will depend, at least in part, on the system you use to play the music.

No automatic source of tags (including iTunes) is reliable. They merely provide a starting point for you to edit the tags to something that fits in with your scheme.

If you want to edit the tags after you have ripped the files, the standard recommendation is mp3tag.

As an example, I use the Squeezebox Touch so my tagging scheme is:

Album: the actual piece (not the CD 'name') in the format: [Composer] - [Piece] - [Main Performers], so one CD might result in more than one tagged 'Album' e.g. "Mahler - Symphony No 4 - Fischer, BFO" or "Janacek - Sinfonietta - Ancerl, Czech PO"
Artist: the performers (some people put the composer here)
Composer: Composer
Track: the movement

Thanks John. However, if I understand you, this is a technique for ripping to mp3, and I want to use uncompressed files.

[richardfinegold]

I wonder whether anyone has any experience of the Brennan JB7 music server that seems to be advertised all over the place? It seems to have a 500 GB drive which they claim works out as enough for 630 uncompressed CDs. They also claim to make it very easy to upload from CDs and MP3 players (but they would, wouldn't they?).

I tried a US variant of the Brennan, called Olive. This was an all in one ripper/ playback with a 2TB Hard Drive. It was not a happy experience. It recorded in flac, but it sounded far worse than any flac downloads that I have made. And it was terrible at Classical Music meta Data. I fed it 15 discs and it could only recognize 2 of them. It also froze frequently. It cost $2500 US and I had to pay a 10% restocking fee to get any money back on it, plus shipping costs.

[richardfinegold]

I made the move away from CDs four years ago, since when over 95% of my musical purchases have been downloads. For one reason or another, I still occasionally buy CDs, and I have also ripped a small proportion of my 1700-CD collection losslessly to computer. Virtually all my music listening is now via a dedicated MacBook which is connected to an Apogee Duet DAC (24/96 capable), with the addition of Pure Music, a software package which manages all music playback and reduces iTunes to a pure database and playlist organizer.

Ease of access to my music collection has improved out of all recognition since moving to this setup. Sound reproduction is top-class through my hi-fi system.



My computer-based music collection is now the equivalent of some 2250 CDs, and is managed totally and faultlessly by iTunes.

One of my systems is an old MaBook (80 gig Hard Drive, completely filled) feeding an older version of the Apogee via firewire. Sounds great, but still have the itunes issue, and of course I'm out of hard drive, which is why this thread was initiated.

[richardfinegold]

One confusing issue for me is whether or not to use a NAS drive or simply an auxillary hard drive. I'm a bit confused about what the difference is. Anyone using NAS drives?

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

a few years ago, if your car broke down, the AA/RAC bloke turned up. he fixed it, or if he couldn't, you hopped up in the cab, decided that radio 1 it would have to be, offered him a chunk of your Yorkie, and he towed you home, or to to the local garage, while you both grumbled about different things.
Now they have improved the service so that it takes a stream of helpful but thwarted call centres, agents, contracted towing companies, and at least 3 firms offering a free hire car, to do the job in about double the time, with everybody doing their best to help.

Playing digital music seems to be in the same zone of "improvement."

That's exacly the way I feel about. It it ain't broke, don't mend it (unless you just like having fun).

[Dave2002]

One confusing issue for me is whether or not to use a NAS drive or simply an auxillary hard drive. I'm a bit confused about what the difference is. Anyone using NAS drives?

An auxiliary drive is usually connected by USB. USB 3 drives are now a better bet because of the faster interface. Some drives may use other interfaces, such as Firewire or Thunderbolt, which are possible with Macs.

A NAS drive is usually connected to your network, and could even be connected wirelessly. Generally these are wired using Ethernet. I have used these in the past, and found them useful - until one failed. Some of them are really slow though newer ones with Gigabit (and up) Ethernet should be fast enough. The useful thing about NAS drives is that they can be shared with several computers, so you could, for example run several machines using the same data files (possibly subject to some constraints).

One other drive configuration you might consider is a RAID unit. This might protect you in the case of a single drive failure.

One very obvious failing with putting all one's music onto drives is that it's possible to lose it all having spent hours doing the ripping due to drive failure. This is a real concern and it's important to keep at least one backup disc to backup one's music library.

Rather than ripping every CD to hard drive I've eased up on that now, and if, for example I get a box set with 20 CDs which may have been bought for just one or two pieces, or out of curiosity, I may only rip the one or two which I'm most likely to play. Box sets often don't take up so much space anyway on a per CD basis.

I am currently listening to Mozart piano sonatas played by Martino Tirimo using my CD player. I have not so far bothered to rip it. and I've played it several times in the last few weeks. Ripping may be more useful for people who really do have limited storage space or who want the convenience of on-line browsing. I do that as well, but not consistently, and not so much as previously. According to iTunes I have about 40 days of music stored on my drive.

I like teamsaint's observations re the AA.

[Stunsworth]

Some people only like digital coax connectors which require more work with Macs. Probably a USB output to SPDIf would be needed. Some DACS will also take a USB input, though some DACs will only do 16 bit audio via USB.

The DAC I use - Audiolab MDAC - will accept up to 24/96 via the USB connection. I would think that, or similar, would be the case for most modern DACs that can use a USB interface. Theoretically the DAC should sound better through the use of the USB port because of the elimination of jitter.

[Stunsworth]

Virtually all my music listening is now via a dedicated MacBook which is connected to an Apogee Duet DAC (24/96 capable), with the addition of Pure Music, a software package which manages all music playback and reduces iTunes to a pure database and playlist organizer.

Ease of access to my music collection has improved out of all recognition since moving to this setup. Sound reproduction is top-class through my hi-fi system.

I use Pure Music too. In case you are unaware, there was an upgrade last week to 1.88.

I too found thathaving everything available, and searchable, was a huge plus.

[agingjb]

I do have a Brennan JB7. It works well enough for me, although serious listeners - I suspect - would not consider it.

Its user interface isn't ideal. As a poster on the forum on the Gramophone article says: "Now if I'd designed it, it would have a whole different set of flaws."

I have wondered about another gadget called the Cocktail Audio X10, which seems to have a more extensive user interface, and seems to be cheaper; but I've no plans to buy anything else at the moment.

I have, gently, fed back some opinions to Brennan.

Oh, and they did send a firmware fix that worked.

[Resurrection Man]

If I may be so bold as to summarise ?

Storing music digitally isn't exactly rocket-science as we have been doing it for ages. As I see it, it comes down to four key factors.

1) What level of compression (including zero compression) you are prepared to accept. That is entirely your choice.

2) Where are you going to store it. Storage is cheap. Again, iTunes lets you decide on which drive you store your library. It can be a large internal hard drive, a large external drive or even a NAS. Other factors will probably come into play such as whether you want a NAS to provide access to files from other computers (as Dave2002 discussed). This is not necessary if you are going to use iTunes and want to access your music from other computers....see below.

Just make sure you have a good backup routine.

3) You need a system to file your music away and to be able to retrieve it. Relying on internet based tags or databases is pretty well pointless for classical music. One only has to look at CDDB, for example, to see that different people have different preferences. So it is more a question of data entry rather than editing. iTunes works quite well in this respect as it will auto-fill fields for you as you type which saves time.

iTunes is a perfectly good database, IMO. You just have to decide on your database schema. If you are going to be accessing and playing your music solely from a desktop/laptop then you have better searching facilities and you are not beholden to the quirky display that you get with the iPod (as I mentioned elsewhere). You have to double up on where you store Composer, for example and use the Artist field for composer so that you can search by composer on your iPod.

iTunes also has the advantage of offering Home Sharing. I have my music on my iMac in the house. I had (until recently) an old PC laptop in my workshop and using iTunes on that could, using Home Sharing, access my music on the iMac.

4) You need to decide how you want to output the sound and at what quality level. This has been discussed up above.

Happy to help/advise as this subject is close to my heart!

One additional point. On the iPod/iTunes database, there is only one data field that seems almost limitless in size and that is Lyrics. It is also viewable on the iPod. I use this to contain details about the broadcast, orchestra etc.

[johnb]

One confusing issue for me is whether or not to use a NAS drive or simply an auxillary hard drive. I'm a bit confused about what the difference is. Anyone using NAS drives?

NAS drives can be extremely useful if (a) you want to share files across a network or (b) if you want to run a music server application on them so that you can put the NAS box somewhere out of the way and run the music server without having your PC on all the time. (The only caution with using a NAS box as a music server is that they can do straightforward playing of music files but most of them struggle to do 'on the fly' transcoding from an unsupported format to one that is supported.)

About 18 months ago I took the plunge and substituted a HP Microserver for my external hard drives and it is one of the best purchases I have ever made. The (4 bay) HP Microserver is really a small server, rather than a NAS, but for the majority of the time I use it in the same way as I would a NAS. The differences are (a) the Microserver is significantly cheaper than a lot of NAS boxes (especially with the regular £100 cashbacks that HP do), (b) it is also more powerful than most cheapish NAS boxes. The drawback is that it doesn't come with an operating system - so you have to install one - I installed Ubuntu (a version of Linux).

One caution with using RAID for data security on NAS boxes: it only guards against the failure of one of the HDDs, not against the failure of the NAS box itself and not against loss due to theft, etc. So, whether or not you use RAID, you also need to have a backup on an external hard drive which is stored elsewhere. Which then begs the question - if you need to have a backup on an external HDD, why bother with RAID in the first place? Indeed, using some versions of RAID can make it more difficult to do 1 to 1 external backups!

[MrGongGong]

Some people may not notice, or find it tolerable. Enthusiasts recommend using some form of external DAC, either connected by optical cable or wireless links. The recently deleted Squeezebox Touch gives good results with Macs.

The noise from some Macs can be quite noticeable if listening via headphones through the headphone socket.

Some people only like digital coax connectors which require more work with Macs. Probably a USB output to SPDIf would be needed. Some DACS will also take a USB input, though some DACs will only do 16 bit audio via USB.

I'm currently using one of these (but mainly for recording / performance )

http://echoaudio.com/products/audiofire-4

probably a bit overkill though for simply listening BUT massively stable and bus powered , portable and firewire which in my experience is much more reliable than USB.

IN many visits to school music departments I would say that the worst audio comes from Dell machines particularly laptops which have hideous earthing noise problems unless you run them off batteries .........

Why is it that if I spend £1,000 on a computer it looks incredible and is fast yet the audio quality is pants ?
Unless, of course, you get a custom built machine for audio but that's out of the range of most folk ......

[BBMmk2]

I have been thinking of buying a hard-drive for my collection. Any ideas?

[johnb]

The main problem that afflicts external hard drives is lack of effective heat dissipation, leading to the hard drive being at higher than optimal temperatures which, in turn, leads to early failure. This is less of a problem these days due to the availability of "green" hard drives which use less energy (and less energy = less heat). Some manufacturers might not choose to use "green" hard drives, of course, as they are slightly slower.

I tend to buy a hard driver enclosure and the actual hard drives separately, so that I can decide on the hard drive that I want - always a "green" drive, usually WD or Samsung.

However, if I was buying an external hard drive I would go for one that can stand vertically (to allow better heat dissipation) and to get a 2TB drive. It might be larger than you ever think you will need but, for the small additional cost, the extra capacity is well worth having.

Some external drives come formatted as FAT32. I would definitely reformat FAT32 drives as NTFS (very easily done).

Also, some external hard drives come with freebie software which the manufacturer encourages you to install. My preference is to never install that software - a USB hard drive will work, by default, without any additional software.

Sometimes the software includes a programme to backup your PC. Some people might find it useful but my preference is to use known, established and proven backup software such as Acronis True Image.

There is also some merit in using a programme to monitor your external hard drive's temperature (and state of health) such as 'Hard Disk Sentinel'. It will also monitor your PC's hard drive, of course. (You can try out a slightly limited version of HS Sentinel before deciding whether to buy.)