Hello.. I have around 500 cd's that I'm wanting to rip and store on a hard drive. Anyone know of a software program that will rip the cd's and then catalog the music for me? Any suggestions / comments are welcome. Thanks !
If I were to do 500 CDs at one pop I would use dbPowerAmp to rip and then Media Monkey to catalog. dbPA is the fastest and easiest ripper with quality second to none. It is a paid for app but you get a 30 day free trial. You ought to be able to do them in 30 days. If not start, with the more obscure. Because it uses a paid for metadata site the metadata is accurate and complete. There are 2 very popular audio manager apps WinAmp and Media Monkey. MM's interface is more of a catalog. dbPA will store the music by artist then store the albums as sub folders. When you are done import the music into one of those apps or both. It only will take a few minutes for 500 CDs. Your catalog will be roughed out. You can add ratings lyrics etc but the basics such as, artist, album, year, artwork and titles were added from dbPA and are in the music files. If you change the info they get change both in the database and in the files. I strongly urge you to read the top sticky "You to can be an audio expert" before you start. Take advice from world experts not one of your 'smart' friends. After you read and check out what the experts say then you can listen to your friends. Music quality is extremely subjective. You hear exactly what you want to hear. my soap box This is my personal preference... I rip to a extremely high VBR mp3 and archive the originals. I will burn copies if I want to play CDs. If you can't archive the originals you might want to consider archiving lossless. dbPA will rip to just about anything. The CDs are lossless so if you do not play them any more you are safe. In a blind test adult audiophiles can't even distinguish 15 kHz in music. High end mp3s record up to about 20 kHz. Dogs can hear in the 20+ kHz range. Lossless can record up to 40 kHz. Ultrasonics require massive bandwidth to store. It is nice to have in an archive but no human can hear ultrasonics.
