The best part for me is going to record stores again. CDs are SO cheap now, especially used ones. I’ll usually pick a few out of the dollar bin just based on vibes and the cover and rip them when I get home. I’ve found some cool stuff. It’s like a treasure hunt.
Don’t miss Spotify one bit.
There's a tool called cdparanoia[1] whose goal is to babysit the CD drive and ensure that it gets a complete, perfect, uninterrupted stream of bits off the drive, and will use a lot of tricks to go back and re-read any data that didn't come back cleanly. I always used it with abcde[2], which was a wrapper around it with album lookup, tagging, and ffmpeg support. I highly recommend anyone amassing a CD rip collection take a look at it, both are still packaged in present-day Ubuntu.
[1] https://www.xiph.org/paranoia/faq.html [2] https://abcde.einval.com/wiki/
Make sure you enable its MusicBrainz support. I used to painstakingly input all the band / album / track title metadata but then discovered that people were already doing it for me.
However, then you go down the MB rabbit hole with obscure music that no one has ever inputted. Still, it's a quick and easy way to contribute and then it's available for everyone.
Or you can run EAC in wine.
Also the price of decent (Sony hifi grade, not ES) CD players used is great too.
Frank turner-ish vibes but I don't think it was actually him.
It's completely un-googlable though, and even the LLMs aren't much help on this one.
Yes, it is (unless the CD player is so bad that it can't do adequate error correction). What I do is rip the CD to my music server, which is where I listen to the music from. Then the quality of the CD player isn't important, as long as it works correctly.
most tools do it badly and just accept what the drive gives them in default mode, often with glitches
Like, ripping seems easy to me, you rip with something that supports a checksum database, and if it comes out with a correct checksum then it's right.
Also not everything is in AR/CTDB. Maybe 3% of the 1000+ CDs I've ripped had no records yet, though I do tend towards the obscure. I rip these again with EAC, which is set up to automatically do CTDB submission. (Usually I'm using the redumper tool which has some specialized features.)
Without external verification it's best to dump it twice and ensure they're bit equal, preferably with a different drive to minimize error correlation.
Only issues come from damaged retail discs and dead burned ones.
The industry has collectively decided that since CDs/DVDs are just about converting digital bits into other bits deterministically, there's no value left to differentiate, and everyone started selling absolutely nasty plasticky junk.
The new Sony unit I got was a loud rattly garbage, that even though it did the things it needed to do, made such an awful noise that I had to take it back. The other one I got (don't remember the brand) was no better.
I took that one back too, and I shelved the issue, but it was kind of remarkably terrible experience for me.
I say this as my primary CD player is actually a Panasonic DVD player from the year 2000. This is the exception that proves the rule. At the turn of the century many quality DVD players were sold and marketed as primarily CD players with the added capability of being able to sell DVDs.
Is it a budget issue or sound quality issue?
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/317751858636 e.g. £65 doesn't even remotely get you close to listenable in vinyl.
I don't understand this, are you saying higher than ES or lower than ES?
I thought ES was their top "Elevated" Standard?
Also my library card is much better for legacy music exploration. It scales too.