will CDs eventually become obsolete due to no CD transports surviving?

[pseudoid]

And back then, the ripping software very often didn't get access to the repositories that auto-populate artist and songs etc.

But not 'back' enough; when CompactDiscDataBase was alive, well and FREE... and before Gracenote took it over.

...In 2000, CDDB Inc. was renamed Gracenote. A 1999 announcement had asserted that access to the CDDB service would "remain 100% free to software developers and consumers". Gracenote nonetheless switched to a proprietary license, prompting criticism that this was exploiting the work of unpaid contributors and motivating the launch of Freedb in 2001, based on the last freely licensed version of CDDB In March 2001, Gracenote banned all unlicensed applications (such as Freedb) from accessing their database...

The CDDB story is an interesting one... sad but still interesting!

 

[TunaBug]

It's funny how many here think of ripping the CDs as the painful part (and I do as well), but I spend way more time curating metadata. There's nothing necessary there (if listening from disc there's not metadata and it sounds just fine), but curating it scratches some itch for me.

@Sal1950 the last time I ripped everything I did actually make sure that catalog numbers are present in my metadata. Anything not linked to a specific MusicBrainz release has my own notes of what the actual catalog number is. Of course that's before I learned that occasionally the same catalog number is used for different masters, so I'm still not spot on.

I keep thinking I need to pull all of the discs from storage and scan the liner notes, since there's a lot of interesting artist bio and production notes there. Then I would feel a need to OCR them. And would I ever read them?

 

[Petrushka]

It's funny how many here thing of ripping the CDs as the painful part (and I do as well), but I spend way more time curating metadata. There's nothing necessary there (if listening from disc there's not metadata and it sounds just fine), but curating it scratches some itch for me.

@Sal1950 the last time I ripped everything I did actually make sure that catalog numbers are present in my metadata. Anything not linked to a specific MusicBrainz release has my own notes of what the actual catalog number is. Of course that's before I learned that occasionally the same catalog number is used for different masters, so I'm still not spot on.

I keep thinking I need to pull all of the discs from storage and scan the liner notes, since there's a lot of interesting artist bio and production notes there. Then I would feel a need to OCR them. And would I ever read them?

MediaMonkey can add multiple images and text. Lyrics, for example.

 

[pseudoid]

...Then I would feel a need to OCR them...

Don't do it!
OCR'g them would be OCD...
Then, you would have to visit a therapist!
If you don't know what genre your music is...

 

[TunaBug]

MediaMonkey can add multiple images and text. Lyrics, for example.

Oh I know. Tools aren't the issue.

Don't do it!
OCR'g them would be OCD...
Then, you would have to visit a therapist!
If you don't know what genre your music is...

Really? That's the point at which it's OCD? No, it was OCD long before...FLACs sound exactly the same as the source material even when stripped of metadata (not counting replaygain). It's all OCD, I think we just each have our own idea of what is good an appropriate amount of information.

 

[Petrushka]

Oh I know. Tools aren't the issue.

Really? That's the point at which it's OCD? No, it was OCD long before...FLACs sound exactly the same as the source material even when stripped of metadata (not counting replaygain). It's all OCD, I think we just each have our own idea of what is good an appropriate amount of information.

I find auto-taggers suck. But then I have hundreds of oddball classical CDs that don’t show up at all in the databases.

 

[pablolie]

I find auto-taggers suck. But then I have hundreds of oddball classical CDs that don’t show up at all in the databases.

contribute to it. I know it is work. but we can submit a lot a lot of stuff. it is worth it.

 

[Petrushka]

contribute to it. I know it is work. but we can submit a lot a lot of stuff. it is worth it.

I did. I hand tagged hundreds of CDs and submitted them. I think it was called freedb.

 

[Sal1950]

It's funny how many here think of ripping the CDs as the painful part (and I do as well), but I spend way more time curating metadata. There's nothing necessary there (if listening from disc there's not metadata and it sounds just fine), but curating it scratches some itch for me.

Sure, that's why I brought up my regrets over my early ripping and the lack of info I didn't bother to include.
For ripping I've used the Linux program K3B for a couple decades now. It's totally painless, just insert the CD, make a couple clicks
and the ripping takes off for a couple minutes and done. But like you say, its including the metadata, artwork and all the rest that will
eat up the time. But in the end it's well worth it IMHO.

 

[pseudoid]

They all have a life expectancy and eventually most of them will have given up the ghost, at which point you better hope you have all your CD stuff backed up on hard drives.

I presume aliexpress heard you loud-and-clear!

At that ridiculous price, buy 3: House/Car/Spare.

 

[Petrushka]

I presume aliexpress heard you loud-and-clear!
View attachment 399426
At that ridiculous price, buy 3: House/Car/Spare.

Overpriced. $20 gets you a USB CD drive, and with a computer, you can get free software that guarantees you a bit perfectly rip.

 

[Sal1950]

They all have a life expectancy and eventually most of them will have given up the ghost,

Absolutely, never gamble with your music !!!
OTOH I must be very lucky, 30 years of computer use and I've never killed a hard-drive.
Back in 2008 I wanted to dip my beak in the then new SSD tech and paid $210 for a OCZ 60gb drive which I used for a bunch of
years as my Linux OS drive. I have no idea how many writing cycles it's endured and I only retired it last year because I was running
out of SATA drive controllers and no real use for a tiny 60gb drive. SMART reported it was running on about 65% useful life left. LOL

 

[Old_School_Brad]

I've previously heard that the congestion(s) in WiFi channels peak at 1900Hours.

Are you 100% certain that they are not doing some other nefarious internet things, instead!

They're not that old. So yeah, 100 % sure.
But when time comes, and I'd see it on the traffic log, I'll limit the speed to their PC's to 56 kbps and tell them a story..

 

[Haskil]

My sentiment(s) were previously posted; here is an example, below:
No need for me to search and nothing in the music business surprises me anymore.

I - as a consumer- have no love lost for the "HooliganB*st*rds and their Shenanigans"!

Neither Sony nor Philips were from US, when their CDs pitted the consumers against them.
Going back many decades, I recall there were some US Federal collusion and price-fixing investigations of the CD industry as a whole, when the "production costs of music CDs" were determined to be $2.57USD. Tower Records (et al) retail prices, at the time (=mid 1980s), were in excess of $11USD.
I did not like their pricing strategies back then, and I detest the business structure of the whole industry now.
It does not matter what country or how long "royalty" payments are to be made to the artists or what other clever gouging tactics they may pursue in the future.

I no longer engage with those peeps (imo: Consumers' enemies) in any financial sense and have no remorse or guilt for being able to LEGALLY enjoy all sorts of music on the FREE.

OT: Consumers have been fighting a similar fight with books. Re-reading a book multiple times does not make them illegal, whether that book was purchased or borrowed from the library. I wish there was an equivalent saying to "You can't judge a book by its cover!" which applies to French poly-carbonate and their pits.

The production price of a CD at 2.57 dollars... The American federal authorities are therefore much worse than those of Europe in Brussels...

Reducing the price of a CD to its market production value amounts precisely to to recognize the idea that when we buy a CD we only buy a polycarbonate object and not its contents... because if we apply the production costs we end up with a significantly higher price...
Especially since the disc , and it's been like that since the beginning, 78 rpm included, the price of a CD never corresponds to its production costs... A classical guitar record is sold for the same price as a record with a work bringing together 200 musicians and singers, soloists, conductors...
And record companies have always operated on this equalization which means that what brings in money pays for what brings in the least.

There is no difference between a book and a CD... You buy a book object and you are in no way the owner of its content which you only have the right to enjoy by reading it... you can read the book and listen to the CD as many times as you want, within the limits set by law for private use... And it's even more restrictive for the book.

Except when the work is in the public domain, but again be careful!
It's not just the cover of the book that is a protected work... The typography used by the publisher, the layout of the text, the place in the text where the page is turned... are protected and belong to him or to the designer who chose all that... You cannot therefore not scan it to publish it as is... You must retype it by hand or scan it and run it through software which will transform the scan into a text file...

Whereas a CD that has fallen into the public domain is cloneable and publishable by a publisher other than the one who owned it before it fell into the public domain : You put a new cover illustration on it and it's good... And even, the restoration work done by the original publisher on an old archive does not give rise to a new printed and is therefore not protected...

Opportunistic record publishers do not hesitate to clone public domain recordings to sell them in the form of CDs and also obviously to sell them in the form of files on platforms... No book publisher can indulge in to the cloning of a commercial book whose text is nevertheless in the public domain because its layout is protected...

 

[Haskil]

I find auto-taggers suck. But then I have hundreds of oddball classical CDs that don’t show up at all in the databases.

I've ripped a little over 10,000 CDs from my classical music collection (only about 400 CDs that aren't). With Itunes and with DbPoweramp which I very quickly abandoned because the metadata which came back from the different databases was too mediocre or from an unnamed kitchen with Musicbrainz and required too much manual recovery work... in Itunes which uses Gracenote which is much more reliable for classic metadata.
Out of 10,000 CDs, I have hardly had a CD that was not recognized... except when I rip them too early: I am a music critic and receive discs before their commercial release... But so, I fill out the metadata carefully and submit it to Gracenote for others to benefit...

 

[Petrushka]

I've ripped a little over 10,000 CDs from my classical music collection (only about 400 CDs that aren't). With Itunes and with DbPoweramp which I very quickly abandoned because the metadata which came back from the different databases was too mediocre or from an unnamed kitchen with Musicbrainz and required too much manual recovery work... in Itunes which uses Gracenote which is much more reliable for classic metadata.
Out of 10,000 CDs, I have hardly had a CD that was not recognized... except when I rip them too early: I am a music critic and receive discs before their commercial release... But so, I fill out the metadata carefully and submit it to Gracenote for others to benefit...

You work with brand new CDs that rip without errors. Most of my CDs are used, and I require an error free ripper.

 

[Haskil]

You work with brand new CDs that rip without errors. Most of my CDs are used, and I require an error free ripper.

Far from it... 99% of my 10,000 ripped CDs were used and sometimes bought second hand... But I'm careful... I rip around ten new CDs every month, no more.
When I have a doubt, I use Dbpoweramp and accurate rip. The doubt being that suddenly iTunes slows down the rip a lot... The only and rare recalcitrant CDs were new... and immaculate upon visual inspection... or formerly the famous "bronzed" CDs obviously.

 

[AnalogSteph]

OTOH I must be very lucky, 30 years of computer use and I've never killed a hard-drive.
Back in 2008 I wanted to dip my beak in the then new SSD tech and paid $210 for a OCZ 60gb drive which I used for a bunch of years as my Linux OS drive. I have no idea how many writing cycles it's endured and I only retired it last year because I was running out of SATA drive controllers and no real use for a tiny 60gb drive.

Your lawn must be full of 4-leaf clover. OCZ had some really notorious series with a nasty habit of dying... apparently they were a RAID 0 internally. Maybe this one predated them.

I lost two, both Seagates, incidentally - one ST51080A in '99 (my games!!!1 ) and a ST1000DM003 in 2018 (partial contact operation sucks). A second, slightly older ST51080A I bought for a retro PC years later only needed a single bad sector to be manually overwritten with a hex editor to convince the drive to remap it, an accompanying ST52520A had a slight stiction problem but overwise was fine.

My parents had a second identical ST1000DM003 as a data drive, it started developing some bad sectors a few years back, was then replaced by a then brand-new ST2000DM008 (partial contact operation + SMR or the worst possible combination, but I wasn't aware at the time), which started acting up again after around a year. They eventually splurged on a 2 TB MX500. Seagate is definitely a "you get what you pay for" brand, never had any trouble with any of their SCSI drives, similarly those in the NAS at work have been chugging along since 2015/16, proving more reliable than its system board whose Celeron J1900 was affected by the infamous Atom C2000 bug and needed soldering in a resistor bodge to revive the system.

 

[tmtomh]

Classical titles are a whole different - and much more challenging - thing when it comes to metadata, for sure.

As far as reliability, years ago when I first started ripping CDs I used iTunes. And I found that a small but worrying percentage of the CDs I'd ripped would exhibit audible glitches. Almost always these were short bits of just one or two tracks on a CD.

This was all due to the lack of sufficient error correction, and the way iTunes has a drive read a disc.

I soon switched to secure rippers - first a now-discontinued app called Max, and then to XLD. Both were/are freeware, and both are for the Mac (which is what I've always used). These apps have the drive read a small segment of the disc multiple times until they get the identical result at least twice in a row, and then move on to the next little segment. They also query the online AccurateRip database, which contains rip logs and hashes from millions of other people's rips - this adds an extra layer of confirmation as to whether the ripped data is correct or not.

Comparing rips using these apps with rips of the identical CDs I'd previously made with iTunes, I found that my iTunes rips fell into four categories:

1. Audibly bad iTunes rips that were due to unrecoverable flaws on the CD;
2. Audibly bad iTunes rips that were due to easily recoverable flaws on the CD, fixed by a secure ripper doing its "read multiple times until we get two identical results" thing;
3. Audibly good iTunes rips of CDs that the secure ripper was also able to rip error-free;
4. Audibly good iTunes rips of CDs that the secure ripper found unfixable errors in, but the secure-ripper was able to complete the rip and the errors were few and tiny and impossible to hear during playback.

With the secure ripping apps I have found that about 96-98% of my 500-disc collection can be ripped 100% error-free (this does include discs where the app reports having to do some retries on some tracks, but that's not unusual and the end result was a perfect rip). Another 2% or so will rip with errors, but when I grab a confirmed 100% perfect rip of the same pressing online and run a null test in Audacity, the errors in this 2% of my collection consist of tiny glitches involving a handful of samples in a couple of isolated spots, and are totally inaudible.

The final 1-2% of my collection is - or was, since I've replaced that handful of CDs over time - discs that could not be ripped 100% error-free, and whose glitches produced audible issues or prevented XLD and the drive from completing the rip at all.

These years of secure-ripping experience and examination of waveforms in Audacity have also turned up all kinds of weird little discoveries. The one that always surprises me is how often when you compare rips of two different CD pressings that were made from the identical digital master, the rips don't match up 100%. The culprit is digital sync errors - one of the two CDs will have one sample repeated every 1-2 seconds or so. This is completely inaudible, but what makes it especially bizarre is that over the course of an entire album, the one with the repeated examples will have a very slightly longer run-time as a result! This is just fractions of a second over an entire album of course, but it's bizarre.

Finally, there is one other major benefit of the secure-ripping apps over something like iTunes: drive offset. XLD and I believe other secure-ripping apps allow you to set the drive offset - how many samples the drive automatically reads ahead of, or after, the official start or end of a music CD track as per the CD's table of contents.

I don't completely understand how this works or why it's even a thing. But with software that makes its own, unchangeable, behind-the-scenes assumptions about drive offset, you can end up with a situation where a tiny but audible bit of the beginning or end of a track is cut off when you rip it. When you rip a whole album, the effect is that the first or last fraction of a second (or in some cases more) of each track is actually part of the prior or next track. It's not an issue if you play the entire album through using gapless playback. But if you play just one track it becomes a huge issue. In the early, wild-west days of the music file-sharing craze in the early to mid-2000s, tracks with this issue were all over the place.

 

[Haskil]

I haven't had these problems: the vast majority of my CDs ripped with iTunes were done in a PC with a multistandard CD-DVD-BD reader whose offset I carefully adjusted with dBpoweramp (or perhaps - being with Exact Audio Copy which I also used a bit), I checked the "correct errors during playback" box in Itunes. But when I had a doubt, I still switched to DbPoweramp and accurate Rip.
From memory I have three CDs clicking in CD and file and in the same place... And I don't have the patience to wait three hours for it to succeed and hear the player spinning like a coffee machine m 'annoying... One of them is a rip of a brand new CD made two days ago. No problem, I wouldn't keep it.