Re-Ripping CDs

Posted on September 29th, 2009
Written by Richard
Posted in: N/A (old archives)

I’ve spent a lot of time this morning evaluating my music collection. I ripped my whole CD collection around 1997/98 to 128Kbit MP3. That made sense at the time, but two factors have changed:

The hard drive thing was obvious, but I didn’t realize there was room in the MP3 spec for the actual encoding to get better over time.  This means that, even at 128kbit rate, an MP3 I made today would sound better than a 128kbit MP3 I  encoded 10 years ago.   Go figure.

Though I threw away all of the cases and booklets long ago, I’ve kept all of the actual CDs themselves. So, out of curiosity I re-encoded a few old CDs at ‘-V2′  with the newest stable LAME encoder, and it’s like I’m hearing them again for the first time.  They sound a whole lot better this way. I’m also taking care to use software than verifies that it read the sound data off the CDs exactly as it was written. One would think that this isn’t an issue, since CDs are used for data, but it apparently is.  So, now what?  Time to re-encode the collection?

I think yes.  Now the questions are:

On the first topic, I realize that I have a ton of music that I never listen to.  Or, when I do, I ‘d probably be better off listening to something else.  I have William Shatner albums, for example.    Or, I have the Chirstopher O’Riley piano renditions of Radiohead classics. Realistically, when am I going to listen to them when I could be listening to the actual Radiohead songs?   So, there were lots of things I bought so I could hear them, but that doesn’t mean they need to be in the permanent collection.

So, I’m starting to feel a bit minimalist. I mean, it’s not the size of your music collection that counts, right? :-)  Maybe it’s time to pare things down to just the essential, best of the best.  Weezer? Pinkerton.    R.E.M? Automatic for the People.  Slayer? Reign in Blood.  Beck? Odelay.   Carcass? Necroticism. Smashing Pumpkins? Siamese Dream.  And on and on.  Of course, my favorite bands will get a pass, and I’ll re-rip all of their CDs.  I mean, how can you choose between The Bends and OK Computer and Kid A? That’s right… you can’t.

As for the format, I did briefly consider FLAC and AAC.   Maybe it was a mistake, but I stuck with MP3 because:

Now, I do also have a large collection of AAC files from the last few years, both bought from iTunes or CDs ripped by iTunes.  Any essential CDs will be re-ripped to MP3 format, and I’ll toss the old AACs.   The stuff I bought from iTunes is more of a quandry.

You see, I’m systematically trying to distance myself from Apple lock-in.  Score-card so far:  dropped iPhone, dropped mobileMe (lamest name ever), switched desktop machine to a Vista box.  That leaves me with a macbook pro and a lot of Fairplay content.  I love the laptop, but hate this Fairplay lock-in.  I see three options:

  1. Pay Apple to “upgrade” them to iTunes Plus so that the DRM goes away.  iTunes says this will cost me $800 or so.  Not thrilled with that idea, though I’m sure I can pare down the list a bunch.
  2. Choose which CDs I can’t live without, and buy them fresh from the Amazon store just to keep that extra $0.30 out of Apple’s grubby hands.
  3. Keep using iTunes and iPods for the rest of my life.

I’m leaning towards #2, just for spite.

Comments

blog comments powered by Disqus