More > JRiver Media Center 22 for Windows
JRiver vs. dBpoweramp for ripping CDs? Opinions?
mwillems:
--- Quote from: JimH on January 09, 2017, 11:24:32 pm ---4 minutes to rip a CD doesn't seem right. Could you double check your settings?
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I checked them immediately before the test, and again just now. MC's speed was on the maximum setting. The CD in question is a longer cd (7 tracks, but about 60 minutes of music)
--- Quote ---"Same compression level"... did you change MC's defaults?
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MC and dBPoweramp use a different default compression setting for FLAC, so I had to equalize them somehow, as the time to compress is potentially meaningful. I set them both to use maximum compression.
--- Quote ---Thanks for the data.
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My pleasure, let me know if you want more, I can add a few more.
--- Quote from: JimH on January 09, 2017, 11:30:13 pm ---Why would you want "Ratings"? I don't think I'd want "Genre" either.
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I chose the metadata tags that are meaningful to me; there are other tags that other people might care about that I could have also evaluated (styles, composer, contributing artist, etc.). To be clear, dBpoweramp had data for a few other tags that were also missing in JRiver, but I omitted them because I don't personally care about them.
I like to have ratings for the same reason that I read music reviews. I ingest a lot of music, and I find it helpful to have guideposts before I re-do the ratings myself. What may not be immediately clear is that (mostly) dBpoweramp grabs ratings from AllMusic. Before I ever picked up dBpoweramp, I used to read allmusic for music reviews and ratings because their coverage is unparalleled. Most of the ratings go through their editorial process (like their music reviews), so the ratings represent an actual critical opinion, not just crowd-sourced noise. For example, when I've been looking into a new artist with a large catalog, it's hard to know where to start, but the AllMusic "Editor's Choice" album for that artist has typically been a safe starting point everytime I've tried it, etc. So I like to see the ratings from AllMusic because it tells me at a glance which tracks are likely to be the "hits" and which ones are likely to be troubled. It doesn't track my taste perfectly (how could it?), but it's very helpful to me as a consumer of music.
As for Genre, genre is notoriously slippery. I used to make myself crazy trying to fit everything into a very specific slot. JRiver actually cured me of that type of thinking. When I was a record store clerk, and when I worked in radio, music needed a clear and categorical genre because it needed to be physically located in one specific place. With digital files that can be tagged, the "exclusivity" of genre isn't really necessary anymore. You can create a hierarchy of genre and sub-genre, or you can treat the Genre tag as a list of tags, and albums can have five genres if you want, which can help play doctor make useful connections. So the metadata-genre saves me typing, and if I decide the work needs a more specific genre, I can add a second one as an additional datapoint. It's rare (IME) that the genre tags from the metadata are flat wrong; they're often simply too vague, but in a multi-genre world that's just more grist for the mill.
JohnT:
Does anyone happen to know if dbPowerAmp pays big bucks for AllMusic meta-data access (via Rovi), or is the cost all covered by the end user's annual subscription?
As has been pointed out, the slow rip times in MC vs. others is due to ripping everything at least twice to verify good data. I'm not sure why that one disc took 4 minutes if no errors causing more than two reads were reported.
mwillems:
--- Quote from: JohnT on January 10, 2017, 10:17:24 am ---Does anyone happen to know if dbPowerAmp pays big bucks for AllMusic meta-data access (via Rovi), or is the cost all covered by the end user's annual subscription?
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They don't have a subscription model, that much I know. They actually use a model similar to JRiver's: you buy the major version and can keep it forever, but upgrades to the next major version cost. They also do licensing per computer (un-like JRiver). So my guess is that it's funded out of user purchase fees.
--- Quote ---As has been pointed out, the slow rip times in MC vs. others is due to ripping everything at least twice to verify good data. I'm not sure why that one disc took 4 minutes if no errors causing more than two reads were reported.
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Well, dBpoweramp took about 2:00 minutes on that disc and only had to read it once (because the accurate rip checksum cleared on all the tracks). I know that's the case because if dBpoweramp encounters an error it shows you that it's reading the track a second time to verify (it automatically falls back to secure rip if accurate rip fails).
If JRiver is reading it twice, wouldn't you expect that it would take twice as long (which was the case for the first and third discs)? That doesn't explain how my second disk wound up so close in time, of course. If there's any additional info that might be helpful, I can try and supply it.
JimH:
--- Quote from: mwillems on January 10, 2017, 07:39:26 am ---MC and dBPoweramp use a different default compression setting for FLAC, so I had to equalize them somehow, as the time to compress is potentially meaningful. I set them both to use maximum compression.
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It would be interesting to test again, using MC's default compression level for FLAC. Maximum compression is expensive in CPU power and doesn't yield much savings in space.
JohnT:
--- Quote from: JohnT on January 10, 2017, 10:17:24 am ---Does anyone happen to know if dbPowerAmp pays big bucks for AllMusic meta-data access (via Rovi), or is the cost all covered by the end user's annual subscription?
--- End quote ---
I just checked and I guess dbPowerAmp discontinued using AllMusic/AMG as of July 2016. It looks like they've replaced it with discogs. I'll bet the pricing got too steep. Or enforced.
https://forum.dbpoweramp.com/showthread.php?36067-AMG-Metadata-discontinuation
It would probably make sense to add another "backup" metadata provider to MC, beyond freedb which hasn't kept up with the others. I spent some time looking at MusicBrainz and that might make sense. Also looked into GD3, which might require the user to have a subscription there. We could also do more with Wikipedia.
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