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How to find CD drive and rip to FLAC

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Tyak:
Hi - brand new user here.   

I'm a new JRiver user due to the Catalina upgrade.  I use a Mac but have all my music in FLAC, and for the last 10-15 years have used the tool Max to rip from CD to FLAC.  Sadly Max hasn't been updated in ten years, and it's 32-bit, so when I upgrade to Catalina it'll be dead.

I have an external CD player attached to my Mac.

In firing up JRiver for the first time, I've stumbled across being able to play the CD I have in the CD player.....but I can't figure out how to see and cue up the whole album.

More importantly, my (hopefully simple) question is this:

  - All I want to do is have JRiver read the CD and rip to FLAC in a destination of my choosing.

I've played around for half an hour and just can't find how to do this.

Thanks,
Tyak

JimH:
You should see a CD icon for ripping in the Action Window (lower left corner).

Tyak:
Thanks for replying.  I do not see a CD icon.  When I expand the Action Window I see Sync Handheld, Build Playlist and Tag only.  Is that where it's supposed to be?  Does the fact that I am using an external CD drive mean that I need to do something else?

blgentry:
Hmm, that's odd.  I just checked MC and I do have a "rip disc" selection in the "Action Window" at the lower left.

When I first tried it, it didn't work.  But that turns out to be because OSX was set to open a different program when I inserted a CD.  You might check OSX Preferences under CDs and DVDs and see what the "insert Music CD" action is set to.  I set it to "ignore".  After that, MC saw my CD when I inserted it.

I use an external optical drive too.  This IMac does not have a built in optical drive at all.

Brian.

Tyak:
Ok, so I looked at those preferences Brian.  But first - here's what else I'm seeing using this app:


When starting JRiver, the JRiver icon bounces in the dock, alongside another app that opens called PackageInstaller which is active.  It continues to bounce until I click on PackageInstaller, which then quits and JRiver starts.

I have Preferences > CDs & DVD’s set to Ignore on all insert events, and yet I still see nothing in the lower left Action Window of JRiver indicating that it can see my CD drive.  I tried selecting opening JRiver upon inserting a music CD and that does nothing.


So I have to go click Playing Now in JRiver to get a split window, then File > Open Media File > select drive > highlight all tracks and move them to the bottom half of the Player window in JRiver, and then hit Cancel to avoid playing anything.  And then the CD gets ejected.  So I push the CD back in, and now I can select the files to convert manually.

This is all a bit manual and clunky, to be honest.

And here I notice that the metadata on the CD is partially missing - track name is OK but there’s no artist, album or anything else.

I then highlight and select all tracks manually > right click > Library Tools > Convert Format

The Convert Format window appears in the bottom left, and I can select options etc.  Here, at this point, is there a way to enter the correct metadata?  Without the artist and album name, the files just get dropped into my root folder and I have to (a) move them and then (b) edit all the metadata in a different tool.


TL;DR  JRiver not recognizing my CD;  thus no means to grab the tracks other than a kludgey manual process which is messy.  And I don't see where to correct the blank metadata.

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