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[Skin]

I have just joined. I am about to start ripping my CD collection and will purchase wire or wireless device(s) to take the stored digital information and feed it into my HiFi system. I am in a learning phase in regard to both hardware, including computer storage and DACs, and software, including for ripping, tagging and archiving. I have mainly classical music and want to do this properly 'first' time. Actually, I started do it a couple of years back but was getting too many flawed rips due to poor hardware. Have now connected a new PATA Plextor 230 (not made for 4? years) to my SATA computer and am virtually ready to go. I have a couple of dozen ripped CDs already using EAC and FLAC. Not sure if I can use these with J River, or whether I should continue ripping with EAC (I have seen that J River also provides lossless rips) and if so whether I can rip to J River with EAC, and what I need to do to capture album art and to have an optimally arranged and tagged music library. My impression is that at present the info is widely dispersed on the J River website ... although I may simply not have come across the right webpage(s) yet. Ideally one would find a roughly 10 page introductory document for people who want to use J River approximately as I do, and similarly a document for the limited other driving reasons that result in people buying J River. Without this concentration of information around broad tasks, acquiring the critical mass of information needed to more forward efficiently is daunting and would seem to involve having to search for pieces of info by searching the wiki base ... which one may well want to do at times to obtain very particular info.

 I would appreciate it if someone can direct to where I need to go in order to get the ‘introductory’ info of the type described. If I am correct about there being no detailed ‘quick start’ guide to ripping and setting up a music library using J River and other leading software which can be used with media centre, perhaps one could be put together.
Cheers
Skin

[JimH]

You might start by ripping a CD.  Just put the disk in and step through the screens.  Explore options.  You can set "secure ripping" and choose an encoder.  It's not complicated.

[Skin]

Well I have not downloaded it yet - I would like to avoid having to try different software myself. I wanted to read about what J River and its competitors do ... and perhaps also find a forum where I could learn from others' posts who have experience with the various software; but I accept that I may have to try it.

[Skin]

Am I disadvantaged in any significant way by ripping with EAC to FLAC and then importing files into J River and organising my music library? If not I will go with that.

[mojave]

Hi, Skin, and welcome to Media Center. For someone new to ripping it can seem like a daunting task. However, MC makes it quite easy. I'll try to give you some quick pointers and some things to think about.

It is easiest to get started by going to Tools > Options in MC. Once you get to the Options window, I will walk you through a few steps. Use the bolded items below to go through the options.

CD & DVD:  Under CD ripping I set copy mode to secure. This rereads the CD up to 16 times in order to ensure an accurate rip. This is the essentially the same as use EAC to rip your music. Under AutoPlay you can set Audio CD for Rip. This way it will start ripping every time you put a CD in the drive. I leave the other settings at their defaults, but you can look through them to get an idea of what they do. Under Rip Complete Options you will see that it will attempt to automatically retrieve cover art for your CD after the rip is done.

To Think About:  You can rip the CD to individual files or as one file with a cue file. The option for setting this is under File Management. The cue file provides the track information that is contained on the single file so that each song still shows up separately within MC. Some that rip classical music like to use this method because sometimes there is silence before the first track that will only be captured using the single file/cue method. I don't think it is necessary, but you can google for more info.

Encoding:  Here you will set what type of encoding you want to use. I use Monkey's Audio (APE) which is a lossless format. It is a little more efficient than FLAC. You can choose the FLAC decoder, though. I would leave the decoder settings to their defaults. MC can also play the FLAC files you have already ripped with EAC.

To Think About:  Determine which lossless codec you want. Note that this doesn't have anything to do with supported formats for portable devices because MC can transcode on the fly to another format when copying to a portable device.

File Location:  Set the folder location you want to use for ripping your music. I use d:\Music for all my music and d:\Movies for all movies. I leave the folder name and file name rules at their defaults.

To Think About:  Some spend a lot of time thinking through their file structure. You really don't need to do that with MC and you can easily change it later using the Library Tools. Unlike some programs, with MC your file structure has nothing to do with how you display and sort your music library.

I would suggest you get started ripping the music and do any additional tagging later. You may find that the tags provided by the database lookup that MC does is good enough for you. However, you may also want to use a more complex tagging system. For example, you could list all the instruments used in each piece or you could list the featured instrument.

Here is a Discussion:  Classical Music thread to get you started on thinking about tagging. You can search for more threads on the topic, too.

[JimH]

You can rip with EAC, but there is no advantage.

[mojave]

Am I disadvantaged in any significant way by ripping with EAC to FLAC and then importing files into J River and organising my music library? If not I will go with that.

You won't get the easy way that your file structure is created, tags are filled in, and coverart is added by using EAC. It is much simpler and more efficient to just use JRiver Media Center.

[gappie]

btw. there was an interesting thread about organizing classical music. might give some ideas..
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=45824.0

 
gab

[Skin]

Encoding:  Here you will set what type of encoding you want to use. I use Monkey's Audio (APE) which is a lossless format. It is a little more efficient than FLAC. You can choose the FLAC decoder, though. I would leave the decoder settings to their defaults. MC can also play the FLAC files you have already ripped with EAC.

OK - I downloaded MC although I could not save it on a memory stick which I wanted to do as I will not use this PC to play from ... perhaps I can do this when it come to buying a copy?

Ripping to encoder (I chose flac) provides a compressed file. I can't see any control over this - or even the level of compression. I would prefer the lightest level of compression (or uncompressed if possible). Is it possible to manage this in J River MC?

[Skin]

OK. found 0 to 8 for encoding options. Checked the web and it seems the greater the number the greater the compression. Have put it on zero and await the outcome

[JimH]

For initial testing, accept the defaults for FLAC encoding.  Don't try to increase the compression.  The gain is just a few per cent in reduced size, but requires significantly more time and CPU.

When you download the MC14 file, save it in a known location, then copy to a memory device.

The Purchase link above leads to info on how to license MC14.  It can be done on a PC not connected to the Internet if necessary.

[Skin]

Just ripped a CD with flac encoding set to 0. It comes to about 320Mb will the disc is close to 700Mb - so roughly half the size. This looks like as uncompressed one can get it.

Can I use accurateRip to check the integrity of the rip?