Easily Rip and Archive Your CDs Losslessly on macOS

hey what's up everyone this is Aaron from Studio 3B today I'm just going to show you how do you archive a CD and how do you organize your music I'm going to show you how I do this and I'm going to do it on Mac OS stay tuned [Music] first things first you're going to need a software program to rip the CD so you want to do this carefully because you want to pick a software program that will be non-destructive to your audio if you really care about your audio you'll save it exactly the way it is on a CD and then you won't lose any information later on down the line you could always take this file and compress it however for archive purposes you never want to store it the compressed version you want to store the original version so software program that I recommend is called xld so just go to Google search on xld go to download and download that bad boy open up xld you're going to copy that file and you're going to open up your applications and you're going to paste it in there thank you now you have xld on your Mac so now you're going to run that program it says xld can't be open because Apple cannot check it for malicious software just click OK control right Mouse click and click open then you can click open and it'll let you go all right now this is the interface you get so what you're going to do is choose your option output format so output format you can choose any one of these some of them are better than others like I said don't rip it to MP3 you're going to lose information it's going to be detrimental to the file and you're going to lose some of the original audio that was in the file whether or not you think you could hear it or not so what I would do is do the Best of Both Worlds see wave and eighth are very similar file formats they are exactly as they are on the CD the thing is they're very large files so what we recommend in the audio Community is Flac Flac stands for free lossless audio codec Flack is good because it does not lose any information whatsoever but it does compress the file to a smaller file size not quite like an MP3 does but it compresses it much smaller than a wave or an eighth there you go let's go to options so if time is no issue for you what I would do is compress it to a higher level it takes a little more time but it's a smaller file size and I would leave all the other settings the same then output directory so I would definitely set that and I would set it to a directory you know where it's going to go so I'm going to set it right to my profile I'm going to create a new folder and I'm going to call it rip and you open that so then everything else is pretty much good uh let's go to file naming now file naming you should be consistent but this is not the end of our archiving solution we're going to go in and organize our files when we're done that doesn't mean we shouldn't name the files consistently that way they're easy to find so let's see format of the file name is default it looks like it's going to be track number a is artist and then T is track name so let's let's stick with that for now this is going to dump everything into one directory so we're going to organize that later now cddb is a database where you're allowed to look up artist information and that's where it will take the CD and look up online what is the artist's name what is the track names and what is the album information so let's just keep that set metadata we're going to add tagging it's all the fault so let's just go to cdrip so this is where it comes down to the best solution so burst burst is what you're going to do if you really don't care about any problems you just want to get it done and burst is also good if there's scratches on your CD and you just need to get the music off the CD burst will help you get through that but it will introduce artifacts and clicking and popping if you have a scratched CD if you have a fairly decent CD I recommend xld secure Ripper it is the more up-to-date solution for ripping okay so CD paranoia is a more outdated older version uh people used to choose that a long time ago so let's just go with xld secure Ripper and I'm just going to leave all the other settings the same as the default so what I'm going to do now is I'm just going to insert the disk you need to have a CD-ROM on your computer so open up your CD-ROM inject it and then you press the uh close button don't just push the tray in there okay now that the disc is in there we're going to file open audio CD and the funny thing about working on Macs is uh it automatically opens in iTunes which is a pain okay so I found the settings that you should change if you don't want Apple music to open when you insert a CD so when you insert a music CD it's set to open music by default you can just say ignore so let's do that so I'm going to close Apple music and I'm going to try to insert the C d one more time and see what happens if you ever have a problem ejecting your CD go to finder and go to your CD and click eject there okay so I got the CD ejected let's try to insert it again I think Apple music conflicts with xld so you don't want that opening up when you insert a CD let's open up xld let's reconfigure our settings so I had it on Flac options High and I'm going to set the output to be my rip folder now all the other settings were the same xld secure Ripper okay let's try to open that CD One More Time if it's the first time you've done this it's going to prompt you to access your volumes then you should hear the drive spinning up it's detecting the pre-gap which is all the gaps between the songs there you go so now you have the CD loaded simply click extract and it will go to this folder that you designated rip technically speaking you can create a new folder for each CD if you don't do that it'll thump it all to One Directory so let's just do that anyway and then open that and then you get a progress so you see how fast it's going if there's no scratches on the song you're gonna get a nice Speedy extraction like this one is going this is a fairly decently maintained CD if you get the older more scratched up CDs you can kind of get error correction going on so the CD will go a lot slower during the Rip but it'll correct the little errors as it can if it really gets stuck and you just can't get the song off either scrap the whole CD altogether if you don't want clicking and popping or like I said you can go to the burst mode and that's generally going to get through a lot of that okay when it's done ripping you're going to get a uh log file here and it tells you basically if there's any errors or anything like that so you know keep that if you're scrupulous and you can close that out I'm only doing one CD for this demo so I'm going to close out xld and let's just go and check out our files so you got Masters of Reality in there and you can play it a little sample to make sure it sounds good so that's that now what we could do is go through all your CDs rip them uh maybe in batches maybe you know however many you could fit on your hard drive comfortably so once you go through a bunch of CDs maybe 10 I don't know how many you want to rip at a time what I recommend doing is figuring out where you're going to store these so you know you need a NOS you need a server you need a big hard drive something like that that's going to store all your flag files once you identify where the files are going now it's time to organize them so for that I recommend a program called music brains Picard go ahead and download that this is available on Windows 2 I believe go ahead and copy that to your applications load up Picard and give it permission all right so now how this works is it's going to look up on a server all the information about your particular CD so what you're going to do is go add folder and then you can choose the root folder of all your CDs click open and then what it does is it finds your songs so this is unclustered files this is files that have not been organized yet so what we're going to do is let's go to preferences and go to file naming what I'm going to recommend doing is just so you know that files have been archived properly I would uh click move files when saving and I'm going to browse to a different directory than the music directory I'm going to create a new folder and I'm going to call it music library and I'm going to drag that to my home folder so this music library or whatever folder you want to call it will be the organized final folder that you can store your music in so click open then I think you're pretty much good with that so let's just say make it so so now what you do is select all the files in the unclustered files I only have a handful from one CD here but what I do is if it's a CD you can click scan and it'll look at the signature of this audio file and they should be able to find your file so let's click that all right so now what this did was match it with two separate CDs so music brains is a little funky sometimes it mismatches CDs so I've got one down here and I've got one up here so this one down here if you look at the metadata this says it's 12 inch vinyl so this is not a 12 inch vinyl this this is a CD so the one up here is I would just go with this it says total this is one total tracks is eight that looks like the right one which you can do is click on the one that's misidentified and literally drag it up to the one where it's supposed to be so Children of the Grave and put it up there there we go so now you'll see that this CD turned gold that means that it has all the songs found on it sometimes if you have trouble ripping you won't have all the songs on the CD so the star on it means it needs to be saved so let's go ahead and save this what that just did is save all these flak files with all this metadata and the images are loaded into it and it moved it to the folder where I told it to go so if you go to your home folder you'll see you have a Black Sabbath directory then a master of reality directory and then the FLAC file there that's just a brief overview of how you organize your files now from there it's up to you what do you want to do how do you want to play your music uh there's all different Audio Solutions for that you can use audovanna you could use a roon you could use Plex and you could use Clementine you could use all kinds of different media players to play this music but the nice thing is they're tagged they're organized and they have images associated with them so until next time thanks for liking thanks for subscribing click the notification Bell for updated content on audio and Technology stay tuned for the next video coming up soon [Music] there we go [Music]

Channel: Studio 3B

Views: 16,538

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Id: eHUOaKtveWk

Length: 11min 46sec (706 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 04 2023