So you would like to digitise your CD collection? (Part 2)

In part 1 I described the sound system I'm configuring (So you would like to digitise your CD collection? (Part 1)) and in this part I'm going to show some decisions in the computer part, software,... Some of them can be wrong because I'm not an expert and, if you have knowledge about the topic I would be grateful for you advise.

I'm using two computers: one for the digitization part (I'm thinking that maybe in the future I will have problems with this: some computers don't include CD reader anymore; we'll hope that there will be some way to buy digital versions of the music).
This computer runs Linux (Fedora Workstation 41) at this moment and I'm not planning to install Windows on it.

The guy at the shop recommended me to use a lossless format, such as FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) and to pay attention to the encoding: it should be what they call 'bit perfect'. I thought this should be easy because you can read and copy the CDs bit by bit (at the end they contain digital information) but this is not the case (as far as I understand the process now) and he recommended me two programs:

• Exact Audio Copy
• dBpoweramp Music Converter

Unfortunately, none of them runs on Linux so I had to look for an alternative.
My finding was:

• Whipper, which according to the webpage 'is a Python 3 (3.6+) CD-DA ripper based on the morituri project (CDDA ripper for *nix systems aiming for accuracy over speed).' ... '

It depends on some well-know old suspects: cd-paranoia, cdrao, ...

The use is easy: you just need to put the CD on the reader and issue some command such as: whipper cd rip -C file -k, where:

• -C option is to get the cover art, if available, and
• -k option means 'continue ripping further tracks instead of giving up if a track can't be ripped' (in case the CD is damaged).

For the names of de disc, tracks, artists, and so on it relies on the MusicBrainz service (and they only use this service, as a design choice).
It is a wonderful system that knows about most of your records but it is a bit uncomfortable when you have a record they don't know. There can be several situations:

• They have the same record with a different identifier (local editions, reissues, previous issues, ...).
• They have the same recording, but with a different configuration.
• They don't have your record, but they have something similar (you need to use the available information, add the new one, ...)

When you need to get information about some recording I've found useful another service, which is Discogs, a marketplace for buying and selling music and also for keeping a record of your collection.

Unfortunately, whipper relies on the first one to get the record information so you'll have to add the information there (or to your own files, we'll talk later about this) in order to have your CDs nicely organized (unless you are willing to have your filesystems with things such as Unknown Artist - pxZo0oSkApg3XUZAroksJSWxAjk- and 01. Unknown Artist - Unknown Track 1.flac.

There are other problems, due to the collaborative way of including data: you will end having discs with:

• 'Johan Sebastian Bach'
• 'J.S. Bach', or even
• 'Gustav Leonhardt, La Petite Bande, Tölzer Knabenchor'

Moreover, you'll have boxes of several discs as parts of bigger collections (so you'll have some music with two discs, numbered 5 and 6), or sets of discs as separated thinks (part 1, 2 and 3 that probably your player does not recognize as a unit).

Everithing can be improved (or I hope so) and you have a very good starting point for working.

The conversion process is slow (less than playing the record, anyway, disc by disc) and the system needs some configuration (Getting Started).

My second computer is a Raspberry Pi 5 8Gb that I bought for some pet projects and which is most of the time in idle state. I got a SanDisk Extreme PRO Portable SSD - 1 TB (yes, just before Raspberry Pi started selling their own solution) and some powerd USB4 Hub to guarantee the power for the disk (independent from the Raspberry Pi).

In the third part we will explain the listening part, once we presented the sound system, the proposed way to extract the music from my CDs' collecio.