Sorry for taking so long to respond to your comment. Sounds like you have a lot of work ahead of you. If your budget allows, I’d suggest you look into the digitization service I recommended above, Naxos Rip. I’m also sorry if you found this post vague…I’m afraid that that was a bit intentional. The fact is, like being an audiophile in the days before computers, there’s a lot of knowledge to acquire and this article was only intended as a primer to digging into things. Of course, much of that hi-fi knowledge/snobbery still applies if you’re pushing music into a stereo, but I think a knowledge of digital audio codecs is comparable to what a knowledge of phono cartridges or vibration isolation once was.

Really, there’s no right way to do all of this stuff. Since I wrote this, I’ve “gone Apple,” converted all my FLAC files to Apple’s lossless codec (which has since gone open source) and am using iTunes–the very things I recommended against above.

(As an aside, for users of iTunes on Macs, I recommend the small and beautifully designed player Ecoute, which plays your iTunes library in a way that I think is more browsable and elegant than the iTunes interface)

I’ve also been trying different ways to tag digitized albums with multiple artists. My point is, it’s really all about seeing what works for you and learning as much as you can.

I can’t provide you with step-by-step instructions, since I don’t think there are any. I can tell you what you need to do.

a) rip your CDs
b) tag & organize your files
e) reliably store and/or back-up your collection
e) push it over a home network to your stereo

A) This is as simple as downloading iTunes and starting to pop in CDs one-by-one. My suggestion (if you’re not shipping everything to Naxos Rip) is to use EAC if you’re on Windows or XLD if you’re on a MAC to rip CDs. You’ll find many guides for using these programs elsewhere, but I suggest you rip your CDs in a lossless format; FLAC or Apple Lossless.

B) Hopefully these programs can find the meta-data for you, but you’ll likely have to do a lot of manual tagging if you want everything to be uniform. MusicBrainz is an excellent and quickly growing database that you can access using Picard (Mac & Windows), but you’ll probably want Tag&Rename (for Windows) or MediaRage (for Mac) as well for manual work. All these programs take some time to get the hang of, but once you have it you can move quickly in them.

C,D) A and B is more than enough to get you started, since you have 2000 recordings to get through! You can wait to worry about storing and backing it up for a bit. But, generally, I’d recommend against using a USB external drive for anything other than backup (I discussed network drives in the post.) Why not start storing it locally–if you think your computer’s reliable.

E) How you push your music to your stereo depends on the audio standards you already have–are you listening to music on something that cost $30, or something that cost $5000? If you’re anywhere near the high end, I’d suggest a somewhat high end product like the Sonos system, the Logitech Transporter, or an Apple Airplay/a> compatible Marantz player. These will all do an excellent job of accessing your music over a home network. Cheaper options include just running an audio cable to your stereo, plugging an iPod into it, using one of the many cheaper network players on the market, or using something like the AirPort Express. You might just set up a dedicated computer next to your stereo.

Sorry, if I’m being just as vague as I was before, but I feel this should give you a starting place. I’d be happy to try to help you as your collection and system come together.

I am just someone who listens to chamber music with about 2,000 recordings. All I want to do is to take these from CD and put into a hard drive and use that as a substitute for a CD player as transport to a DAC. Is there a very simple guide that begins ‘first purchase an external hard drive’ and explains to me where I put the initial files and how I lay these out. I am afraid while I can read all the words in the article above, all the words in the guides you link to I am completely lost at the level of ‘what do I do,’ described as a linear sequence of actions and behaviors. Any directions to another simple instruction site would be of great assistance. [I don't care about covers or anything just getting the recordings so they are not a mess of separate movements and all are tagged with quartet, composer, opus or other relevant catalogue number, date of recording etc.]

I intentionally list composers as artists. I’ve always found it works better with jukebox software and ipods and that sort of thing. I prefer to put the performer(s) in the album name. If I were running a library where I had 1000 Beethoven recordings, I’d do it differently. But in a personal collection I think it’s just easier to have them all grouped together.

I also find Roman numerals to be a little clunky…especially when you’re looking at a list with hundreds of audio tracks. Numbers seem to streamline it.

Artist: Berlin Philharmonic, Abbado
Composer: Beethoven
Album: Beethoven; Symphony Nr. 9 in D minor Op. 125

Track 1: Symphony No.9 in D Minor, Op.125 “Chorale” – 1. Allegro ma non troppo, un poco maestoso
Track 2: Symphony No.9 in D Minor, Op.125 “Chorale” – 2. Molto vivace
Track 3: Symphony No.9 in D Minor, Op.125 “Chorale” – 3. Adagio molto e cantabile
Track 4: Symphony No.9 in D Minor, Op.125 “Chorale” – 4. Finale

i agree with your track listing except it should be in german form. I always add the composer last name to the album title so that they will sort out correctly. i mostly use the roman numerals if that’s the way they are in grove. i.e I,II, III, IV rather than 1, 2, 3, and 4

You raise a very good point…one of the many I have ignored above. I’ll admit that this is an area where my knowledge is limited, but I’ll give it a shot.

I don’t know what you used to rip your CD, but I think your issue may be more in ripping and encoding than in playback.

In the digital audio world, what you’re referring to is sometimes called “gapless playback” and is actually a common issue, particuarly among listeners of electronic or trance music. Some artists even go so far to please their audiophile fans by releasing elelctronic versions of there albums as one seamless audio file, rather than individual files for each track.

I think the gaps you hear come from two sources.

A) When audio is encoded into a lossy codec, the encoder will often pad the audio file with silence at the beginning and the end. A codec like MP3 neglects to write information into the file about how much padding has been added, making it impossible for a player to throw it out later. This is another advantage to encoding in a lossless codec.

You can read more on this here: http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Gapless_playback

B) When a CD is mastered, recording engineers add gaps at the beginning of each track (except for the first one). This silence isn’t actually in the audio file itself, but stored as meta-data that tells your CD player when to start playing each track. (CD players effectively count down to 0 from a negative number for the duration of these gaps.) This data can be read by computers and stored in something called a cue sheet. Here’s a selection from a sample cue sheet:

TRACK 01 AUDIO
INDEX 01 00:00:00
TRACK 02 AUDIO
INDEX 00 05:33:45
INDEX 01 05:34:55
TRACK 03 AUDIO
INDEX 00 10:22:12
INDEX 01 10:22:57

Obviously track 1 starts at 0 seconds. Track 2 starts at 5:33:45, but the audio of track two doesn’t actually start playing until 5:34:55, or INDEX 01. (Note that the last place is actually 1/75th of a second, not 1/100th.)

When we rip a CD, software automatically detects these gaps and, usally by default, appends them to the actual audio files. A program like iTunes doesn’t (to my knowledge) give you a lot of options here, but a program like Exact Audio Copy does. If you configure it properly, you can leave the gaps out, append them to the previous track (this is usally the default), or append them to the next track. You may want to rip your CD throwing the gaps out.

The source of this issue is because (most of us) prefer to rip out music so that 1 track=1 file, rather than single audio files containing entire discs, where it’s easy to exactly replicate the CD. Some audiophiles prefer this latter option, and it may be an easy way around your problem. These large files with their cue sheets, which can also contain meta-data like track names, so that when the file is loaded into a player (some handle this sort of thing better than others), the player will break it up and show you a proper track list. You actually don’t play the audio file itself, but rather the cue sheet which knows where to look for the audio file. But you’ll probably find this clumsy if the rest of your music has been ripped into seperate tracks–I know I do.

These pages explain this stuff in better detail, with helpful images and tutorials on CD ripping with EAC as well as generating cue sheets.

http://blowfish.be/eac/Rip/rip14-cuesheets.html#no14e

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=EAC_Gap_Settings

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=EAC_and_Cue_Sheets

I suppose my suggestion comes down to reading up on gaps and ripping with EAC (this is a great guide to follow) and try to re-rip it properly, throwing out gap information. But, if Windows Media Player works for you, by all means go with it.

This was with the 1951 William Kapell/Fritz Reiner: Robin Hood Dell Orch Rachmaninoff Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini, which RCA has divided into 25 separate tracks.

Since the iTunes rendition was entirely unlistenable, I then tried the same thing in Amarok. Instead of the same sort of pause between tracks, Amarok inserts a very audible blip between each of the attacca tracks.

I next tried importing this piece into Windows Media Player, which plays through all the tracks exactly as you would hear on a DVD player, with no pauses or blips.

I just wonder if you have not yet run into this problem of attacca with your Amarok.