Gramophone

The Rough Guide to the Hifidelio

Organizing Import Tagging Maintenance

Ripping CDs

You can import a CD by hand or automatically depending on the import mode.


 

Auto import

This mode is great for bulk loading.

You  load a CD and after completion you do another one. Typically something you can do in between other activities.


It does have some drawbacks to.
If you convert you CDs to a compressed format you run the risk of overloading the system.
As a rule of the thump: 10 CDs in a row and wait until the last one is converted.
I once loaded 30 CDs in this way. As a result the system crashed and rebuilding it using the recovery CD was the only way to get it to work again.


An alternative is choosing WAV or AIFF so no compression. This speeds up matters substantially. As soon as you run out of disk space you might decide to start compressing.

 

Another drawback is that you are at the mercy of FreeDB . In case of pop music this won't be much of a problem probably. But in case of classical music there is hardly any resemblance between the album title and what you get from FreeDB .
So after bulk loading 30 CDs in a row it is quite a job to find them in the list of albums.
You can use the search list (date is last day) but the result is tracks (songs) so an endless list. Unfortunately you can't sort the list by date/time.
So it becomes pretty hard to find the newly imported CDs.

Manual import

If you put auto import off, you have to press import to load a CD.
The advantage is that you can ask for information first.
If you don't like the information as supplied by FreeDB  simply press Read CD-Info.
Often there are multiple entries in FreeDB  so you can choose the one you think most apt.
You might also edit the information before importing the CD.
This method gives you more control over the results a forehand at the expense of paying attention to each CD at the time.