Digitising my CD collection and stopping Apple Music from ruining it…

[Cassandle]

Hi, hoping this is the right place to ask for advice with this…

I have a number of CDs that I want to rip to lossless so that 1) I have a digital copy, 2) I can listen to them on Apple Music. I know that Apple “matches” your music to what’s in their servers, but I‘ve found the results to be… mixed at best.

(For example, I have the Mono remasters of The Beatles back-catalogue, and Apple Music has swapped out many tracks for stereo versions, and in some cases greyed out songs that I ACTUALLY OWN so I can’t play them, or for other artists I find that albums get split into 2 or more versions making it impossible to listen to the whole album in sequence)

I have an M1 Mac Mini with a 256GB internal SSD. So I know that I need a CD drive and some external storage for saving the files.

I’m looking for advice on:

• A CD drive I can use - I’m assuming I don’t need anything fancy?
• Is there any software I need to use?
• How do I stop Apple Music changing my music? Is there stuff I can do to the metadata so that I can listen on Apple Music without the issues I listed above?

I’m not keen on leaving Apple Music, and not especially keen on having my library in multiple places, but if it was necessary to keep my CD versions out of Apple Music and played from a different app then I’d do that.

I also have a few albums in FLAC but Macs don’t seem to like that format. Is there any way to convert to ALAC, or am I going to have to rip them again?

 

[MisterSavage]

• A CD drive I can use - I’m assuming I don’t need anything fancy?

Apple still sells the superdrive.

Apple USB SuperDrive

Apple USB SuperDrive lets you install software on your Mac and play & burn both CDs and DVDs. Get fast, free shipping when you shop online.

www.apple.com

• Is there any software I need to use?

I'm just using Apple Music but I hit a nasty bug after a crash where it won't show my album artwork when I'm playing albums I bought or ripped after the crash happened.

• How do I stop Apple Music changing my music? Is there stuff I can do to the metadata so that I can listen on Apple Music without the issues I listed above?

I think you'll be fine if you just turn off "automatically update artwork for imported songs" under advanced settings.

 

[BrianBaughn]

I don't think there's a way to keep Apple Music from screwing up things like that. It's probably in the user agreement…I dunno. It's the cost users pay. It's been happening since before the Apple Music subscription service was a thing…with "iTunes Match" or whatever it was called.

I completely bailed on having my own copies of music if Apple has versions that might (and often do) get mixed up.

Personally, I don't necessarily want to hear the 2017 remaster of whatever instead of the original version. Now the originals are gone in a LOT of cases.

But the service is WAY cheap for what you get…and I like the fact that I can add stuff they don't have and listen to via my iPhone and other devices. I don't use Apple Music much at all and it still seems inexpensive.

Before iTunes Match I was streaming my personal library from my own computer to the iPhone using some software I don't remember. I think you can do the same thing with Plex these days.

 

[BrianBaughn]

Probably many apps to convert FLAC to Apple Lossless. The xACT app has been around a long time.

http://xact.scottcbrown.org/

 

[MajorFubar]

Any USB drive will do. The trick is to take proactive ownership of the ripping / tagging and stop relying on automatics / matching. Such as, turn off the option that says 'let Music keep my folder organised'. Make sure you populate the Album Artist field. Find or scan your own album art. When ripping albums spread across multiple CDs, make sure the album titles are EXACTLY the same and the disc numbers are correct, or else Music won't recognise them as the same album. Make sure compilation albums have their tickbox ticked.

TLDR just be proactive about getting the tagging correct and all will be well. I have always done this and have zero issues in 13+ years. The people who moan that iTunes / Music has ruined their music library are the people who don't know how to take proactive control.

 

[organicCPU]

Recent optical ASUS drives are doing quite a good job. For most of them, you can find drive offsets in the AccurateRip database. Any other CD drive that you can find in that database will probably work and those that you can't find there should be tested, if they'll have a constant drive offset or not.

For digitizing your CD collection, I suggest to use XLD (X Lossless Decoder) with AccurateRip enabled and a decent configuration. Personally I always rip to MP3, ALAC, FLAC, AIFF and WAV to make sure I never need to do it again. I also use to write a cue and a log file. For CDs that are not known by the database, I use MusicBrainz Picard to fetch similar recordings or to contribute completely unknown albums, covers, etc. For some metadata editing I use kid3. xACT is really good for converting already digitized audio to other formats.

Cover and booklet scanning is done with an old flatbed scanner, Hugin for stitching large sized booklets and Serif Affinity Photo for cleaning scans up.

I don´t use Apple iTunes or Music anymore, but changed them for Musique. I wish there were better music players, more similar to "early" iTunes versions, but I stopped asking myself why Apple discontinues great apps without giving us any better alternatives.

Besides making a backup of everything on HDDs, I like to put the whole music collection in ALAC on a 1TB SD card.