Ripping Hidden Tracks and Partial Tracks From CDs

Normally when you rip a CD, you just rip whole tracks or albums. However, there are times when you might want to be a bit more selective about which bits of a track you rip. CDs aren't always mastered as "one song per track", hidden tracks and other playback inconsistencies don't really fit well with the "one song, one file" digital music approach.

So you might want to "fix" your CDs as you rip them to:

1. Save space - if you're storing at a constant bitrate, silence costs as much as music (not really a problem with variable bitrates), hidden tracks that you never listen to also don't have to live inside the final track and can be left off your iPod
2. Make playback easier by creating a "one track one song" version
3. Fix issues where song intros end up on previous tracks

This isn't an easy thing to do, it thankfully isn't an issue on most CDs, but if you absolutely want perfection from your digital music library...

Hidden Tracks

The most obvious scenario is the often-used "hidden track" at the end of some CDs. Nirvana's Nevermind is a classic example - the final 20-minute track contains not just the final 4-minute song ("Something In The Way"), but a long period of silence followed before the final droning noise of "Endless Nameless". So rather than ripping as-is, you might want to hack out the silence and have your ripped copy be 13 songs, with the "hidden" track not-so-hidden and the track times slightly more representative of what's going on.

Mastering Issues

Sometimes CDs play with where the index markers go (ever seen those negative timers?) so the intro to one song appears at the end of the previous track (random example: my two pressings of Iron Maiden's "Powerslave" disagree over which CD track the intro to the title track belongs in). Occasionally, CDs just make mistakes. It's nice to have the option of fixing things so they work better on a digital music jukebox.

Fixes

Thankfully, you don't have to live with your ripping software's initial assessment of how a CD is structured (and anyway, a CD is just a continuous piece of music with a load of index markers for where the tracks start and end). Listed below are a couple of strategies for fixing things, although you will have to make a note of the times of where stuff starts and ends if you want to tweak tracks using these approaches.

Partial Rips - Telling The Ripping Where The Tracks Are

One of CDex's killer features is the "extract partial track" option. You might have to do some finding of files and re-tagging them afterwards (files tend to get dumped, un-numbered, outside the artist/album folder you normally rip to), but you can bring up the "extract partial track" option, set where you want the track to start and end (which can be somewhere in another track!), and then go rip.

EAC has a similar "copy range" feature - see this post on EAC.

Audio Editing

You can always use an audio editing program (I recommend Audacity) to glue together or separate out tracks. You might have to do your editing with WAVs (in which case you'll have to re-tag afterwards). This is not really an option if you're ripping direct to MP3 (you'll be compressing, uncompressing for edit then re-compressing), but if you do keep a lossless copy around, there's no problem trimming things. You can always take those FLACs, edit them and re-save, and not lose any quality.

Ripping And Rocking With EAC

OK, I go on and on about using a decent ripping package for turning all those CDs into digital files for your music library, streamer, portable player etc, and I'm sure that just about everyone takes one look, gets scared and runs back to the safety of using iTunes to turn CDs into MP3s. So here's the thing: using a decent ripper isn't hard. Or it shouldn't be. So here's my quick guide to setting up and using EAC for ripping CDs.

Quick note: this post was mostly written with EAC version 0.99. I'll update for new features in 1.0beta1, such as the new artwork downloader, when I have time.

Setup

First thing, go get EAC from http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/. Install it (make sure you install the FLAC component too, do a full install and you should be fine), run it, go through the setup wizard - accepting the defaults should be fine, although when it asks you for formats, pick FLAC rather than MP3/WMA. Some of the FLAC encoding level and filename options, we'll set later, but for now defaults will do (it's lossless, you can always re-convert, and post-rip tagging is a doddle). You also need to give your email address in return for access to the tagging database.

Options

Some of the settings you'll want to tweak...

Tools: "Do not open external compressor" - do you want a DOS window showing the FLAC compression happening?

Filename: use naming scheme "%D\%C\%N - %T"

Directories: set directory to whatever space you've set aside for your FLAC files eg. "music\flacTunes".

Ripping

The process of ripping a CD is quite simple. Fire up EAC, bung in a CD, hit ALT-G to query the freedb database and get the tagging info - if you get multiple entries, select one, you can always re-query if it looks wrong. You'll also get prompted for an album cover art search (medium sizes are probably fine) - hover over to preview, select/highlight the best and hit the big "save with EAC" button. Images are saved as "folder.jpg" in the album folder.

If the CD wasn't found, or there are tagging errors, enter/fix the info (double-click on a track title to edit), but you can always fix the tags later. Also note the "first track number" option, very useful for binding two-disc sets together into a single album (you'll also want to hack the "disc two" out of the album title).

Hit SHIFT-F5 to start ripping (if no directory set in options, it'll prompt you for one). This can take a while, EAC is pretty persistent and will try its best to get an accurate rip. When it's all done, you'll get a success/error report.

You can even watch the progress as the files get converted and written - temporary WAV and FLAC files get written along the way.

The Next Step

With your CD now in FLAC, you have options. Save it to your library for streaming. Convert to some other format (eg. MP3).

And then you can start really playing with EAC...

More Options

EAC has tons of options, this post just covers the basics.

For advanced drive configuration, you'll need a good, unscratched CD for EAC to do a test rip with (yes, this software actually tweaks itself for your CD/DVD drive), probably best to pick a nice long 70-minute CD (don't worry, it won't take nearly that long to do the test rip).

External Compression Options

Under EAC->Compression Options->External Compression, I have the following set:
Use external program for compression
Use file extension ".flac"
Program "C:\Program Files\Exact Audio Copy\FLAC\FLAC.EXE"
Additional command line options: -8 -V -T "ARTIST=%a" -T "TITLE=%t" -T "ALBUM=%g" -T "DATE=%y" -T "TRACKNUMBER=%n" -T "GENRE=%m" -T "COMMENT=%e" %s -o %d
Bitrate: 768kbps, high quality
Delete wav after compression
Check for external programs return code

Copy Range Feature

When the CD doesn't allocate the tracks exactly as you need, whether it's those pesky hidden tracks or strangely-placed index markers, you can fix things using the "Copy Range" feature to move where the CD tracks start/end or split tracks up.

The first thing to find out where your tracks start and end. If you can get exact CD block positions from a ripping log, great, otherwise at least note the times. Do "Action->Copy Range->Compressed" to start a partial track rip. In the dialogue, use the sliders and "snap track" to get a rough start/end position, fine tune with cursor left/right, or enter the block position directly. Once you've set the start and end positions, hit "OK" and the track rips.

Note that the file is saved outside of the normal album folder (defaults to the root of your music ripping directory) so you'll have to do some file moving afterwards. Name the file with standard "01 - Trackname.flac" scheme, and correct the tags afterwards (track number and name may default to whatever track was selected when you started the partial ripping.

For more in-depth details, see this guide.

Ripping CDs For Home Servers And Portable Players

CDs are awesome. They sound great. They have artwork and booklets and occasionally fancy packaging. They can hold up to 100 tracks or 78 minutes. They take up shelf space. They need to be loaded into a machine if you want to play a song off them... er, OK, CDs were awesome, a digital music library of thousands of tracks that can be played as whole albums, single tracks, playlists etc. is more awesome.

Many people have made the switch from CD to a flexible digital library and traded quality for the convenience of inferior formats like MP3. You don't have to. You can have that nice fat bitrate lossless CD quality with all the convenience of a 10000-track CD jukebox. But first you have to rip those CDs...

So you want get that music off CD into digital format. The plan is to only do this once. Ever. So the key question is:

"Do you want it fast or do you want it good?"

If you just want any old quality of rip, use iTunes, Windows Media Player, etc. If you have an expensive CD/DVD ROM drive, a shiny new CD and a bit of luck, it'll rip fine. The problem is, something like iTunes will just sprint through a CD regardless, and if it picks up any errors, well you might just hear them when you play it back. CDs aren't perfect and don't have the best built-in error checking, and it takes care or fancy hardware to reproduce them exactly.

If you want this to be the only time you ever rip this CD, ever, consider a slower error-checking rip. CDex is good, DBPowerAmp or acknowleged leader EAC are better. You're looking at 20 minutes a CD, but a good chance of perfect rips. EAC will do a couple of things to get good rips - read and re-read (extremely slowly if necessary) every bit of data on your CD, and then compare that to a crowd-sourced database to determine whether there are any errors on your copy of the CD.

So you have a CD/DVD-ROM drive and a stack of CDs just waiting to be ripped. If you have a laptop (or when you realise some CDs just won't work well on your current drive) you might also want to look at getting an external CD drive or getting that old tower out of storage instead of just relying on that one drive. For major bulk ripping sessions, start with a pile of CDs, set several drives going and burn through your collection.

So basically, you fire up your ripping software, feed it a CD, get it to pick up the tagging information, then start ripping and come back when its done. The best format for filenaming is a "Music\Artist\Album" folder structure, tracks named and numbered "01 - Track Name" for sorting.

If your library software needs a playlist for each album (most don't), make sure you spit out a ".m3u" file at this point.

Some rippers, such as EAC (think DBPowerAmp too) can grab the artwork as part of the tagging process, saving you some work later.

Digital Music: Building A Library From CDs

OK, these days, most people don't buy CDs. Hell, most people can't even spell "CDs" (there's no apostrophe, kids). But CDs are still almost always the only way to get high-quality lossless music.

So this guide assumes you want to build a flexible digital music library from existing and continued CD purchases. Of course, you'll want all that music to be correctly "tagged" so you can find things later.

These notes deal with ripping high-quality lossless - I'm also going to assume that you'll want not only the lossless version to listen to in the house, but the option of a compressed copy on your MP3 player. Any library is going to contain stuff from a few different sources, so improvise for any non-CD formats - if you're starting with MP3 (eg. iTunes store purchases), skip right to the last section. Likewise, skip the CD ripping part for anything you can get in a lossless format. And if you want to go straight from CD to MP3, remember that choice is final and can only be reversed by re-ripping the CD.

I've noted the tools I use, but the process is the important thing here (and some of these stages are optional). Other posts may expand on setting up the various bits of software listed (look for the links), failing that you're going to have to do a bit of searching. Sorry.

If this all seems a bit much, don't panic. Once the tools are installed and setup, it's a fairly simple process to stuff a CD in, press a couple of buttons, then leave the computer to do all the work. It's worth noting that even the most basic "use iTunes to rip CDs to MP3" solution does the ripping (to lossless), tagging, and "creating MP3 version" stages. But those intermediate lossless files are destroyed.

A Day In The Life Of A CD

1. The Ripping
   
   First thing to do is get that music off CD into a digital format. I cover this process in this post. Depending on what you use, you may end up fixing tags and adding artwork at this point.
   
   My Solution: EAC for ripping (I have a couple of drives I can use in case of problem CDs), freedb tagging info, and on those rare occasions where I can't get track info, I fire up iTunes and copy-and-paste the track names (but still rip with EAC). Oh, and EAC can grab artwork too.
   
   
   
2. The Tagging (Optional)
   
   If your disc wasn't found in the database, or whoever put it there spelt a track title wrong and you've only noticed now, or you want to merge two-disc sets into one long album (CDex does this with its wonderful track offset option, EAC has a similar "first track number" option), you'll need to edit the tags with something like Foobar.
   
   My Solution: Foobar2000 (but I don't like the way it won't mirror tagging info changes in filenames, need to find something better).
   
   
   
3. The Cover Art (Optional)
   
   If you didn't get artwork while you were ripping, grab some artwork using something like Album Art Downloader. I'd recommend getting your artwork at at least 500x500 if you can. Safe bet is to save the artwork as "Folder.jpg" in the same folder as the album tracks. Check with your library software for exact size limits and filename requirements. Getting the artwork is something you can do later or grab several covers at once. Watch for auto-tagging programs, they don't always get the best (or even correct) artwork.
   
   My Solution: Album Art Downloader, just search for artist/title, pick the best match and drag from search results into album folder to save. Files saved as "Folder.jpg", up to 600x600.
   
   
   
4. Feeding The Library
   
   OK, now you have a digital version of the CD and the front cover.
   
   Move/copy the ripped music plus artwork to its new home on your music server (you could probably even automate this bit), press whatever buttons you need to re-scan and add it to your library, assuming your music server doesn't do this automatically (Sonos allows you to schedule this). If you're ripping lossless, you'll fill up a hard drive quickly, so do any housekeeping you need to and clean up those temp files.
   
   My Solution: copy to a "Shared Music/FlacTunes" folder on my NAS, use "Update Music Index" option to get Sonos to recognise new stuff, keep the last few weeks of rips backed up on my laptop until properly backed up.
   
   
   
5. The MP3/Portable Version (Optional)
   
   If you're going the lossless route, you probably also want a portable copy, so convert those FLACs to MP3 etc. This is a big topic. I use iTunesEncoder and my own custom scripts to get to 160kpbs AAC, but there's so many options. And if you screw it up or want to change format or bitrate in a couple of years, well you do have those master lossless files, and your PC will be happy to repeat the conversion. And for the artwork, well iTunes will find artwork sometimes, otherwise, just use the JPEG you grabbed earlier.
   
   My Solution: 160kpbs AAC managed by iTunes. I use FLAC and iTunesEncoder on the command line to do the conversion (uses iTunes' internal AAC encoder) and my own custom scripts/software to find, convert and import anything I copy into a temp "flacDrop" folder (FLAC to WAV to AAC).
   
   My Alternative Solution: 192kpbs MP3 converted by Foobar. Open Foobar, drag in the FLAC folders/files to be converted, select all and hit "convert", saving in an "itunes import" folder. Then open iTunes and use the "file->add folder to library" to import. More on Foobar here.
   
   
   
6. The Shelf
   
   Now your CDs can gather dust on the shelf, to be visited only when you want to laugh at the band's 80s haircuts in the photos in the booklet. Unless you forget to do...
   
   
   
7. The Backup
   
   Remember to take backups. Seriously, remember the backups! Or just live in the belief that your hard drive will never fail (millions of people do, some of them are even lucky). A USB hard drive is cheap. Re-ripping CDs is tedious, re-buying downloads is expensive. You choose.