The CD Ripping Adventure: Past to Present

 The Before Times

Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was in high school, CDs were still expensive, and I didn't really have many.  Those I did have were mostly CD ROMs, or CDs people have me, freebies, etc.  

I had an Atari ST and later Atari TT computer, with a "Megafile" drive.  These came in 30 and 60 MB sizes, though I am not sure which I had.  Note: I said MB as in megabytes, not GB or TB.

At one point I got an external CD drive and tried to rip an audio CD.  I was astonished to see that a single track could take up 10s of megabytes!

For example, a 3 minute song would be almost 32 MB, which would be too big to even fit on the Megafile 30.  But there was a work-around, down-sampling.  You could convert the CD to mono as you ripped it, which would reduce the file size to 16 MB!  Still a huge chunk of your hard drive - but you could also lower the sampling rate from 44khz to 22khz, and that file is not only 8 MB.  Finally, you could convert the bit depth from 16 bit to 8 bit, and now it's down to 4 MB!  Magic, right?  Well, it sounded pretty bad, but what else can you do?  At least you could have a song or two on your hard drive.  

Once mp3 (and later Sony's ATRAC, and MP3 Pro, and AAC, and Ogg, etc.) became popular, some people started to use that - but there was a problem with my Atari TT.  It simply didn't have the horsepower to decode the files in realtime.  There was a workaround, though, you could rip the file and convert it to mp3, and then when you wanted to listen to it, you could simply convert it back to a PCM file "offline".  That is, you could use mpg123 or similar to convert the mp3 back to a WAV file, and then after 10 or 15 minutes when it finished, you could listen to your music.  When you got tired of that song, you could delete it to save space.  

I bought an audio CD player at some point.  I remember them having a special feature of 30 seconds of buffer to prevent skipping when you moved the CD player.  Ah, the bad old days.  

The College Years

I moved to Philadelphia (America) for college, and brought my somewhat antiquated Atari TT, but also bought a Powerbook 540c.  Hard disks started to be measured in gigabytes instead of megabytes, but a "huge" 40 disk was still not cheap.  

The PowerPC and 486 already out, and those could play mp3 files in realtime - but I didn't have one.  

I liked music though, and started to collect CDs.  Remember the Zune, the Creative audio player, and all those really bad "mp3 players"?  Yeah, I skipped all those.  That's because I just got a minidisc player instead.  I only remember it was a red colored Sony, that took a rechargable gumstick battery, but had a bolt-on thing to accept a AA or AAA battery as well.  The sound quality was, in a word, fantastic.  

I bought a Discman CD player, and an optical cable, which let me record from CD to MD losslessly.  Well, sort-of.  The transfer was lossless, but the MD players used Sony's ATRAC compression.  To my ears, it sounded a lot better than the MP3 files of the day, but that could also have been the amp or earphones.  

Although I lived in Philadelphia, I still came back to Japan for winter break most years, and stocked up on CDs.  If there a new release I *really* wanted, I would buy that new at full price.  Since that would cost a pretty penny, I could only accord 1 or maybe 2 CDs.  

But... they also had rental CDs.   Did I mention that copying rental CDs for personal use is completely legal in Japan?  Yes.  In fact, they would often ask you at checkout "Would you like some Blank MDs to go with that?", the same way they ask if you want fries at a fast food place.  The newest released wouldn't become rentals for a while, so I could just make a list of things to check next year.  

Also, rental shops like Tsutaya stock up on CDs when something popular first hits rental, but sell them off over time or once they start to become too worn out.  These battered rental CDs are sold at bargain basement prices just like used rental skis at the slopes.  If I can rent or buy for nearly the same price, I may as well buy, right?

So every year I would come home with a pile of CDs and start ripping.  First, I have to say that, at the time, Yamaha CD drives were by the best at ripping CDs, and so I bought a SCSI Yamaha CD drive and had very few problems.  

And I also bought some CDs in the US (not many, mind you).  For example, the Atari Tempest 2000 CD, and a bunch of Orbital CDs like "The Box".  

I was running mainly Linux (and Solaris) at the time, and HDDs started to become a bit larger, but storing everything as WAV seemed excessive.  Even FLAC only cut the size in half, if that.  I mainly used OGG Vorbis compression.  

Some may ask "What about napster?  What about bittorrent?"  Well, to be honest, my school had something better - just browse the network from a Mac, and everyone had folders labeled things like "Share the wealth" that had tons of mucis, videos, etc.  

Aside from ethical and legal implications, though, the quality and consistency was just aweful.  Some files would be MP3, some would be MP3 Pro or some other form of MP3, and certain audio players would play some types of files, but not others.  Some were CBR, some were VBR, some were very low bitrates and sounded very... compressed, while others sounded better.  Then there was the tagging.  Trying to sort by artist, search for a song, etc., was a true nightmare.  You might have 10 copied of the same songs and not notice it, becuase you had lots of variations like "The Crystal Method", "Crystal methods"  "the CRystal mEthod", etc.  

I did not have a $1000 audio system, in fact I remember I had a sony SRS computer speaker system - but I didn't want to listen to badly distorted audio, nor did I want to sort though all the garbage and retag every file.  If I am going to spend my time doing that, I may as well spend my time ripping CDs, right?  

I should add that the ability to purchase songs online may have been available by this time, but I liked owning the CDs so I could re-rip if needed.  iTunes did not originally allow you to re-download files (not to mention it didn't work on Linux).  

Back to the Future - Part 1

I always wanted a decent unix laptop, and once Apple came out with OS X, I started to think "if only there was a thin and light version of the macbook that ran OS X" - and then the Macbook Air was released.  

Problem was - no support for OGG (or FLAC) in iTunes.  No problem, I could just re-rip most of the CDs I had, and re-rent the ones I only had on MD.  For ones I had in FLAC, I could just convert them to AAC without re-ripping.  

A waste of time and energy, I know, but for some odd reason I actually wanted to use iTunes at the time.  (Airport Express?)

I moved to Tokyo, and bought a Mac Mini, and this fun continued, but at least I was near Tsutaya now!  

Hard drives were measured in hungreds of GB, or TB now, so I could even rip DVDs if I wanted - but how many times are you going to watch the same TV show?

I didn't have the best audio equipment anyway - a cheap Yamaha speaker, and some $50 sony headphones.  

Back to the Future - Part II

Apple slowly drifted into their machines becoming non-repairable, non-expandable, non-upgradable, hermetically sealed giant iPads, and I had enough of it.  Upgrading from one laptop to another meant re-buying all of the expensive SSD and RAM because they couldn't be swapped, and then I had a $5k laptop die on me because the memory failed.  That meant a $800 motherboard replacement instead of just swapping out a RAM stick.  I had enough and switched back to Linux (on a Framework Laptop and Intel NUC).  

One of the first things I did was to inventory my old music collections, and identify what was missing in FLAC format.  Now HDDs are typically measured in TB (or tens of TB), and even SSDs are getting there.  

I could rent CDs, but  I no longer had the Mac Mini with the CD drive, and I discovered that the Apple "super CD" drive I had was broken.  (It wouldn't even work on my friend's Mac).  

So I went to the store (Yodobashi) and bought the cheapest USB3 CD drive I could find.  It turned out to be a DVD drive without the proper firmware to read video DVDs.  Erm.. interesting.  It's a Logitec drive, and honestly it does an okay job for the price bracket, though I will be upgrading it soon to a drive better suited for the job.  

I might also mention:  A lot of people in Japan don't have computers, and so the CD rental stores will also actually rent you a CD ripper device that you can use to rip to your iPhone or Android phone.  It will rip, convert, and tag for you automatically.  They also sell these devices in the electronic stores.  But... they are more expensive than the normal CD drives, and I am not even sure that the pickup mechanisms or drive quality is actually any better.  

I bought a pair of high end IEMs (earphones) and a Walkman music player, which is so much better sound than anything else I have ever had, and so I have accellerated collecting old tracks I had, old tracks I didn't have, and a little bit of new stuff.  Having better equipment is a bit of a double-edges sword, as it allows you to hear defects and distortion better too.  

I still buy and rent CDs, because it's often still the best and cheapest way to get the songs I want in lossless format.  For example,  I wanted to get a copy of an old "PiNE AM" CD I had, but none of the online music stores had it, and I couldn't find the CD.  I was able to find a used copy of it on Merucari or Yahoo auctions easily, though.  Likewise, I was looking for a "Verbal" CD that I could only find on used sites.  

Even mora.jp doesn't have everything in lossless format.  e-onkyo often does, but they still don't have everything, and can be quite expensive.  I don't need everything in 192khz/24bit, but I do want it in lossless for future proofing and quality reasons.   So buying physical CDs is still my main way to get music for now and the forseeable future.  

What about streaming?  Well let's see.  I don't want to have a to pay a monthly fee just to listen to my music.  I also don't want internet to be mandatory.  I actually use YouTube music for when I am jogging or riding bike, and it's... fine, but for serious listening it's pretty bad.  (Example: Listed to "Voices" on YouTube, and then download the same track from mora.jp and listen again.  If you are using descent equipment, the difference is clear).

I'm not honestly that much of a super snob about music - I treat it like I treat coffee.  I love espresso made from freshly roasted and ground italian beans.  That doesn't mean I won't drink coffee from Dotour or Jonathan's though.  Sometimes you just want coffee, and anything's good enough.  Other times you want to sit down and enjoy the flavor in peace.  

Likewise, sometimes I just want background music while I'm working, or exercising, or even vacuuming.  Those times, having super high quality lossless files is obviously not going to help much over streaming YouTube, but than again, it won't hurt either.  

To me renting CDs is actually a very similar business model to streaming.  Since ripping rented CDs is legal, that means that the rental price has that factored in, and I have to believe that most people renting them these days are doing it for purposes of ripping.  

I don't mind streaming TV shows, because most of the time, I  am not likely to want to watch the same show many times.  I do listen to the same song lots of times.  

Perhaps in 10 years, they will stop selling CDs, and we'll be forced to choose between purchasing or streaming.  I'll probably still choose to purchase then.  I've already heard of songs disappearing from streaming sites (and movies TV series disappearing from video streaming sites).