I finally completed my CD ripping project and now have lossless copies of all my CDs (and the CD-audio layer of my SACDs) on my Mac.

As I mentioned before, the bulk of the work is tagging the music with correct metadata, locating cover art when the majority of my CD jewel cases and booklets are moldering in a cellar in France. (Amazon is helpful, specially now that it allows users to upload their own scans of cover art). Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes make short work of normalizing CDDB metadata like correcting the people who stuff the composer name in the title or vice versa.

I wrote my own scripts to tackle these common operations:

1. Strip numbers from titles. That’s the “Track #” field’s job. This script requires the Satimage AppleScript Regex OSAX plug-in to work.
2. Renumber a selection sequentially, so I can split a CD into its constituent parts and renumber them independently from each other or the original CD track order.
3. Strip prefix strings from titles.

This does not mean I am finished, however. About 3/4 of the way through, I realized iTunes is far from perfect at extracting CD audio. For various reasons related to how the Redbook CD audio format was designed without computers in mind, it is very hard to get a perfect, repeatable rip from one attempt to the other. iTunes has an “error-correction” option that seems not to have any effect. For reliable ripping, you have to use specialized programs like EAC on Windows and a cdparanoia-based program like Max on OS X. This complicates the workflow as Max is slightly buggy, and nowhere as good at managing metadata as iTunes is, so the one-step import in iTunes becomes a less streamlined affair:

1. Rip the CD to AIFF in Max
2. Import the AIFF into iTunes
3. Number the tracks (very important!) using my “Renumber tracks” script
4. Convert to Apple lossless
5. Copy the metadata from CDDB using Doug Adams’ Copy info tracks to tracks script.
6. Add album cover art and mention the track was ripped with Max
7. Backup to another hard drive!

The good thing is, now that I have collected the metadata and cover art, I can rerip trouble tracks with clicks or pops, and copy the metadata in one step using Doug’s action, so re-ripping won’t be as much of a hassle as the first time. The next step is to convert everything to FLAC so I have a non-proprietary library that works with SlimServer on my Solaris home server.

If you are not as obsessive about your music metadata as I am, the process will be much easier if you just use whatever CDDB supplies you. In any case, remember, just say No! to DRM-infested lossy-compressed tracks from the iTunes Music Store.