Ripping CD's to SSD?
OK, so be patient here with me, I am an "old" 68 year old audiophile from the 1980’s dealing with new technology. I was away from the Audio Scene for 20 years until I came back in 2021. SO I’ve updated most of my equipment. One of those updates is an Aurender N200, which I got this April. I added a Samsung SSD drive to it and was thinking I may like to rip a few CD’s to it for the sake of comparison vs streaming Qobuz.
Please understand when ya all start mentioning file types and all that I am in the weeds. I am behind the tiems.
What I can tell you is i have a 10 year old Macbook Pro running OS 10.14.6 Mojave. I have the external Apple CD drive. How do i go about placing the CD into the drive, attaching a USB cable to the Aurender and getting the file loaded onto the Aurender Samsung drive? Do I need any special software? Dom i just stick the CD into the drive and the Aurender is found on my laptop and i select it as the location for the file. Like I said this is all so new to me, I want to learn. I’d like to see how i like this compared to listening through my CEC Tl1x. If the explanation gets technical you will lose me, go slow and walk me through it if you are willing. And thank you!
You can see my system in my profile. New speakers are on order to arrive soon!
OP,
I will be interested in hearing your findings. I own two Aurrender streamers, N100, and W20SE. In both cases I cannot hear a difference between a stored file and the streamed (same master / file). Often streaming sounds better because Qobuz has much of what I listen to in higher resolution files. |
Good advice here. Not sure why the OP is ripping to a usb flash drive when his stated intent was to rip to a Samsung HD. The first step to is to just rip to the Samsung HD. Just put a disc in the Apple Optical Drive and have both that and the Samsung attached via usb to the computer. The Aurender doesn’t need to be involved at this point. In system preferences for laptops there is a place to pick where you want the rips to end up, and designate the Samsung. The software package will ask you what file type-just pick FLAC. EAC and dbPoweramp both work well. Once the files are on the Samsung then connect that to the streamer. |
I am expecting that finding, I didn't buy a big SSD, only 2T. One thing I wanted to understand is if the ripped version sounds different will it be because of anything I have in my network? If so I can work further to improve it, if not then my network is up to snuff. Secondly I wanted to have the option to store some of my favorite music so no need to pull out the CD's and stick them in the transport. And I guess I'd like to learn more of this as digital playback is continuing to progress. I gave up on vinyl and sold all of it a few months ago. I am all digital now. For better or worse, it has always pleased me. Thank you every one.
@mahler123 I will give that a try, I will connect USB to my N200 from Macbook and see if the the SSD is recognized. My laptop doesn't have a ethernet connection, wi fi only so it's not discovering the N200. |
The Samsung drive referred here is an internal drive housed inside Aurender. So it does not have USB port. I would rip CD’s in WAV format. All other formats use some form of compression during ripping process. Once you have ripped files in your MAC hard drive, transfer them to Aurender folder, Music1. As long as your Aurender is on the same network, you can directly transfer files onto Music1 folder. That’s how I manage my downloads, they go straight to my Aurender Music1 folder from NativeDSD downloader. |
Welcome to digital world. To combat Wi-Fi, you need USB C to Ethernet dongle. This will speed up large file transfer. My laptop doesn’t have Ethernet port either, I use this dongle during my DSD downloads. Your ripped version may sound better possibly because of different master used on CD vs one being streamed and vice versa. I buy lot of Japanese XRCD’s and found them to be superior than most other versions including streaming. |
