But then users would complain that they can’t find the rip they just did. The rip would just pile up under “unnamed album” by “unnamed artist”. Better to have the rip not complete.
Antipodes goal here is to have their server act more like an appliance. Those who want to have greater control of outcomes have the power to do so by using the third party tool of their choice. I would much prefer that Antipodes focus their efforts on giving us a user friendly app that gives us the absolute best sound quality. I would be disappointed if they invested any effort in improving the ripper to satisfy the few individuals who can’t wait a few days for the free metadata service to be restored.
Good point. Hanged if you do, hanged if you don’t.
I have experience of using CdParanoia, with a Melco D100 USB Optical Disc Drive. This is suppose to be one of the best drives, for cd ripping. Well, to my ears, I could not tell a difference in rip quality. The same I find, as with Wav and Flac.
The only point I can say in defence of people who are, shall we say are disappointed, at the loss of cd ripping. Is Antipodes sell there products, with cd ripping as a feature of that product. If that service is not reliable, then Antipodes should seek a alternative. However, I believe a cost factor would have to be added.
Naim Audio had this problem with their internet radio stations supplier - Tune-in. There had been failures over the years, however what broke the camels back, was when the service went out one Xmas Eve, and was not rectified until the New Year. In this period of time, the updates from Tune-in about restoration of the service was deafening. Their viewpoint, was it is a public holiday, so go figure.
This attitude, did not go down well on the Naim forum, or with Naim itself. So Naim, instead of suck it up and make excuses, and every credit, took the whole internet radio station business away from Tune-in and brought it in house.
I hear you but I can’t agree because every CD will still get ripped eventually. These servers are music players primarily with CD ripping added as a convenience. If music can’t be played for some reason, then most certainly a server manufacturer should drop everything to get music playing again.
A while back it was mentioned that Antipodes has only 9 employees. According to this website, Naim has over 100 employees and they grew by 8% over the last year. So Naim added about 8 more workers - roughly as many people as Antipodes employs. Not really a fair comparison.
With only 9 workers, it might that actually no more than 3 or 4 are working on new product development. The rest are managing operations and supporting customers. Pivoting a single employee to work on CD ripping might be the equivalent of pulling a quarter of their workforce off of new product development. That could be quite impactful. I am sure my math is off here but I’m just trying to show why it is that smaller shops have to be more ruthless about prioritization. And yes this is what I do for a living.
I have never ripped with Antipodes. Every single one of my rips have been made to AIFF format to retain compatibility with Apple. Every single one of these rips is stored only on my NAS.
I pretty much stopped buying CDs years ago. I have the Sublime subscription level with Qobuz that gives me a nice discount on high res music. When an album is only available in redbook, I will then typically opt for purchasing a used CD from Amazon. Looking at my order history in Amazon, I have purchased only two CDs since 2019. I purchased my K30 in 2020. High res downloads from Qobuz tend to cost less and are more convenient to deal with than a CD.
I do tend to purchase a handful of SACDs each year. These get ripped to ISO using a Sony blu-ray player. The ISO is then extracted to AIFF with those files also copied up to my NAS.
One more thing I should mention. Qobuz considers 24/44.1 to be high res, so they are priced at a discount with Qobuz Sublime. I previously did comparisons to see if 24 bit over 16 bit matters and found a slight preference for 24 bit. This contributed to my decision to stop buying CDs. Those 24 bit files tend to be provided directly by the studios with them never mastered onto an optical disk. Avoiding a rip altogether can be worth obsessing over more than which ripper to use. Especially when Qobuz Sublime offers the 24 bit download at a price that’s more affordable than buying a CD.
