Archiving my old CDs

2026-10-08

start and config

I've attempted this a few times but never found a workflow that "stuck". lets try again.

for accurate digitizing, "whipper" seems recommended. arch packages it.

after installing whipper and maybe picard, first thing we need is to rip a CD and see if whipper confirms it as a correct rip. To do that whipper wants the offset for our specific CD drive.

Note / Todo: whipper seems to not be able to write cover art into the file because the "pillow" module isn't available.

After running "whipper offset find" it claims my Verbatim usb-c portable cd drive has an offset of 6. it also prints some "found 3 Q sub-channels with CRC errors" but apparently that is OK, sub-channels aren't the actual audio and the audio has stronger error correction.

Once that's done (whipper saves it in .config/whipper/whipper.conf) i do a quick "whipper drive analyze" to find the cache behaviour - apparently "defeats_cache = True" for my drive. this is also saved in the config.

get the music off the disc

Then we try to rip it. in my homedir i made a ~/whipper/ dir with "out" and "work" directories. we try to build a command (thanks whipper cd rip --help):

whipper -c false cd rip \
--output-directory "~/whipper/out" \
--working-directory "~/whipper/work" \
--cover-art complete \
--disc-template "%A/%d/%A - %D" \
--track-template "%A/%d/%t %n"

First issue was that all the songs were put into the out/ directory. to make it use a folder structure we like, we can set the templates with slashes in them. make sure to set the templates for BOTH disc and track.

also, to stop the error message that pops up when it tries to auto-close the drive, i added "whipper -c false" to the start.

Unrecognized album by whipper

At the first disk Whipper didn't correctly identify, i decided to make some changes: Keep track numbers, do embed album art (only the front) into files for portability. also i think NOT moving the files is better - keep picard optional, but still allow rsync to pick up anything we ripped and upload it to the storage server.

While ripping i filled the musicbrainz database (you're welcome). To get the metadata into my files:

• get the URL of the specific album in musicbrainz (now populated)
• put it into the search bar top right of picard
• this will create the entry on the right pane
• pull the files into that entry (hopefully with track numbers they get auto added)
• save. picard will move the files.

rsync when metadata is ok

To rsync them once a new disk is ripped:

rsync -zaP ~/whipper/out/* targetserver:/share/path/to/original-rips/

further learns

out of like 10 cd's only 2 had "multiple releases found", and in both cases the releases are practically identical and the first / default choice would have been the correct one. i've removed "--prompt".

the portable disk drive i have is usb-c, but funnily enough when connecting it usb-c to usb-c on my laptop, it suddenly got 10 times slower. Not sure what's up with that, might have been a fluke, but the usb-A to usb-C cable made it work fast again.