Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Streaming Ripping CD Collection into Sooloos

Hello

This is my first post to this, or indeed any other forum, so please accept my apologies for any ignorance which I'm sure will come across on my part!

I've recently purchased a Meridian Sooloos Control 15, MS600, PMC Fact 8 speakers and a Plinius 9200 integrated amplifier, although am currently pondering swapping this for the new Plinius Hautonga as I don't anticipate taking delivery of the system until end of June. I currently find myself stressing over the best way to go about importing my CD collection (about 1000) into Sooloos and would appreciate any guidence from forum members as to the best way to go about doing the job. From what I've gathered from the internet I don't think using the Control 15 for the bulk load is the solution and am contemplating doing the job using my laptop (Sony Vaio) or engaging the services of a CD Ripping Service. My laptop has a 300 Gig hard drive so I guess I would have to rip the CDs to an external hard drive using the Control:PC software, which I guess I could always use as a back up. I did anticipate saving for a TwinStore but understand that these have now been discontinued so await details of their replacement. I received a quote from a CD Ripping Service offering to do the job for about �700. They advised that, were I to import the files they provided into Sooloos I should allow it to overide their Metadata with the Sooloos AMG Metadata in order to take advantage of the album credits feature, which I must say was one of the systems selling points.

The main consideration comes down to quality of the rips and I'm not sure how much of this is dependent on the hardware used, eg my Sony Vaio laptop drive, or the software such as Control:PC or dBpoweramp, which appears to be the software of choice for the various companies out there offering a CD Ripping Service.

The timing of all of this has taken me somewhat by surprise. I'd been contemplating purchasing a new HiFi system for about a year or so but didn't anticipate this happening for at least another year. I'd already deceided that a server/streaming solution was the route I wanted to go down and had earmarked the Linn Akurate DS and Meridian Sooloos as the main contenders. A local HiFi store had a sale on and were offering a good deal on the PMC Fact 8 speakers. I invited my wife down to come and take a look at the speakers, as much to confirm whether they needed to be removed from my wish list based upon whether she would contemplate them taking pride of place in our living room. She actually loved the look of the speakers but was blown away by the Control 15 and simply said "we've gotta have that!"

My apologies for rambling on (first forum post remember!) but this is the most excited I've been about any purchase since going down to Richer Sounds twenty years ago with five hundred quid in my pocket to pick up my NAD combo and Mordaunt Short bookshelves!

If you've got this far your patience is already appreciated but I really would be grateful for any advice you can give as to the best way to go about importing my CD collection into Sooloos.

Kind regards
Clive

I ripped about 1000 CDs with my Control. No issues except it takes time; Approx 6 minutes/disc.
Just stack them up and go to it!

If you have a service do it you'll still have to go through and make sure the cover art is correct and as high a quality as you can source. This especially holds true if you have a lot of classical CDs.

Good luck and have fun!

Hi Clive,

Welcome to the forum and congratulations of your purchase of a C15.
As G997 says ripping a 1000 CDs on the C15 is no problem; however, it does pay to check each rip for accurate meta-data and note if there is an issue. I did this by added a tag e.g. �Album Track Issue� or �Album Art Issue� then you can search for the tags and correct them later.

The C15 and ControlPC/MAC uses the same core software to rip CDs, so if you wanted to speed thing up you could rip using the C15 and your laptop.

You can also use a 3rd party tool to rip to FLAC and then import in to the Sooloos, I would recommend dBpoweramp, which you reference. The key feature of these three methods is that they produce "bit perfect" rips by looking up data from the internet to confirm the rip is 100% accurate.

Most CD taken about 4-5 mins some a little longer; though I did have one that took 2.5 hours!

Regards,
Carl

I wonder if this YouTube - Sooloos Ripping Station still exists...

I wonder also, there must be a few of these around.

I wonder who makes it?

As far as I have worked out, it's made by Ripstation. Here is a page about Sooloos firmware, so I deduce that Ripstation made the hardware, but with custom firmware. This presumably means you can't buy a Ripstation 7604 and expect Sooloos to work with it.

Certainly in Germany you can still hire a Sooloos Import:4 through the M dealer network in order to do bulk ripping. Rick suggested to me that this was a better idea than doing it through C15 or my laptop. Perhaps the big PC drives do a better job of error correction than the small-format laptop-style drives like in the C15?

Hi Carl,

I've found that if you try a rip on Control:PC while you're ripping using the Control 15 then the C15 rip slows down, so actually you don't speed up the ripping process. That's with a C15 as the Core.

It's as though the core can only cope with so much ripping data at once.

This may be different with an MC600 as the core, as it's a much more powerful processor.

Rick

I use both the computer (Mac) and Control:10 to Rip. Oddly enough sometimes one or other refuses to import a CD and the other does? Not sure why!
I use both to import but not usually at the same time so the slow down mentioned would not be an issue, nice to be able to Rip in 2 locations depending on where I am in the house.

I am up to about 1400 discs imported but it has taken over 6 months!

Good luck with the task, it's worth it in the end!

I file imported (dBpoweramp) about 1300 CDs, my suggestion is to allocate time to clean up the metadata after import because mistakes will be made with identification, especially with EPs (the import will find a match for file amounts and track lengths and just accept the random or first match), and also with tracks that are just 1 long track (requires manual confirmation).

dBpoweramp will show a list of possible matches for EPs, Sooloos will just "power through". So most of my EPs had incorrect metadata. Luckily I avoided buying too many EPs, only for more very favorite bands.

Consider also it took my about 2 days of picking and choosing my actual albums (I have also a large live FLAC audio collection of non-copywritten 16 bit concerts intermingled which I have for the most part not imported so it was not trivial), and dBpoweramp also has a Batch Rip version, which has support for a variety of CD/DVD batch rippers, including drives which are bought and sold on eBay (at least in the US) for $500-$700 a piece.

Since I painstakingly already ripped, I have not gone down this route, but it is an option for someone with 1K disks to rip.

-MJT