This is not an existential question, but a very practical one. While it won’t apply to all your music, you might want to consider doing so for certain CDs.
Here’s what happened to me. I was listening to a recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations by Robert Hill this morning, and noticed that there was a tiny hiccup between the tracks. With iTunes playing music gapless, since version 7.0, this shouldn’t have happened. But I suspected that it might have had something to do with the ripping: I had originally imported this CD under iTunes 5, a couple of years ago.
I thought the problem might have been in the original ripping, so I tried importing it again, and it plays fine. So, for some reason, even though iTunes “updated gapless playback information” for these tracks when version 7 came along, it didn’t do so correctly; or the actual rip was different back then. In any case, if you notice any problems like this, you might want to rerip the CDs that don’t sound perfect.
The only thing that gets in the way of sitting down and re-ripping a large
number of discs is the amount of work needed to get the metadata right! I find it
very rare that the online data available for classical CDs is accurate — or, if it’s
theoretically accurate, rare that it’s set up the way I want it. I don’t know if I’m
particularly fussy about metadata (always a possibility), but it’s taken me a while
to get right and I hesitate to throw that amount of work out the window!
If you’re on a Mac, here’s what you can do: use this AppleScript:
http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=copytinforackstotracks
Copy the tag info from the existing tracks to the new ones, then delete the old
ones. (You’ll want to put the old ones in a Temp playlist so, after copying, you
can delete them easily.)
The only thing that gets in the way of sitting down and re-ripping a large
number of discs is the amount of work needed to get the metadata right! I find it
very rare that the online data available for classical CDs is accurate — or, if it’s
theoretically accurate, rare that it’s set up the way I want it. I don’t know if I’m
particularly fussy about metadata (always a possibility), but it’s taken me a while
to get right and I hesitate to throw that amount of work out the window!
If you’re on a Mac, here’s what you can do: use this AppleScript:
http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=copytinforackstotracks
Copy the tag info from the existing tracks to the new ones, then delete the old
ones. (You’ll want to put the old ones in a Temp playlist so, after copying, you
can delete them easily.)
Rip your media with X-Lossless Decoder (XLD) which can compress to ALAC, AAC, MP3, FLAC or whatever. The point is, it is free and can perform completely secure ripping with reporting down to the individual atom jitter, duplicate byte error and the rest of them. It can generate CUE sheets and ripping logs as well. It is the Mac answer to EAC for Windows (it’s actually better). Cheers.
Rip your media with X-Lossless Decoder (XLD) which can compress to ALAC, AAC, MP3, FLAC or whatever. The point is, it is free and can perform completely secure ripping with reporting down to the individual atom jitter, duplicate byte error and the rest of them. It can generate CUE sheets and ripping logs as well. It is the Mac answer to EAC for Windows (it’s actually better). Cheers.