On my way to the grocery store yesterday morning I discovered that one of the songs playing on my phone was misbehaving a bit. It skipped forward randomly for most of the first minute or so before settling into something resembling normal playback. In a moment of brilliant forethought I made note of the glitch (thank you, Obsidian) to check on once I got home.
Sure enough, that song (and indeed every song on its particular album) had been ripped with a barely-out-of-beta version of the Ogg Vorbis codec, which means it hadn’t yet been optimized for decoding in mobile device environments. Then I checked a number of other albums by the same artist and… all but a few were ripped at basically the same time with the same (new then, but obsolete now) codec. Clearly at some point in 2002 I was super busy ripping CDs.
Guess what I spent yesterday afternoon doing! Ripping CDs again!
On the upside, I have dbPoweramp‘s CD Ripper software on hand and a solid & reliable LG optical drive to work with. On the downside, some of these CDs are quite old and are showing their age. (Plus, in some cases, there’s actual physical damage. The kids got into my CD collection once when they were very very young…)
Overall the operation went well, and the only three tracks which indicated failures in the ripping software were tracks I don’t particularly need. (The first is a duplicate bonus track available in remastered form on a different album, and the remaining two are live versions of songs I can probably source elsewhere.)
Why even bother, then? Because this time I have more advanced codecs available, at higher bitrate (thus slightly better overall quality), and if anything went horribly wrong with my source CDs (further bitrot or an actual physical catastrophe of some sort) I want the (reasonably) best available archival copies I can get. (No, I didn’t FLAC these albums. They’re not important enough to me to justify the vastly increased storage requirement.)
And now when those songs come up on my phone in the random playlist, they shouldn’t go all glitch-y on me. Priorities, y’all.