Ripping CD's, 2022 Style

CD ripping - not new tech, but it’s rapidly heading towards being as ‘easy to do at home’ as digitise VHS tapes. I suppose the fact that I only have one machine in the house with a CD/DVD drive should have given me some warning, but whilst it’s a 2007 24" iMac, it worked fine for many hundreds of CD’s up until now.

So storage may be cheaper - a 256GB USB thumb drive is around £25 - but old formats keep throwing up odd quirks, in this case the first of many of my 3" CD Singles, and old plastic spacer and a slot loading drive… Yup: it got stuck :( Happily, because it’s old tech, stripping it down and taking the lid off the CD unit wasn’t that onerous (just annoying), but it’s a clear warning that I’m doing this at about the latest time possible.

Thankfully, ripping to a lossless format isn’t taking up that much space in today’s terms, so as long as I backup the rips (and, I suppose listen to everything to check for skips) then this kind of hassle shouldn’t need to be repeated. By me, anyway. Now to go and find a USB CD with a sliding mechanism…