Operation Digital Heritage

Tools#

I consulted Gemini (the AI), and it strongly recommended “dBpoweramp CD Ripper”.

Sony Music Center for PC also came up as a candidate, but its reputation online was pretty rough, so I passed.

I used to lean on Gracenote through iTunes, but this time it’s the final archive, the one meant to make sure I “never lose this data again.” What sold me was FLAC output, the PerfectMeta feature that pulls tags from multiple databases, and above all AccurateRip, which verifies that the disc was read correctly down to the bit. That’s real peace of mind.

The Process#

I think picking this tool was the right call. For CDs from well-known circles, it fetches complete metadata plus album art for you.

Even when it can’t, you can paste the album art in from the clipboard and paste all the track titles in one go. It really feels optimized for exactly this kind of mass CD-ripping job.

Most of my collection is Touhou arrangements, so apart from a handful, I could pull the info for all of them from THBWiki (a Chinese-language Touhou wiki).

I was amazed to find that even works by circles almost nobody remembers, the kind that put out a single album and vanished, are properly archived there. I’m truly grateful to the people who preserve this kind of data on the internet…

The workflow went like this.

• Take the CD out of the tray and put it away
• Put the next CD in the tray and start reading
• Set the finished CD on the “ripped” stack, and pull one more CD from the cardboard box onto the desk
• If the finished CD didn’t get metadata, copy-paste the data Gemini has already formatted
• While ripping, search for the next CD’s info on THBWiki, and throw the page contents at Gemini to format
• When the rip finishes, go back to the top

Repeat that 70 times and the CD collection archive is done. After that, I sent everything to my home server, tidied it up in Jellyfin, and a beautiful digital archive was born.

About 5 of the CDs wouldn’t read properly until I wiped and blew on them a few times. Luckily, none turned out to be completely unreadable this time. I hear CDs last about 30 years, so for CDs pressed 15 years ago, this may have been cutting it pretty close.

Rescue the Lost Media#

As the ripping went on, albums started turning up that can never be reissued because their circles have long since disbanded, and that don’t exist anywhere on the internet. There were even albums by circles that aren’t on THBWiki and that return absolutely nothing when searched.

Potential lost media, never seen by anyone, in some cases without so much as a digital fingerprint.

One by one, I transcribed the track names from the booklets and sealed them into FLAC files. It felt like fieldwork to protect a vanishing cultural heritage, and I was strangely filled with a sense of mission.

When everything was done, 7 hours had passed since I started, and it was past 3:30 a.m. In the silent room, I admired my freshly finished Jellyfin library and tilted a glass of highball.

The very first track of the commemorative “shuffle play” to come out of the speakers was that intro we all know so well.

A song you could call the history of Touhou Project’s music fan works in itself, “Bad Apple!!”, was picked out of 71 albums and 659 tracks. I can’t help but feel a sense of destiny.

It was as if the universe had played a fanfare for this good deed, an almost too dramatic finale.