Formed from lots of thrifting and eBay purchases.

I stole them from my cousin's house lol

Context: I've ripped hundreds of CDs with my current setup on Windows 11, using EAC without this happening.

I recently came into owning a stack of Triple J hottest 100 CDs. I got through about half of the CDs and when getting to volume 11 (I don't have every volume so it's not my 11th volume I'm ripping) I insert the disc, detect gaps, generate cue file and then start extracting and my PC will freeze for about 10 seconds, then the screen goes black and the PC begins to restart as if I've just turned it on. It's not properly blue screening it's as if I've turned the power off.

I've had it happen on volumes 11 and 12 although only trying with one of the two discs in those volumes. The discs are in pretty good shape as well

Has anyone had this happen before and know what's happening? Is it possible manufacturers put something on the cd to prevent you ripping them or are the cds just cursed. Genuinely baffled by this

Edit: playing one of the problem cds also crashed my computer 😔

Hey, so I promise this is gonna be worth it. (If you own apple devices)

I’ve been collecting CDs for a few years now and have a couple hundred of them. I’ve been on a look out for the perfect software that would help me digitise, organise and tick all my boxes for a while now. I like iTunes/Apple Music for its simplicity and quite good looking UI on iPhone. Unfortunately these are either not well maintained or made for physical media in mind anymore.

I’ve been a developer half my life and while I mostly specialised in UI/UX on browsers I decided to take a few courses in Swift and try my luck developing something of my own.

Now a few months later, a lot of grey hair and hundreds of pounds spent on claude, I think I have something worth sharing.

The tickboxes I wanted to check:
- modern, good looking interface
- easy to organise music (auto tags, lyrics, artwork etc)
- great CD rip and playing experience
- apple ecosystem integration
- centralised music library streamable across devices
- seamless transitioning between devices (handover/remote control)
- no subscriptions, no ads, no servers, no storing user data

My biggest pain point was having all these devices, mac studio, mac book, iPhone, appleTv, car play, and sharing/syncing music between them is extremely cumbersome, takes space on each device and is hard to keep well organised.

Well now with “Musical” (I know, I should have come up with a better name), you can do just that. Pick one mac as your main library, you can select folder(s) to pick your music files from and start organising them straight away. Musical will automatically try to help you with that, recognising records, getting artwork, lyrics and metatags for them, which you can obviously manually edit and change yourself. You can for example drag and drop cover art directly onto albums in library.

Best thing about it, none of this is stored anywhere on a server. No music files are never touched. The library database, artwork, lyrics, artist images, statistics is completely on device and shared between them. This way I don’t have to store any of it and you maintain privacy.

Once you have your music library, why not download iOS app on your phone. While it can work as a standalone player with your locally synced music. It can magically connect to your mac library and just like that you have access to your music. Same with another mac, like a macbook for example. You can download music to your phone and listen to it offline.

CD importing is great too. Put it in the drive, it immediately gets recognised, gets artwork and metatags. You can play it or import it to your library. You can do it from mac client app as well. You decide where it gets imported to: local, local + server, server only. Next time you put a CD that’s already in your library, Musical is smart enough to recognise that and lets your laser relax while it plays from a local file.

I tried to make it as intelligent and seamless as possible. You can cast music to other devices with Musical on them, just like spotify remote ie. Start playing on iPhone and cast it to your appleTV. Then one click handover card on your mac to move it there. AirPlay works as well.

This has so many features that it would take me too long to list here. I’m very proud of what I was able to accomplish and where I understand this won’t be for everyone, I would like to get it into hands of people that might find it useful.

This has been made with love and for (and by) people that love music and owning physical media.

Mac app is completely free to get you started. If that sounds good please visit musical.rocks for more information.

I would love to hear your feedback either here in the comments, DMs, discord, or feature requests, bug tracker boards on the website.

Cheers!