The NEO-22 has the ability to rip your CD+G's directly to an SD card (up to 32G) in mp3+g format.
At 128 bit-rate, you'll be able to cram hundreds upon hundreds, if not thousands of tracks onto a single 32G SD card. I ripped 742 songs and barely took up 3G of space.
Before you go guns blazing into the ripping sunset, there's a few major points to highlight.
Note: I ripped all tracks to a single folder that the NEO-22 created called "CDG to MP3". There is probably a way to rip each disc to individual folders but, for home use, it'll make for unbelievably fast song call-up if everything is in the same folder. The only caveat is that you must be extremely diligent and organized as you rip.
The absolute first thing you should do before you put a disc into the player is start a spreadsheet (or add some additional columns to your current one)
Mine has the following column headers:
-- Artist
-- Song
-- SD Card Track #
-- SD Card Track Title
-- Disc Info
Artist & Song are pretty self-explanatory so I'm going to highlight the rest of them individually.
SD Card Track #
This (mostly) correlates to the order that you rip your songs/discs in and is the number you will enter to call up a song for playback.
Example:
The first disc you rip has 8 tracks on it and you rip them all.
The SD Card Track numbers will be 1, 2, 3, 4, etc.
Hit the 1 button on your remote and it will pull up track 1 of that very first disc you ripped.
You'll notice the word "mostly" in parentheses.
I say "mostly" because we ran into 1 freak disc that randomly inserted itself in the middle of my track list. I'll have more on this later but suffice to say at this point, every other disc out of the 40 was perfectly sequential in its numbering and I'm pretty sure there was just something up with that disc.
SD Card Track Title
This bit of news is only sort of alluded to in the NEO-22 instruction manual (that I think was translated by a 12 year old Japanese kid as a school project for his English class) so I'm going to say what they only hint at:
Ripped tracks contain no artist or song title information.
Anywhere.
All tracks are in the following format:
TRK[Disc ID][Track #]
And look something like this:
TRKEB001 where "EB0" = disc ID & "01" = Track #
Note: Disc ID's are any combination of letters and numbers and seem to be 3-4 characters in length.
When using Excel, you can just put that first TRK number in & then do that handy drag/copy auto-number thing.
We did a lot of things to try to get that artist/song info to show up but the NEO-22 just does not capture that data (if it exists at all). So unless you want to manually alter all of your mp3 & cdg files, just record the TRK numbers and save yourself a lot of work.
Disc Info
This is your traditional disc information that you use in case you want to use the physical discs (or need to because something breaks).
Example: SGB-0068 01
Where "SGB-0068" is the manufacturer's ID printed on the label of the disc and "01" is the track number.
Hopefully, that was useful.
Now, jumping back to that "mostly" comment earlier.
As I mentioned previously, every disc/song that I ripped just tacked itself on to the next sequential SD Card Track #. So after awhile, I stopped being as diligent about checking the SD Card files against my spreadsheet and just kept on ripping and recording in my spreadsheet.
Suddenly, all of my SD Card Track #'s were off... a lot...and I was 500+ songs in and facing the prospect of having to sort and then manually go line by line with the machine & the spreadsheet.
It ended up being a single disc that caused all the mayhem and that disc was odd for a couple of reasons.
First, the track numbers printed on the front of the disc were messed up.
Second, there were tracks on the disc that weren't printed on the front of the disc.
Those factors caused my numbering to be screwy all around for that particular disc and because of that screwed up my spreadsheet a couple ways.
Here's where having a systems administrator programmer linux guru type in your house can really save you a lot of time. And if you want more information exactly what my husband did let me know. The short version is there are standard utilities in linux/unix that can compare & contrast & sort text files and csv files. These should be available on most Macs and are most likely available in a program called CYGWin which is a linux command shell for Windows.
However, you can do this manually, by opening the text file songlist generated by the NEO-22 in Excel. Use colon as delimiter and that should then give you 2 columns which correspond to the SD Card Track # and the SD Card Track Title of your spreadsheet. Sort your spreadsheet and the songlist by those TRK numbers. You can then do a side by side comparison pretty easily (though time consuming).
Once you're confident everything matches up, you can just copy & paste the SD Card Track # column from the songlist file into your spreadsheet.
When I printed out my songlist from Excel for my friends:
I highlighted the first 3 columns (Artist, Song, SD Card Track #).
Went to File / Print.
In the section where you can choose to print all sheets, selected sheet or selected cells, just choose to print out the selected cells.
You'll end up with just those first three columns and your friends won't be trying to figure out the significance of TRKEB001 and SGB-0068 01.
Hope this helps anyone who has picked up this system!
~jen~
