A unique CD Ripping solution?

[Yertletheturtle]

HI all, I am new to the forums.

I recently was faced with how to rip a 1000 CD collection into high quality lossless (AIFF or FLAC) files, PAINLESSLY AND QUICKLY.  The last time I tried this I was doing about 10 an hour.  At that rate I would use up an entire vacation to rip 1000 cds.  

 

Rejected solution: I looked into buying a ripper, but the cost of these appliance like devices is high and they dont improve on the ripping speed much.

 

Rejected Solution:  CD ripping services that charge $0.69 to $1.29 per CD seemed on their face like the most painless... but the prospect of packing CDs in their fragile jewel cases or onto spindles and shipping them off to have them ripped and archived Seems anything but painless!

 

Unique solution?: I put together a cluster of 10 used macs, invested in DB power amp ripping software for each one, fixed their hardware (The CD drives on old computers are often fried and the hard drives are often on their way out) as needed.  Laid out on a large table, using 4 monitors and some HDMI switches, the cluster was able to rip an entire library in a day or a weekend at most!

 

I haven’t seen this done before but perhaps others have done something similar? Any better solutions?

 

(I have held on to the equipment and would welcome Ideas for how to make use of this cluster for other projects.)  

[kumakuma]

Great solution!

 

Probably doesn't need to be said but make sure you've got multiple backups including at least one in a separate location.

[CatManDo]

That looks good if you need the rips quickly. Maybe you wouldn't need so many computers but could rip 2 CDs on one computer in parallel, using two drives.

 

I ripped more than 2000 CDs a year ago, on one computer with one drive.

 

After I finally decided to digitize my collection, I ripped CDs all the time that I spend at my computer, while I was doing other stuff.

 

Changing the CDs, organizing files, sometimes having to edit names, copying a cover image to the folder, this all takes very little time compared to the time it takes for the software to rip a CD (about 10 minutes in secure mode).

 

It took me 5 months or so, but it didn't appear to me as spending a lot of time on it, as I sit at the PC for 2-3 hours per day anyway, reading things, listening to music, watching sports streams.

 

Scanning booklets would have been much too time consuming. I now download front and back cover from Discogs or Allmusic to complete the rips when I have the time.

[Samuel T Cogley]

 

1 hour ago, Yertletheturtle said:

Unique solution?: I put together a cluster of 10 used macs, invested in DB power amp ripping software for each one, fixed their hardware (The CD drives on old computers are often fried and the hard drives are often on their way out) as needed.  Laid out on a large table, using 4 monitors and some HDMI switches, the cluster was able to rip an entire library in a day or a weekend at most!

 

An interesting solution.  I'm imagining the percentage of people with the skills/money/space to deploy ten computers for the sake of ripping CDs will be very, very low.  But I applaud your somewhat Rube Goldberg approach.  Quite nerdy 👍 

[yamamoto2002]

I used 10 USB cd drives connected to 2 PC to rip 2704 Audio CDs.

USB CD drive was cheap, $15 each.

It took 4 days

 

This is a screenshot while testing how many USB DVD drives are too many for one PC

[Samuel T Cogley]

57 minutes ago, yamamoto2002 said:

I used 10 USB cd drives connected to 2 PC to rip 2704 Audio CDs.

USB CD drive was cheap, $15 each.

It took 4 days

 

This is a screenshot while testing how many USB DVD drives are too many for one PC

 

This is just awesome!  Thanks for sharing!

[StephenJK]

3 hours ago, yamamoto2002 said:

I used 10 USB cd drives connected to 2 PC to rip 2704 Audio CDs.

USB CD drive was cheap, $15 each.

It took 4 days

 

This is a screenshot while testing how many USB DVD drives are too many for one PC

That's a terrific idea!  Those outboard drives are a relatively new thing, but I'll keep it in mind should it ever come up in conversation.

[bobbmd]

i spent the better part 2 full NFL seasons doing that for 800+ discs into an apple CD player(talk about boring) never again now all those albums are streamed by someone somewhere but they are on my assorted HDs and backups

[MetalNuts]

I think most of us have experienced the pain in ripping our CDs collection into files.  Please consider also the format, i.e. flac or wav you want (they may sound different).  The most difficult and tedious task is not ripping but scanning the artwork and booklets of the CDs.  Not all CD artwork can be found on internet, even if you can, some, in particular those older CDs are of very low resolution.

[Ralf11]

many are on here:

 

https://bendodson.com/projects/itunes-artwork-finder/

[lucretius]

1 hour ago, Ralf11 said:

many are on here:

 

https://bendodson.com/projects/itunes-artwork-finder/

 

Looks like only album covers.  Also, first you need to know the Apple Music URL for the album.  Not too useful in my opinion.

[Ralf11]

nope - you just type in a few terms from the album and it gives you the cover

[daverich4]

I rip using dBpoweramp and it's really rare for it not to have an album cover. When it doesn't I've found that alsmost always. Amazon does.

[MetalNuts]

So some of you are just avoiding to point it out to @Yertletheturtle the most painful and tedious work to scan the CD booklets into PDF.  May be some of you never mind to read the booklets or you think you know all the information of the CD by looking at the artwork.

[lucretius]

16 minutes ago, MetalNuts said:

So some of you are just avoiding to point it out to @Yertletheturtle the most painful and tedious work to scan the CD booklets into PDF.  May be some of you never mind to read the booklets or you think you know all the information of the CD by looking at the artwork.

 

Often, I find the scanned booklet at Musicbrainz. Sometimes, I have to resort to Discogs to get the booklet, but the scans there are limited to 600X600 pixels in size.  For album covers, the best are found at Album Art Exchange:  https://www.albumartexchange.com/

[Ralf11]

albumartexchange seems to be a site that steals copyrighted album art...

[MetalNuts]

20 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

albumartexchange seems to be a site that steals copyrighted album art...

If you really concerns copyright then you should not copy from any website any material and that's why I scan my own artwork and booklet.

[One and a half]

Every metadata system has limitations, never quite 100%. FWIW, Discogs has a unique catalog number that is unique for that release, which country, year, disc number and so on.

 

In this case, r3598376 is copied to a box in say MP3Tag, and the metadata is previewed so that the tracks match. What you see above on basic metadata info is embedded into each track of the file. What it doesn't do is add disc numbers.......dunno why ask them!

 

The cover art is usually small <80k to avoid media players gagging with too large an image file.

 

Discogs has booklets, larger art to upload, so for players like Roon, you can see this information while listening.

 

It's not perfect, dbpoweramp also can choose the wrong edition, the discogs information can correct that easy enough.

[esldude]

I did something like the OP.  Actually had a weeks vacation I had to take or lose before the end of the year.  Only week I could get turned out to be just horrid weather.  So I decided to rip all my CDs as there wan't much else I could do with the week.  I didn't have 10 computers, but did have 6.  

 

My plan had that not occurred was to do 10-12 each day.  Do them while doing other things around the computer I was using.  Would have taken a while, but done in a way you aren't really losing much time.  300+ a month until done. 

[lucretius]

48 minutes ago, One and a half said:

FWIW, Discogs has a unique catalog number that is unique for that release, which country, year, disc number and so on..

 

After ripping, I also look up the release in the Discogs database and use the unique identifier (e.g. 1579942) for the Search by: Discogs Release ID function in the Mp3tag software to auto-populate metadata.  After I am done using Mp3tag, I also use Musicbrainz Picard to auto-populate metadata for each album.  The Musicbrainz database also has unique identifiers for every release, etc.  (On various occasions, I had to add the release I have to either the Musicbrainz or Discogs database.)  The identifiers become embedded in the metadata, e.g.:

 

Field                                         Value

WWW                                       https://www.discogs.com/Fleetwood-Mac-Rumours/release/1579942

MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMID          8608c0dc-99dd-491e-b8f8-28f2ad0b4d82

 

The embedded IDs are useful for quick lookup of the release in their respective databases.

[lucretius]

6 hours ago, Ralf11 said:

albumartexchange seems to be a site that steals copyrighted album art...

 

Fair Use doctrine (access to the images is contingent upon your agreement to limit their use to that of your own PRIVATE, PERSONAL and Non-Commercial usage).   All auto-taggers are pulling images of scanned, copyrighted album art from some database or another -- even Roon does this!

[mansr]

2 hours ago, lucretius said:

Fair Use doctrine (access to the images is contingent upon your agreement to limit their use to that of your own PRIVATE, PERSONAL and Non-Commercial usage).   All auto-taggers are pulling images of scanned, copyrighted album art from some database or another -- even Roon does this!

Regardless of whether the somewhat fuzzy fair use concept applies, I don't consider it particularly immoral to download a scan of a cover you own in paper form. It's harming exactly nobody.

[StephenJK]

12 hours ago, MetalNuts said:

So some of you are just avoiding to point it out to @Yertletheturtle the most painful and tedious work to scan the CD booklets into PDF.  May be some of you never mind to read the booklets or you think you know all the information of the CD by looking at the artwork.

I just want the music.  I don't know where dBPoweramp looks for cover art, but with about 1,200 CDs ripped there were very few it was unable to find. 

 

When recording LPs, rock, jazz, cover art and track lists were readily available through VinylStudio, generally with Discogs. 

 

For the classical and opera titles I set up an easel and took pictures of all the cover art - likely about 400 LPs and maybe a couple of dozen box sets.  There's not much point looking for classical by title as there could be hundreds of versions.

 

But I would never scan the booklet to PDF.  If it's lyrics or something like that they can be easily looked up online through a number of services.  

[lucretius]

1 hour ago, SJK said:

I don't know where dBPoweramp looks for cover art

 

dBpoweramp selects first the cover art choice designated by PerfectTunes (which is part of the dBpoweramp family). Nonetheless, both dBpoweramp and PerfectTUNES access a wide array of sites (too many to mention) on the internet for cover art.  For metadata, dBpoweramp looks at Discogs, GD3, MusicBrainz, and freedb.

[daverich4]

14 hours ago, MetalNuts said:

So some of you are just avoiding to point it out to @Yertletheturtle the most painful and tedious work to scan the CD booklets into PDF.  May be some of you never mind to read the booklets or you think you know all the information of the CD by looking at the artwork.

 

I use Roon which generally provides more information about an album than the booklet does. As well as active links to other things by the artists involved and similar information.