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.)  

[Yertletheturtle]

On 1/29/2020 at 12:18 PM, 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

So just curious how the software manages multiple drives at a time ripping- I didn’t think that was doable...

cheers

[Yertletheturtle]

On 1/29/2020 at 12:05 PM, Samuel T Cogley said:

 

 

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 👍 

It does sound excessive but I had five dead macs with various issues that I refurbished, and then shopped for 5 used 2009 to 2010 additional ones.  The equipment is worth maybe $2000, but I should be able to recoup some through reselling if nobody is interested in reusing this setup. 

Haha. It does sound excessive but I had five dead macs with various issues that I refurbished, and then shopped for 5 used 2009 to 2010 additional ones.  The equipment is worth maybe $2000, but I should be able to recoup some through reselling if nobody is interested in reusing this setup. 

[Yertletheturtle]

On 1/29/2020 at 8:17 PM, MetalNuts said:

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.

I went with AIFF - no compression I think and storage is so cheap these days.  20 years ago when I was first ripping on iTunes storage was a buck a gig.  Now it’s more like 3-4 cents per gig!!

[Yertletheturtle]

Anyone interested in borrowing this setup let me know... I am in NYC area but could conceivably ship too.

cheers