A unique CD Ripping solution?

[FredericV]

A long long time ago before we went in the hifi business, I wanted to rip all my CD's as I did buy a squeezebox player.

The solution:

4 ripdrives with vibrapods + rubyripper + some linux scripts to make it work

Rubyripper guarantees correct rips, when correcting for the offset of each drive. As rubyripper rips the same track using cdparanoia until it finds enough matching chunks between the 2 files, on damaged disks it could take a while to get right, as for unmatched chunks it would repeat the process - but the outcome was that all these drives resulted in the same file for non problematic disks. This worked still acceptable as most disks were not problematic.

We also tested the same CD's with EAC and plextools pro and the files from EAC & plextools pro on windows would contain the same audio data as the rubyripped files on Linux. So our ripping stack was secure enough.

I still have a mix of 3 plextor premiums I & II's in a box somewhere, but the experiment here was to see how much longer it took for the cheaper drives, to get a bitperfect result, and if cheaper drives could rip secure.

With the current Teac's which we use in our servers and which are far from cheap, whatever we throw at them across many drives, always give the same md5sum checksums on the files for the same CD's ripped on many drives with just a single cdparanoia pass. In this scenario rubyripper is a little bit overkill as it is very time consuming. For older drives which were less reliable (except maybe for the Plextor's) it was a great ripping concept.

It could be a fun experiment to make a custom 3D printed case with some spare Teac slot-in drives and a mini ITX board with enough SATA ports, to rip in parallel. These bulky PATA drives with flatcables are so Y2K.



With teac slot in drives, we can probably fit two in the space of these old skool drives:

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2824941

 

These days I no longer collect CD's but using the thingiverse mount for slot in drives could be a big space saver for massive batch ripping.