A unique CD Ripping solution?

[lucretius]

1 hour ago, SJK said:

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.  

 

There's often more than just lyrics in the booklet:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liner_notes

[lucretius]

23 minutes ago, daverich4 said:

 

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.

 

Roon uses the info found in the Allmusic database (https://www.allmusic.com/).  The unique thing about Roon is that it readily presents links (album, artist, band members, guest artists, mastering engineer, producer,  etc. ) to easily access the database info on that subject. (Roon also presents a link to any artwork/liner notes you choose to maintain yourself!) I learned quite a lot using the Roon links -- I love Roon!

[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

[thomashanser]

I'm about to take on a similar project - ripping hundreds of CDs using an Apple Mac Pro. I just obtained Phile Audio from the Apple App Store.

 

I was about to invest in a Brennan B2 CD ripper, but I started to think...why not just do it with what I already have? My only concern is my existing Valoin USB external CD drive. There a lots of these drives available, dirt cheap, but what about the possibility of "ripping errors" occurring? Due to the drive itself?

 

Should I invest in a better quality USB external optical drive before I start?

 

Thanks.

 

[Kal Rubinson]

18 hours ago, thomashanser said:

There a lots of these drives available, dirt cheap, but what about the possibility of "ripping errors" occurring? Due to the drive itself?

Should I invest in a better quality USB external optical drive before I start?

It is not likely that the drive will be a problem unless it is defective.  If you rip with software that can verify the accuracy of the rip (e.g., http://www.accuraterip.com/), you will find out. 

[thomashanser]

Thanks, Kal.

 

I've decided to invest in dBpoweramp, rather than Phile Audio from the Apple App Store.

 

Thanks again.

[blownsi]

When I rip, I use 3 computers each with usb 3.0 enclosures with full size drives in them.  These are much faster than the slim $15 drives mentioned above.  I have never successfully been able to rip more than one cd per computer because ripping two at once seems to cause a conflict which slows down the rip speed considerably.  It's almost as if the computer gets confused on what to do with each data set or is storing it in different places on the drive.  Perhaps it's because they are both running on the same usb hub?  

 

If you have successfully ripped two or more cds at once without slowdown on the same pc/mac which software is being used?

 

 

[kurb1980]

When I started this journey I researched on dbpoweramp for drives that have the highest confidence most accurate  rips.  I found ASUS BW-16D1HT and Vantec NST-536S3-BK NexStar DX USB 3.0.  I used my own power supplies the JS2 12v.  I was able to blast through my collection very quickly and accurately.  I only had about dozen not accurate due to damaged foils.

[Qhwoeprktiyns]

Since booklets and artwork were mentioned, a great source is the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/

 

[Northern_Canuck]

 I often rip CD's using two instances of dbpoweramp open at the same time (only have two optical drives installed). Just select a different CD drive in each instance of dbpoweramp. I have never seen a performance degrade using this method. Not sure how many instances of dbpoweramp you can have open at the same time but 2 instances works well.

[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.

[Samuel T Cogley]

While some see the old Plextor Plexwriter Premiums as a kind of "ultimate" OG ripping solution, know this:

 

Those drives typically had problems with 80 (vs 74) minute CDs.  Just use a modern DVD or BD drive.

[sphinxsix]

I think many stores in Europe still have the 'five days - no questions asked - return' policy, I believe that according to law in case of internet sales it's 30 days. Many years ago I had to service my laptop and needed a replacement gear quite badly just for a couple of days. Tesco (huge European supermarket network) was famous back then for exceptionally bad treating of their employees. They also a couple years earlier had a suspicion that I had stolen something and invited me for a personal search which wasn't very pleasant (of course I didn't steal anything). I didn't hesitate long. I went to the nearest Tesco, bought a 5i Dell, installed 2 or 3 programs that I needed after coming back home and uninstalled them later and returned the Dell after 4 days.. Actually not without problems - they wanted me to buy some other laptop. I refused and asked to talk to the boss of the employee whom I talked to, who at first also didn't agree but after she saw that I won't give up easily - I asked to talk to the head chief of the store  - she did. 

Just saying.. 

[AudioDoctor]

Last night while ripping a couple new CDs I noticed an option in dBpoweramp to rip from multiple sources. Under File I get this menu on a Mac.

[sphinxsix]

On 1/29/2020 at 4:58 PM, Yertletheturtle said:

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

Has someone already found a possibility of using a blockchain in audio.?

😉