Automated Ripping with CD Jukeboxes?

apago asks: "I am ripping my large collection of CDs to MP3 one at a time. This takes forever. I would like to know if there is a way I can use my Sony 200 disc jukebox to help automated the ripping process. I can already drive the jukebox thru Sony's S-Link interface using a Nirvis Slink-e device. The juke has SPDIF output. Can I get a sound card with SPDIF input and start ripping thru the digital optical connection? Will this be the same quality as the CDDA data streams?" Now if something like this is possible, it would finally sell me on those multi-CD devices. I too am in the process of sending my CD tracks to MP3 format. It's a fun process, but a little bit of automation couldn't hurt.

Simple: I'll do it for you

[jcapell]

Send your CD collection to me, and I'll rip it at your prefered bit rate, all with proofed ID3v2 tags. I can't guarantee, tho, that a copy of the MP3s will not stay on my 160Gb Maxstore MaxAttach NAS that I maintain just for my .mp3 collection.

I'm serious - really.

This may sound silly but...

[JoeShmoe]

I actually hired a neighborhood kid to do that. A friend of mine was moving out of the area and I decided to make a local mirror of his collection so that I could continue to "borrow" CDs from him. It was around 400 CDs or so that I was interested in ripping but I quickly realized what a major hassle it was.

Then I got an idea and called up another friend and ask if his younger brother (age 13) wanted to earn a little money. I offered to pay $40 to rip them for me. I brought over a stripped down Win98 box with a fast CD-ROM and he got it done that weekend. All he had to do was stick the CD in, wait for CDDB to fill in the names, and click the convert button in MusicMatch or whatever the hell I was using back then. Rinse, repeat.

I mean, kids these days are usually familiar with the process anyway. A completely low-tech solutions but hey, if this is a one time deal why buy hardware that costs ten times as much?

- JoeShmoe

Re:Probably not going to work the way you want

[apago]

The few reviews I've seen for Creative Soundblaster Live's optional SPDIF input haven't been good. I'm worried about timing the start/stop of the cdrecord program to match the cd spinning up/down in the juke.

Re:be careful ....

[dfn5]

The setup that I have for ripping CDs to ogg vorbis files is a two machine process. I have a ripping machine that dumps the wav files into an NFS directory. That process takes about 20 minutes per CD. I have that process automated to the point where I enter one command, and it rips the CD, and then eject it so I can get the next CD in as quickly as possible.

The second machine is a Sun E450 with 4 processors. I have a process that sits out there looking for albums that are ready to be encoded, and keeps 4 albums encoding simultaneously.

The whole process works fairly well and the encoding is almost as fast as the ripping, so the only thing left is an automated way to switch CDs. If anyone can figure that out, that would be sweet. (And I'd be in Ogg Vorbis heaven).

Re:Hack time?

[Phork]

for linux there is software that will do exactly what you want. I use a program called abcde, it is really a frontend for various rippers and encoders and cddb. it combines them seamlessly. To encode a cd to mp3 i just put it in the drive, and type abcde. 20 minutes later i have the mp3s on my harddrive, stored in /mp3/artistname/albumname all with proper id3 tags. where the files are stored is configurable, how they are named is configurable, what ripper and encoder is used is configurable. i use lame set for 256k high quality and cdparanoia. you can find abcde at http://lly.org/~rcw/abcde/page/ [lly.org].

Re:False

[statusbar]

Actually, you are only partly correct.

AES/EBU & SPDIF extract the clock from the incoming encoded bitstream with a phase locked loop. If you use this clock to drive your D/A converters, you are bound to the recovered PLL clock jitter specs. Tiny amounts of clock jitter cause real noise and distortion (Non-Harmonic Distortion!).

HOWEVER, in this case, you are just receiving the data words and storing them. The timing of these words is not important anymore. You don't care about clock jitter. That is not recorded when you store the the words to disk. So AES/EBU & SPDIF clock jitter do not matter in this case.

Anyways, that sucks if your sound card wants to sample-rate-convert the signal up to 48khz. Yes, that will cause distortion. My RME Audio 9652 (24 adat optical in/out, spdif in/out, wordclock, 44.1, 48, 96khz) pci card doesn't do that.

However unless they use a really crappy sample rate converter algorithm, that distortion will be masked by the mp3 encoding distortion.

--jeff

Changers aren't worth the bother

[jaffray]

I've ripped and encoded about 1000 CDs. Lessons learned:

1) Ripping requires significant manual work if you want good results - in particular, cleaning up missing or incorrect or inconsistent data from FreeDB/CDDB, and cleaning/repairing/retrying discs that you can't get a clean rip from the first time. (And normalizing if you want that.) Even if you could reduce manual CD-changing to zero, it'd still be a tedious process.

2) Ripping isn't easy. You really want a player with fast reliable DAE and software you can trust to detect possible errors. Ripping a large collection is enough work that you don't want to redo it because you eventual discover sporadic errors in your first results.

3) CDROM drives are cheap and well-supported. CD changers are expensive and require kludges. Instead of messing with a changer, it makes a lot more sense to stick a few extra CDROM drives in your system. Borrow some good drives and an extra IDE or SCSI controller, or buy/sell them on eBay to effectively get a cheap rental. Then rip the discs four or five at a time at 15-20x using cdparanoia.

Rip all CDs to WAVs on RAID, make MP3s w/multi PCs

[MMHere]

Crunching MP3s from WAVs is the time consuming part. I focused on automating this.

I ripped all of my ~400 CDs to WAV format stored on a Linux RAID which is shared on my home network. I have two Western Digital 120GB drives striped in RAID-0, which gives me about 220GB useable online storage -- easily enough for 400 uncompressed CDs.

Granted, the ripping process was not automated with a juke, but it only took about 5 minutes per CD with my Plextor CD-ROM/R/RW drive.

The most time consuming part is converting WAVs to MP3. I've decoupled the ripping and compressing processes, and automated the latter. I do this with LAME running on multiple machines against a common data store (on the RAID).

I have a simple "multi-processing" script which runs on Linux and windoze clients; I run one copy of it per PC on the net that can reach the input WAV repository and the output MP3 repository. These two repositories can be on the same RAID, or can be at different locations on the net.

Each album is represented by a single directory of WAVs, and each copy of the script (running one copy of the script on each of several PCs) "owns" the crunching of a single album directory from WAV to MP3.

Since the crunching process is primarily CPU bound (not I/O bound) throwing multiple machines at it radically speeds the conversion process. The 100Mbps NICs and switch I have are more than enough I/O bandwidth. I can even use some PCs which live elsewhere in the house (on the other side of a ~10Mbps HPNA2/phone-net bridge).

I can process the entire collection from WAV to MP3 in about a day using 7 PCs of various vintage. House stays nice and warm too.

Since I haven't yet found the "best" LAME command line incantation for me, I've found that I've re-crunched the WAVs->MP3s more than once. My plan is to keep all the original WAVs around until I find a set of LAME conversion options that create MP3s nearly indistiguishable [to my ears] from WAVs.

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Juke auomation idea is pretty darn cool. I could have physically loaded 200 CDs in a fraction of an hour. Less than a day later (assuming 8X rip speed is somehow possible), the RAID would have been ~1/2 full with no further intervention by me.