Automated Ripping with CD Jukeboxes? 274
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.
be careful .... (Score:2, Informative)
I have 3 scsi cdroms on my box
Then again, depends on your processor, so ymmv.
Re:be careful .... (Score:2)
Re:be careful .... (Score:1)
Re:be careful .... (Score:2)
Re:be careful .... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:be careful .... (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:be careful .... (Score:2)
It's still that.
There's much less error correction on Audio CDs. This allows a slightly higher data rate at the exact same rotational speed as a 150 kbps Data CD (which is full of error correction that must be read, and if not used, discarded).
>Just like the original DVD drives are now called "1x"
Yes and no... original DVD drives spun the disc just fast enough to read the maximum data rate a valid DVD could be encoded at (10 Mbps IIRC). This makes fast forwarding a painful process...
Re:be careful .... (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:be careful .... (Score:2, Interesting)
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).
No problem. Use the napalm! (Score:2)
Re:be careful .... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:be careful .... (Score:2)
On my 450 mhz dual g4 mac, os-x, iTunes simultaneously rips and encodes for me at 11 times real time. With a real encoder.
--jeff
Re:be careful .... (Score:2)
Re:be careful .... (Score:2)
--jeff
Hack time? (Score:1)
with a Plextor reader??
Is there a nice automated ripper that pulls track info and builds the ID3 and all just from dropping a CD in the tray?
Re:Hack time? (Score:1, Informative)
there are alot of perl scripts that do this plus.. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Hack time? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Hack time? (Score:2)
SoundJam on the Mac will do that. Just keep feeding it CDs.
Re:Hack time? (Score:2)
I used MusicMatch under Win98. I can't recommend it very highly. The ripping was not very reliable. If the disk had any scratches Musicmatch would switch to analog mode and record silence.
The biggest problem was management of the volume control. Each time IE or any other application grabbed focus the volume would change. This made it impossible to use the PC for anything other than playback.
I switched to XP and the problems are fixed. However MSFT's player is pretty slick and is not nagware. You have to buy a third party MP3 encoder but the WAV support is built in.
Media player does not handle multple CD Rom drives very well. There is no feature to queue up several disks. But there is an open API and a plug in architecture. So CDROM jukebox vendors should be imposed upon to provide the appropriate plug in.
A few simple factors (Score:1)
Potential with DVDs (Score:2)
Imagine if you did this with a DVD jukebox. Throw them in, turn on
PowerFile DVD jukebox (Score:2)
You can buy a 200 disk DVD/CD jukebox for $999 from PowerFile [dvdjukebox.com]. 32X read of CD, CDROM, etc., 6x read of DVD, DVDROM, etc. This thing talks IEEE-1394. Note that it doesn't decode anything; it just reads and ships the stored bits. You need a separate decoder. Proper Linux interfacing is left as an exercise for the student.
autorip a good start (Score:1)
i've been hacking on autorip to support a multi-cd tower (mines on scsi so at least that part is easy).
autrip is a perl front-end to cdparanoia/freedb/ and a wav to mp3/ogg converter.
it's written for one device, but easily hacked for multiple (even if just the cheap way of forking it a bunch of times)
it does track at a time converting so you don't need to worry about a disk full of wav's that need to be converted.
unfortunately i've put the project on hold -- i can't get a stable 2.4 kernel on my PPC box that supports XFS. Currently when I launch cdparanoia the kernel bombs.
Probably not going to work the way you want (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Probably not going to work the way you want (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Probably not going to work the way you want (Score:2)
Re:Probably not going to work the way you want (Score:2)
But the juke solution will rip 200 cd's in one sitting, whereas you will rip but just one. I unfortunately ripped my whole collection -- about 120 cds -- at 128k before realizing how much better 192k sounded (and before getting about 100 more gigs of space). I would love to have a 200-cd juke slowly-but-surely rip my collection in one pass. The old tortoise and the hare story.
I want to hear from people who use a beowulf-optimized encoder. That would certainly help minimize temp disk space. Wow, setup a juke like that and you could charge to rip people's cd collections to a 100-gig HDD with next-day service. Sounds like a great way to make beer money for the frat house.
Re:digital degradation (Score:2)
An SPDIF port is really just a 'special' synchronous serial port.
--jeff
False (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.republika.pl/mparvi/digital.htm [republika.pl]
http://www.geocities.com/jonrisch/jitter.htm [geocities.com]
Btw.: Many [most?] sound cards use 48khz as an internal sample rate and upsample any sound signal that has a lower frequency. A 44.1khz CD track would therefor be upsampled to 48khz if input via the SP/DIF connector on the sound card. This, of course, degrades the sound signal somewhat.
Re:False (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Some might think it's better this way. (Score:2, Informative)
-apg
---------------
"Oh, Precious Roy you get us every time..."
-Sifl and Olly
Track info (Score:3, Insightful)
CDDB etc. use the track lengths etc. to work out which album it is but this information won't come along with the audio, so you'll need to post-process the ripping operation to look up the album and rename the files or you going to have 1.mp3 through 3000.mp3 which would be a PITA!
Re:Track info (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Track info (Score:2, Informative)
A way around "Copy-Protected" CDs? (Score:1)
If you can't rip them (due to the "defects" added to them to induce clicking noises), you can certainly encode the digital output (assuming you have a sound card that has the proper inputs), and get your mp3s that way.
Hhhmmm... it seems that the first person/company to come up with a self-contained device that does this could make a lot of money...
External Jukeboxes can at best RIP at 1X (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Top ripping speed is 1x... slow
2. No disc info, so no CDDA type track ID info, are you going to type in all the track info?
3. No standard interface for controlling the external jukebox.
So although it would be GREAT to rip 50, 100 or more CDs at a time, there is no inexpensive way to do it.
A few years ago there were SCSI jukeboxes commonly available. I have a couple 7 disc ones sitting on my shelf, one 2x, the other 4x. Sadly both are so old they do not support audio ripping.
Unfortunately that market seems to have all but disappeared to be replaced with SCSI jukebox towers. You can build one yourself using cheap SCSI CD-ROM drives, and a big SCSI tower case. ComputerGeeks sells 24x SCSI CD-ROM drives for $15 each:
http://www.compgeeks.com/details.asp?invtid=240
You don't even REALLY need a case, you could just stack them up, tape them together, and use an old AT power supply to give them juice. Heat is not an issue since you are only using one at a time.
Re:External Jukeboxes can at best RIP at 1X (Score:2, Informative)
2. I think this will fix that: http://akom2.2y.net:81/mp3ascd/ [2y.net]
3. Thats what he is asking about, is there a way to do it?
Re:External Jukeboxes can at best RIP at 1X (Score:2, Informative)
2) I already can get track info via freedb.org. I calculate the diskid via the slink-e interface to the sony jukebox.
3) I also control the juke via slink protocols.
Re:External Jukeboxes can at best RIP at 1X (Score:2)
It looks like the only thing you are looking for is the audio connection, and yes, many new sound cards have both coax and fiber SPDIF IO. Check out the creative live/audigy, or the Soyo DRAGON motherboard. The digital audio should be lossless, and error corrected by the jukebox electronics, so you should be able to record with any standard recording software (wavr on my debian box). Throw together some scripts to synchronize the recording start with the signal from the jukebox and you should be set.
Re:External Jukeboxes can at best RIP at 1X (Score:2)
CyberDrive 24x (Score:2, Informative)
I used to use one of these with CDParanoia - When it was in a good mood, it'd just give me an endless pile of jitter errors - When it was in a bad mood, it'd flood my SCSI bus and cause General Badness. The same disks ripped OK with my Plextor, but that isen't exactly fair, is it? :)
I guess most people would assume that a $15 SCSI peripheral would be junk, but I thought a comment was worth making before somebody dropped $150 on ten of these things.
Re:External Jukeboxes can at best RIP at 1X (Score:2, Funny)
On the other hand, you might find the cost of training prohibitively expensive...
Re:External Jukeboxes can at best RIP at 1X (Score:2)
> wouldn't let me order more than six. Only $90
You got the last of them! They are no longer listed. The only SCSI drives they have left are 1x and 2x.
When I posted the link, they must have had more, I was able to put in 7 drives (but I didn't order them, I was concerned about their quality and speed of ripping).
If you want more of the 24x CyberDrives, they have them here for $16 each:
http://www.pcbuyerclub.com/shop/IPS003.asp?ProC
some problems... (Score:2, Insightful)
2) You won't be able to automate the naming of files and id3 tags. You'll have to name every track manually.
Re:some problems... (Score:5, Informative)
Most SPDIF receiver chips (e.g., those from Crystal Semiconductor) provide a way for a processor to examine the Channel and User bits. I have no idea whether common PC sound cards have this capability. Wiring up an ISA card with a Crystal Semi receiver chip would be pretty easy.
For details, I recommend
A couple of problems (Score:5, Informative)
1) Speed. AFAIK, multi-disk CD changers only read at 1X. Even with the highest qualtiy settings, I can encode at 3-4 times that rate on my dual CPU PIII.
2) Access to TOC. This is the real killer: if you want all the nice freedb lookups to work right, you need to extract the TOC from the disk and compute a hash of it. I am almost positive this doesn't go down the SPDIF line.
The speed I could deal with (just leave it running when you go on vacation for a week or so), but unless you want a hard drive full of unnamed
Don't know about PCs, but on the Mac use PowerFile (Score:5, Informative)
Anyone know how this could work on PC/Linux? They have a M$ SDK here [powerfile.com] which includes visual basic samples.
Re:Don't know about PCs, but on the Mac use PowerF (Score:2)
Ah well... time to tell the boss how badly we need a CD jukebox.
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With another drive... (Score:1)
Simple: I'll do it for you (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm serious - really.
This may sound silly but... (Score:5, Interesting)
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:This may sound silly but... (Score:5, Funny)
Not bad... (Score:3)
2. Child labour
3. Hiring someone to commit crimes for you
The Kinderegg commercial is so right, you can get three things at once. And it gets modded up to +5, Interesting. Remind me to quote it next time slashdot complains about those damn pirates ruining their wonderful fair use world...
Of course I'm inclined to do exactly the same thing myself, so maybe I'm a good slashdot'er too
Kjella
Re:You cheap SOB. (Score:2)
Re:You cheap SOB. (Score:2)
So you're looking at about an hour and twenty minutes of actual work... it comes out closer to $30/hr.
Re:You cheap SOB. (Score:2)
//rdj
Re:This may sound silly but... (Score:2)
oh, good luck.
contributing to the delinquency of a minor is a serious offence, and what's more requires the minor to be delinquent.
normally that means the minor has a rap sheet that's a few pages long.
copyright infringement is criminal, sure, but you have to go pretty far with it: hiring a kid to copy music for a weekend just isn't as bad as hiring a kid to service johns for a year or two.
Re:This may sound silly but... (Score:2)
how about "-1 no sense of humour" on the metamod system?
dunno about unix, but (Score:2)
this is a good program, because its halfway intelligent. it doesn't even store
a good product, and it has excellent scratch repair. its very much worth $30.
http://www.windac.de/ [windac.de]
Re:dunno about unix, but (Score:2)
USD$1000 - fsck that.
Slink-e, S/P-DIF, etc. (Score:5, Informative)
Every bit of audio present on a CD will be retrieved with a SPDIF connection. Enough quality for ya?
As for the interface and ease of writing discrete MP3 tracks when the SPDIF stream changes, tagging, etc., well, that's where a SPDIF connection becomes more of a hassle than normal ripping. But that's all really just a software issue -- all the hardware is available. Like the poster, I also have a Slink-e from Nirvis [nirvis.com]. Great box and it lets you pull approximate TOC info from the CD in a single or multi-disc Sony player (via an S-Link cable) to retrieve CDDB (or equiv) info for tagging or naming. You'll need another connection (S-Link, for example) alongside the SPDIF connection for player/disc/track data.
The Slinke hardware is platform independent, though the software the give away with it is entirely Windows. Search around and you'll see some Linux and Apple support for the Slink-e also...
in Python [connactivity.com]
someone's project & some links [www.hut.fi]
HA support [sourceforge.net]
By the way, the Slink-e is great for general infrared in/out in addition to controlling Sony (and a few other manufacturers') CDs, MDs, receivers, TVs, etc.
Re:Slink-e, S/P-DIF, etc. (Score:2, Informative)
We had a sound card with a TossLink input that did an outstanding job of recording from the Sony changers.
CDJ made it easier to get the track names since it handled the CDDB stuff, and it had an automation interface so we could control it (and the CD player) from the program.
We built a version in about a week that would rip two sample CD's we'd made for the purpose.
When we went to production we had various problems - mainly, with the Slink-E, there are enough delays that you can't guarantee you are starting the recording at the right place. The gap isn't always the same, so you can't add a set amount to the beginning.
The end is even worse - For a track reported as 2:30 by the player when it started, sometimes 2:30 was the last time indication we'd see. Other itmes, 2:29 was the last indication. This made it very hard to stop recording at the right place.
I don't know if they ever used this or not, because I don't work there anymore. I think if I were doing it I'd use a computer, since you can rip faster than 1x.
Is there really a market? (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course it would be cool to throw all your CDs in a 50 CD changer and have it auto rip.. but would you buy one? The real question is, would you use it a second time?
Once you rip your collection, you only need to rip your new CDs (likely purchased one at a time) as you buy them. This you can do with a conventional CD drive.
I think at the cost that mp3 home audio is going for now, it isn't worth it to market or purchase something that is designed for this type of single use convienence.
Re:Is there really a market? (Score:2)
personally I've ripped my cd collection twice already. and I plan to rip them again when
avoid ide jukeboxes; they tend not to do DAE (Score:3, Informative)
I am told there's a few Nakamichi changers that extract DAE over the scsi bus.
you really don't want to be stuck with a 1x system (spdif). even 4x beats that. plus, when you extract over a computer bus (not spdif) you can ID the disc and even read its TOC to get the song lengths, and use that to get the network cddb info. with an spdif stream, none of that is do-able.
iTunes? cdslayer? (Score:5, Informative)
However, now that I'm using MacOS X as a desktop, I use iTunes, which is actually better, oddly enough. While it doesn't have the seperate rip/encode queues, it does have auto-eject & auto-encode on cd insertion. Where it beats out my old cd-slayer is speed. cd-slayer had seperate processes, iTunes does encoding as it's ripping!
The speed is pretty incredible, on some tracks (Front Line Assembly), it does the rip/encode process for 192K/s songs at 15.5X. More typically, I get 8X performance. iTunes smokes anything I've used by not only combining both processes, but having a nice SMP AltiVec Fraunhoffer based encoder.
So, this still means a single CD takes 4 minutes, but that aint half bad. It still means spending 13 hours on the weekend inserting a new CD when you hear the completion sound and the gears turning as your CD drive ejects. Slot drive encouraged!
So, if someone has a nice G4 around, do what my roommate does.. "Hey Thomas, can you rip these for me real quick?". Just an idea!
Re:iTunes? cdslayer? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:iTunes? cdslayer? (Score:2)
I've also got dual drives, and only ripped the songs I'd actually listen to, both of which I'd say halved my time, because I could preview the disk I wasn't ripping and decide which tracks I wanted. And iTunes remembers your settings, so I could preview a queue of disks, and then go off to do other things, and then whenever I walked by my computer and had a disc sticking out, just replace and insert.
Database of CD UPCs available? (Score:2)
This is for a personal, non-commercial project to inventory my discs. Therefore, licensing expensive databases with "commercial" pricing is out of the question. I'd consider hacking together a script which would submit it to an online vendor (such as an amazon or cdnow) and parse the results, however I haven't found anyone who accepts UPC searches.
Any ideas?
Re:Database of CD UPCs available? (Score:2)
Having just ripped 800+ CDs.... (Score:3, Informative)
Having said that, if I had to do it all over again, it would make a lot of sense to rip the CDs to wavs on a linux box, then have a cronned script to encode them.
By and large, the ripping took longer than the encoding. I was normalizing my CDs, so maybe that had something to do with it, but it'd be really nice if I could rip, rip, rip, then have my linux fileserver's processor manage the encoding while I was gone.
I think this concept maximizes the time that a human actually has to be around, and lets the computers do all of the repetitive crap. Which, of course, they are good at.
Ripping to
Take your time, convert it to a format you WANT, and let the computers do as much work as you are comfortable with.
Speaking from experience, you definitely will NOT want to do this again.
Lego Mindstorms (Score:2, Funny)
When a CD was finished ripping, the PC would automatically eject the CD. The machine would sense the tray being out and pick up the CD (using a piece of double sided tape on the end of an arm). The CD would be dropped to the left of the CD tray (using a little pneumatic "solenoid") and the mechanism would go off to the right of the CD tray, pick up another CD, drop it in the tray. The whole process was timed perfectly so the drive would know when to close. The to-be-burned stack was simply stacked onto one of those spindles you get when you purchase a bunch of blank CD's. It worked pretty well but I took it apart before I documented it.
Now that I've been laid off
Geoffeg
I've done it and it's GPLed (Score:5, Informative)
http://jukebox-control.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
Interfacing to grip, lame, etc is fairly easy. It has FreeCDDB interfacing and can grab the TOC from the disc. It also will write the title information back to the jukebox so that you can easily select discs from the front panel.
Re:I've done it and it's GPLed (Score:3, Informative)
Amazing, but true.
Moderators use your points and give this guy just credit !
XBox = painful CD ripping (Score:3, Funny)
I love being able to listen to my music while playing Tony Hawk, but it's painful to get to that point. Can't wait until they get this thing online so it can download the names from the CDDB.
Re:XBox = painful CD ripping (Score:2)
But hey, I've got a copy of XMMS from 1998 that doesn't download track titles either, if we want to play this game.
Re:XBox = painful CD ripping (Score:2)
My point was that the CD Player that I have seen from MS, before they gave up on it altogether was the most broken lookup thing I've ever seen, written at a time when dozens of other apps were doing it right. I've avoided newer versions of media player for their huge size (screenwise) and rights-management [I expect I can turn it off - rah rah. I don't care, I don't use it].
This is sooo close!!! (Score:2)
Look at it: A 200 disc audio CD changer that can be computer controlled through an easily accessible interface.
Now, why isn't that CD drive a CD-ROM, or better yet, a CD-RW drive? Who here wouldn't want to have approx 140 gig of optical R/W storage - cheaply?
There are larger changers available as well - 400 discs and more. They are cheap.
Oh, yeah - they do make "commercial" CD-ROM/RW jukeboxes - but instead of being $250.00 - they are $5-15K! WTF? It must be because it seems like a niche market.
I have a ton of CD-ROMs and CD-Rs that I would love to be able to load into a jukebox to use at a click of a mouse. I have even thought about what it would take to build my own jukebox, or possibly convert an existing cheapo jukebox.
I know some of you are thinking "Dude! Get a few 100 gig IDE drives and shut up!" - All I have to say to that is that you are forgetting that these hard drives can crash, and there is no cheap way to back up - while a CD will last a very long time - you don't have to worry about it much.
I just can't understand the large difference for something that would be cheap and easy to do for a manufacturer...
Re:This is sooo close!!! (Score:2)
You have a point, which is valid for music CDs.
However, I am thinking data CDs (ie, CD-ROMs), and more specifically, CD-Rs and CD-RWs - things you have burned yourself. Standard, off-the-shelf CD-ROMs (like games, etc) that you buy would still pass the test you proclaim. But when it comes to stuff you burned yourself, things get a bit more tricky.
It would be nice just to have something that could burn on the fly, and archive them - rather than burning the CD, which creates the backup, from whatever is on the hard drive (array or whatever).
I can see your point, but an all optical system would be nice as well...
Re:DIY? (Score:2)
The lower cost players (such as AIWA and Pioneer) can be nice, but you don't know what kind of CD mechanism they use (ie, who the manufacturer of it was) in order to get a similar mech from a CD-ROM or RW drive by the same manufacturer.
Plus, I would be willing to bet the manufacturers purposefully use different style connectors, cables, etc - to PREVENT this kind of thing occurring. That is just a gut feeling, though.
But you idea is sound. I am thinking one day just picking up a cheap unit off of Ebay, then futzing with it to see if I can get something rigged up. I am thinking a serial port selection interface, and a cheap IDE CD-RW drive on the back end.
If I ever do it, I will be sure to post to
;)
Do it with normal CDROM changers (Score:2)
Re:Do it with normal CDROM changers (Score:2)
Changers aren't worth the bother (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Changers aren't worth the bother (Score:2)
I just finished ripping +- 1300 CD's. Took me almost 4 months...
1) Ripping requires significant manual work if you want good results - in particular, cleaning up missing or incorrect or inconsistent data from FreeDB/CDDB
I gave up on FreeDB and its typos, it was faster just to type in everything myself.
and cleaning/repairing/retrying discs that you can't get a clean rip from the first time.
I used ExactAudioCopy [exactaudiocopy.de], it rips perfectly!
btw, i used LAME 3.89beta, it takes quite a while, but at least i'll be sure i have near-perfect mp3's... The commandline i used is: -V1 -b128 -mj -h -q1 (VBR, average bitrate over 7600 songs is 181.5). Its rather pointless to use Xing to rip over a 1000 CD's, it will not sound good.
Bite the bullet (Score:2)
Get yourself 3 things:
Fastest computer you can get your hands on,
Fastest Plextor CD-ROM/CDR you can afford,
and a skipdoctor (skipdoctor.com) to repair thrashed discs
Do them in your spare time, if your watching tv, just get up every commercial break and insert a new cd
Rip all CDs to WAVs on RAID, make MP3s w/multi PCs (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Rip all CDs to WAVs on RAID, make MP3s w/multi (Score:2)
Why not use MP3.com? (Score:5, Funny)
site confirms that you own a CD, and then you
can use their catalog of MP3's on the fly, saving
the trouble of ripping all of your CDs one at a time. It's a classic example of the American dream, where innovation with new technology creates new markets, expanding the horizons of creativity and comfort while driving the economy to everyone's benefit.
Oh, wait, the recording industry, which takes huge profits from the work of creative artists long after any of its contributions to production and marketing have been recouped, and sells product to consumers at monopoly prices, thus gouging both sides of the buyer-seller equation, might not benefit.
Oops...never mind.
Grip is your friend (Score:2, Informative)
It will read the audio at full speed, buffer it on the harddrive while converting, eject CD, start new rip when next CD is inserted.
So it takes a few minutes per CD, and you could easily do 20-50 CDs in a few hours if you have harddisk space for them to be buffered before conversion.
AudioCatalyst (Score:2, Informative)
cdex (Score:3, Informative)
Hardware hack (Score:2, Insightful)
My guess is that the disk changer has a lame latch to hold the cd in place.. that works fine for 1 or 2x.. but not for real fast... you might be able to get by that by installing a bigger spring or something.
-AP
Tech won't help much here (Score:2, Insightful)
With a good drive and a decent CPU (750mhz+), it shouldn't take more than 4-5 minutes per disc, which means 12-15 discs per hour. There also nothing preventing you from using multiple PC's (or just two drives in one box if the encoding is fast enough).
Of course if you have lots of money to burn on a gadget, you could buy a robotic disc changer (or build your own from legos). But the jukebox thing is doomed from the start.
Hard drive space. (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, I think he does want Automation. (Score:2)
Re:You want Automation? (Score:2, Informative)
Because the RIAA makes bad assumptions... (Score:2, Insightful)
However, I feel I should play Devil's Advocate here. The RIAA sees every MP3 created as a CD not purchased. If you went to MP3.Com, for example, and downloaded all of the 2000 (200 CD's x 10 songs per CD avg?) songs so that you don't have to swap CD's all the time, then they'd say 2000 more pirated songs were downloaded.
Is their logic correct? Heck no! But they use this flimsy logic to get the courts to pass silly laws like the DMCA. They don't see it them as backup copies, but rather copies intended to distribute to other people so people don't buy the CD's.
In a sense, I can see the RIAA being worried about this. The thing is, though, I think more and more people want to listen to individual songs and not CD's full of filler. This is scary for the RIAA because if people get their way, then they would only buy a song for $2 a pop instead of buying the album for $20. On top of that, they'd need media for each individual song. At that point, the individual artists don't even need the record industry anymore, they could sell that service by themselves! That business model suddenly doesn't sound so interesting, does it?
Getting back to your question, personally I'd recommend using Morpheus or whatever Napster clone is available to just build up your collection of songs, then only rip the ones you can't find. That way, instead of ripping 2000 or so songs, you may only end up ripping like 50.
Be careful, though. If the RIAA comes knocking at your door because of this article, be sure to have each and every one of your CD's ready to present to them.