Slashdot Asks: SATA DVD Drives That Don't Suck for CD Ripping? 330
To work around the problem, I've temporarily yanked an old Promise IDE card I had in an ancient K6-2 rig (timothy found parts of it in a dumpster even) and am using the old drive, but it's approaching a decade and was pretty heavily used. What with having lots of moving parts and a laser or three, I don't see it lasting another decade, and I'd like to have a drive usable with a bus that hasn't been deprecated for almost as long. I'd also like to avoid anything that can read/write Bluray, because the hardware implemented DRM is pretty heinous.
For those interested in the gory details of the hardware I ran cdparanoia -A on both drives: ide drive, sata drive. As you can see, the old drive is way faster, and it looks like the primary difference is that it also has a cache that works with non-linear access, but that behaves "correctly." If you own a drive you want to recommend and can analyze it with cdparanoia, I'm interested in seeing the output.
A note on software suggestions: it has to be FSF-definition Free Software, and GNU/Linux is the only operating system in my house. That basically leaves... cdparanoia. I'm a bit uptight when it comes to tagging (mostly because: once I've done this, will I ever have the stamina to re-tag? Nope), but I'm not trying to start a pirate CD factory and don't really care about getting 100% frame-accuarate rips, just error-free ones.
HP DVD Drives (Score:5, Informative)
Re:HP DVD Drives (Score:5, Funny)
I work in the entertainment industry, and we have to rip about 100 albums a month at work for online promotions of various sorts.
So, that's what you tell the judges?! And they believe it?!
"Well, your honor, I'm not a pirate! I'm doing this for promotional purposes for these movies and bands. Torrents? Oh! That's how we get our promotional copies. It's really efficient!"
Re:HP DVD Drives (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually I have downloaded torrents of CDs I own. It tends to be faster than ripping and someone else has already gone to the trouble of doing all the metadata, downloading album art and most importantly checked the quality of the rip.
The faster you rip the most likely you will get errors. Mostly they are inaudible because the CD format is designed to cope with a few bit errors, but for nerds like me it matters :-) There is an app for doing this (http://www.accuraterip.com/) but it does take a lot longer than a normal high speed rip.
Re:HP DVD Drives (Score:5, Informative)
Just use something like Exact Audio Copy. It does all that for you. It is pretty good at mending issues with CDs and automatically uses accuraterip.comto check tracks. It'll tell you how many tracks were ripped "accurately" and, if none, it'll tell you that you may have a different pressing to the one in the database etc.
Re:HP DVD Drives (Score:5, Informative)
EAC *IS* a great program, but still not anywhere NEAR being considered fast. One thing that annoys me is that it rips a track, compresses it, and does not even begin the next rip until the last track is compressed. Ever heard of "multitasking?" I am pretty sure that my computer could handle a rip and a compress at the same time.
Re:HP DVD Drives (Score:5, Informative)
You are wrong, it rips and encodes at the same time on my computer. You need to learn how to configure your settings!
I have Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit, AMD quad core CPU, 8GB RAM, EAC v1.0 Beta 3, LAME v3.99.5
Re:HP DVD Drives (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually I have downloaded torrents of CDs I own. It tends to be faster than ripping and someone else has already gone to the trouble of doing all the metadata, downloading album art and most importantly checked the quality of the rip.
You must not be picky with metadata tags accuracy. I gave up on torrents when I stumbled upon songs like Brown Eyes Girl by Jim Van Morrison or Red Red Wine by Neil Young.
Re:HP DVD Drives (Score:5, Insightful)
If there isn't a requirement to put both types of drive in the same slot, I'd suggest you get a good ripper (read only) to rip (for mounting in your rig), and use a separate external burner (USB) for burning. You could never saturate a basic USB while for burning and the lighter heads (Read Only) for ripping will give you a longer life on your DVD-Rom.
For drives, LiteOn used to be a great brand, but I think these days they only do OEM hardware. Dig around and see if you can find any and you should be golden.
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So you didn't look at the links, eh? The new drive that he hates is an iHAS.... AKA a recent Liteon DVDRW.
Re:HP DVD Drives (Score:4, Insightful)
You do realize the model he's using isn't exactly what one would normally use for ripping? it's a lightscribe drive, which is why I suggest a proper drive for the job rather than trying to use a one-size-fits-all that does none of them well.
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But his reference to "lighter heads" for readonly and his use of the term "DVDrom", suggest that a DVDRW is not what he was recommending.
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Actually Jmc23 is correct. I meant the DVD-Rom drive. In no bizzaro universe would the heads ever touch the disc. Lighter mechanicals in the drive make for less wear and tear on the drive.
Re:HP DVD Drives (Score:4, Informative)
In that case you are still wrong, since it doesn't have heads in the normal sense that disk drives have heads.
It has a laser that slides along a rail. It has a lense that jumps up and down to focus. You still need both of those even in a Read-only drive.
Recording is serially located along the disk. Nobody records movies with random placement of blocks.
Therefore, there is no rapid back and forth seeking involved on CD playing or burning to induce wear on
the mechanism.
The difference in weight of read lasers vs read and write lasers is negligible. The laser is tiny.
In fact many devices only have a single laser, and they use higher power to write than to read.
The only devices I am aware of having more than one Laser+Lens pair are some Blu Ray drives, which have a separate
lens+laser pair for backward compatibility with CDs.
I've had lasers fail, but never the mechanism. Even on the cheapest drives.
Re:HP DVD Drives (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, in a perfect world, mastering errors wouldn't exist to begin with -- it's perfect, remember? And over here in the real world, I normally get perfect rips from clean and undamaged CDs, even at rather high speeds.
Moving the head to re-read a single block? Just how physically wide do you think these blocks are that the weight of the head assembly would be a significant factor on either wear or speed, given the microscopic level of movement this entails?
Now then, I'm open to the suggestion that some readers may be better at ripping an audio CD than some recorders. But reasoning that excess mass must be the root of this perceived disparity seems more like blind faith than sound logic.
To wit, every cheap-shit DVD-RW that I have here, from Lite-on to LG, works both faster and better than the 32x Plextor SCSI CD-ROM reader that I bought exactly for this purpose ever did.
Re:HP DVD Drives (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, I don't think you know what you're talking about.
iHAS is not a feature or anything to be 'flashed out', it's the model number/name of the drive.
The firmware you linked to is still the Liteon firmware, it's just been patched to allow writing all the way to the rim of the DVD-R DL, specifically for piracy of Xbox 360 games with the XGD3 copy protection.
iHAS burners are a lousy choice for ripping audio CDs, and that's also true for damned near any current drive on the market. CD Audio extraction quality and speed is simply NOT a mass marketable feature anymore, and hasn't been for a while.
Re:HP DVD Drives (Score:5, Interesting)
THIS is why I cling to my Yamaha CRW-F1.
10 years old, 1000s of CDs ripped and burned, and never a bad rip, or a coaster to it's name!
Have you heard of these? Any thoughts?
Cheers!
Re: (Score:2)
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Hey this is /., I thought we all used Linux here.
Re:HP DVD Drives (Score:5, Funny)
maybe you'd feel better if you tried windows 7.
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Re:HP DVD Drives (Score:5, Insightful)
There are some artificially staunch Windows 8 supporters on Slashdot, Reddit, and other discussion groups. Try making a post critical of Windows 8 and you'll see this in action.
You know, it is POSSIBLE that some people out there actually like it. So far, I can't say that I do - but I once met a guy who does. No joke.
Re: (Score:3)
Ok - Instead of whinging about it, let's all form a working group, and create a /. type site that has all the best features that /. USED to have.
I'd definitely contribute if such an effort existed.
-Jar
Accuraterip accuracy list (Score:5, Informative)
http://forum.dbpoweramp.com/showthread.php?25782-CD-DVD-Drive-Accuracy-List-2012 [dbpoweramp.com]
Re:Accuraterip accuracy list (Score:5, Informative)
That Accuraterip list is horribly outdated for new purchases.
Almost none of the models that do well in their stats are for sale anymore.
Most are IDE as well.
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accuraterip grabs hashes of track data.. as long as you get the right number, you know (reasonably) that you have a good copy. The drive db is outdated, but all that's needed is to configure the read offset in the software for your drive. each is different.
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or a repress/remaster, or a bad reader, or a misconfigured offset in the software, etc..
Sound level.. (Score:5, Informative)
Most new drives come with a control for the sound level, which will intentionally keep them running slower so that they don't sound like they're going to take off.
http://hektor.umcs.lublin.pl/~mikosmul/computing/tips/cd-rom-speed.html
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I've had good luck with LG drives.
USB CD rom (Score:5, Interesting)
Buy a collection of USB CD roms, so you can rip many discs at once. Then you aren't pulling apart your computer to add these drives, and they have a lifetime beyond your current computer.
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There are problems with this proposal. IIRC, the accurate rippers need direct access to the hardware, or at least drives that do not buffer reads. I don't think there are USB bridges that will let this happen. Things could certainly have changed - I finished converting my CDs years ago.
Re:USB CD rom (Score:5, Informative)
If you care enough about quality that you're using AccurateRip and need to check how the drive is caching, a USB interface might not work. The sort of USB->SATA chipsets used in USB CD-ROMs, which are universally cheap devices nowadays, will likely not pass data through faithfully enough to be useful for accurate CD ripping.
That said, it is possible to find useful models if you test carefully. The external drive I'm using is a LG "Portable Super Multi Drive", model GP10NB20. LG makes many of the best CD ripping DVD drives available, and the USB chipset in this model is transparent enough for accurate ripping. At around $35, it's not the cheapest model on the market, but it's not like that's expensive.
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Being able to play bit-accurate data from a CD drive does not mean that you can extract audio from it. It is far easier to get CD-ROM data than audio off a CD.
The fundamental problem that makes ripping hard is mapping the audio stream, which was only designed to be played back continuously, into a series of sectors, and then reading all of them. Early CD-ROM drives didn't even allow repeatable positioning within the audio stream, suffering from what's called read offset jitter that wasn't consistent. It
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Oddly, it looks like PCIe (in the form of "Thunderbolt" and USB 3.0) will replace both of them.
and over load the slow usb bus (Score:2)
and over load the slow usb bus
firewire and e-sata are better then that.
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USB is plenty much faster than any drive on the planet can read CD-Roms
Add USB 3.0 in there too. (Score:2)
I do a lot of movement onto and off of compact flash media and such. I recently got a USB 3.0 card reader and woo-doggy is it faster.
Similarly I would expect that paying the tiny extra sum for 3.0 drives would let you stack a couple CD/DVD read/write devices onto your system a lot more efficently.
You really can bump your head into the 2.0 data limits pretty easily at times.
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every usb drive I"ve seen has a power brick..
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Then you haven't seen very many USB CD/DVD drives. I'd say most of them these days will actually happily work off a single USB port but will often include a USB cable that splits off in two - a data plug and a power plug - to drop it into 2 ports if 1 won't source enough current.
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Because (if you read the post you're replying to) USB makes it easier to add the drives and upgrade, and it means you can connect a large number of drives at once.
Advice from a DAE veteran (Score:5, Informative)
1. Stop using cdparanoia - it isn't very good, at all. It tests poorly, we're sad to say. The software you actually want to use is Exact Audio Copy. You want to use Secure Mode with NO C2, accurate stream, disable cache. Yes, we said DISABLE cache. Trust us on this. We checked. Very very extensively. Yes, we know it runs slowly: that is because it actually does need to physically read every sector at the very least twice - that's the POINT. Sadly EAC isn't open-source (and despite many years passing, there still is no open-source software that does a Secure Mode), and runs under Windows (although it will function in a virtual machine if the drive is passed through well, such as VMware).
2. Use AccurateRip in that if you can. Matching the read offset is strongly-recommended-to-required - ideally, find one of the few drives that can overread into lead-in AND lead-out. You won't hear it on many discs, until you come across That One Disc that has the track transitions exactly just so and thoroughly audible if they're off (despite the Red Book standard having a truly ridiculous amount of defined leeway either way).
3. Hardware time.
a) Best case scenario: The Plextor Premium, which does have a (rare) SATA version as well as the IDE version. That is the best CD drive ever made, and it is the highest quality DAE drive ever made, by far. That, and the above software (especially if you set the drive to "first session mode", or use AnyDVD), will rip clean through any "Copy Controlled" discs you may have in your collection too, by virtue of sheer quality. Be warned: that drive is no longer made, and REALLY sought-after. It will cost hundreds of dollars to find one new, and any used ones will be totally clapped-out by a lifetime of ripping and burning discs in professional CD-R duplication towers, or poorly refurbished.
b) Can't get that? The Plextor PX-716SA will do the best job of any DVD drive. If you can find one easily, grab it.
c) OK, plan C: something else. You'll need to check up on DAE quality. Check the offset tables on AccurateRip, which might give you a few clues. Lite-ON are way, way more reasonably priced, and some models work well at this; check them. So do a few LG drives. If you get lucky, you may have some good hardware already. Be warned, however, that you may NEED AnyDVD to rip any "Copy Controlled" discs that you may have correctly if you don't use one of the few drives that are out there that can do the job.
4. Destination: Rip it to FLAC --best. Really, you're making an archival copy, and you are probably talking about terabytes of storage to play with - why WOULDN'T you use a lossless codec that is suitable for archival, well-known, free and open source, contains an internal MD5 checksum, supported by damn near every toolchain, supports all the metadata you need, and is absolutely guaranteed to not leave you with any possible transcoding issues if you ever want to transcode to a lossy codec for portable or streaming usage at any bitrate in any codec you want in the future?
5. No online storage is even close to trustworthy enough for archival purposes. By all means, if you want, for convenience: but buy a couple of hard drives and put it on there too, and put them away. OK, they might not work after a long time on the shelf - that is a risk. But it is still A safety-net that is less likely to fail than an online storage company which bears a multitude of risks (many of them legal ones, if they are storing people's music files for them in any useful manner).
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The software you actually want to use is Exact Audio Copy. You want to use Secure Mode with NO C2, accurate stream, disable cache. Yes, we said DISABLE cache.
Many modern drives are built in such a way that "Secure Mode" won't give you any different results from any other mode, but will slow you down a lot. In particular, neither of the drives I recommend in my other post require you to enable the EAC features that result in very slow reads, yet you will still get the same output.
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1. Stop using cdparanoia - it isn't very good, at all. It tests poorly, we're sad to say. The software you actually want to use is Exact Audio Copy.
Hey, marketing your product on Slashdot is fine, but posting your ad as AC is poor form.
Re:Advice from a DAE veteran (Score:5, Interesting)
1. The problem with EAC is that it's not open-source, and while it'll run on Linux with Wine, it requires you to use a GUI, which may not be an option on headless boxes. I won't deny that cdparanoia isn't as good as XLD, EAC, or dBPoweramp, but for a Linux box, it's still about as good as you can get, and although it doesn't support C2, cdparanoia III 10.2 does finally do well with most disc caches today. I mentioned in another reply here that I've used cdparanoia pretty reliably, although there are still issues (you need to keep a close eye on the quality gauge, as its repair mechanisms can actually deterministically mess up a CD rip!) But with a high-quality CD drive (Like the Plextors you mention) that gives low error rates by default and some double-checking of cdparanoia errors (i.e. assume that if cdparanoia reports that a track has errors that it didn't correct them), cdparanoia will work about as well as any other option. Yeah, you can't recover from errors as well as EAC or dBPoweramp can, but if you've got a pretty clean CD collection, you won't be too bad off. Combine cdparanoia with some of the command-line AccurateRip tools out there (as you mention), and you can probably be pretty sure your rips are good.
2. The only downside with AccurateRip is that it's not actually compatible with the GPL (use of the database imposes additional restrictions that aren't GPL compatible). The CUETools Database [cuetools.net] is GPL compatible (and even can repair some errors using some parity data!), but as of right now, no command-line tools play with it on Linux, and it's probably always going to be a little worse than AccurateRip due to fewer tools supporting it. I've been meaning to add support to rubyripper, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.
3. The Plextor PX-716UF is the external USB version of the 716SA, and may be better suited to setups where you absolutely don't want an IDE bus in your machine.
Response from CDParanoia author (Score:5, Insightful)
> Stop using cdparanoia - it isn't very good, at all. It tests poorly, we're sad to say.
Really! As the author, I'd love to hear hard specifics. or maybe a bug report.
> You want to use Secure Mode with NO C2, accurate stream, disable cache.
You can't disable the cache on a SATA/PATA ATAPI drive. The whole point of cdparanoia's extensive cache analysis is to figure out a way to defeat the cache because it can't be turned off. There is no FUA bit for optical drives in ATA or MMC.
The 'accurate stream' bit is similarly useless (every manufacturer interprets it differently) and C2 information is similarly untrustworthy.
Plextors are not recommended for error free or fast ripping. They try to implement their own paranoia-like retry algorithm in firmware and do a rather bad job about it. They also lie about error correcting information (you do not get raw data, you get what the drive thinks it has successfully reconstructed). Plextors often look OK on pristine disks, but if you hit a bit error (like on just about any burned disk), you don't know what it's going to do. Plextors are, overall, among the more troublesome drives _unless_ you're using a ripper that does no retry checking (ie, NOT cdparanoia and NOT EAC). If you use iTunes, you want a Plextor. Otherwise, avoid them.
Why change optical drives? (Score:2)
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Why would he want it to last a decade?
He wants to rip his collection NOW. If it fails in 3 years it would not matter, especially since he will never let such a huge queue of to-be-ripped discs pile up (making the ripping speed of any replacement less important)
Alternative approaches: multi-CD, services, arrr! (Score:5, Informative)
Just throwing some other approaches out there - I'm sure people will point to SATA drives that rip plenty fast (myce.com is sure to have some recommendations, for what it's worth).
Alternative A: Why just 1 drive? Get multiple. They're cheap (sub-$15 for an external CD drive that'll happily do DVD as well. And burn them. Sell them on when you're done.)
Alternative B: Better yet, since you have so many discs, get a (semi-)automatic CD changer system. Sit back, let it rip a bunch at a time. Sell system on when done.
Alternative C: Why even bother with it yourself at all? Go find a CD ripping service. I have no experience with these guys - http://musicshifter.com/ [musicshifter.com] - but at less than $1/CD and the option to have them rip lossless (yes, including FLAC) and send them a drive to put it on, perhaps it's worth it to let them deal with it and use your time and effort elsewhere. I know it's not much effort (I just digitized every single Stargate DVD between working on things, just swapping out the DVDs - each taking about half an hour), but the option is out there anyway.
Alternative D: Piracy! Well, it's not really piracy since you already have the CDs. There's some sites out there that will happily let you submit your CD's code (either the simple code used by e.g. Windows 95's media player or a more complex one) and spit out links for getting digitized versions. I'll let you do the Googling there.
Alternative E: Buy them. Certainly a lot (understatement, seriously) more expensive than the other options, but on the up side you should get perfect metadata, album art, etc. included.
Re:Alternative approaches: multi-CD, services, arr (Score:4, Interesting)
The OP didn't mention why the need to re-rip and why he's going with FLAC (other than the obvious FLAC benefits and a concern over media longevity), but if he has the CDs and is concerned about the time to rip, go lossy! And if so I'll add one more alternative that will save even more time:
Alternative F: Purchase one year of iTunes Match ($25 US) and you probably won't need to rip most of your CDs at all. Depending on what you have now the downloaded iTunes versions may be of better quality. I'm making the assumption he doesn't already have them in FLAC format because if so why re-rip?
Mass ripping (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem isn't the drive speed, but the amount of manual labor involved in placing hundreds of drives, sorting out the ones that have failed to be retried, and then restocking them. There are multiple optical disk loaders out there, but they aren't intended for transient use and usually require a painful data entry step at the beginning before the drive can locate them.
I have a similar problem, but for a collection of over a thousand mixed-media items. What I've settled on is building a three-spindle set and using a robotic arm with a vaccum sucker to life each item off the spindle and set it into the drive. The spindles are incoming, complete, and failed. The arm is controlled by a simple microcontroller and a couple of sensors to track position and success of each pickup, and connected by USB to custom software. The software alarms if there's a failure, and stepper motors for precise location. The arm "free-falls" from the top of the platter (on a gas piston to reduce contact shock) and a pressure sensor to detect when contact with the next item has been made. It also controls the drive eject/load and the ripping software is triggered using auto-it scripts. Any failure is detected the same way, by watching window titles, and then signalling pickup of the optical media after. There is also a webcam placed directly over the optical drive insert with a bright LED, and a picture is taken of the 'top' of each inserted media at high quality (in case the title is only printed on the inner track). The picture is placed in the same directory as the ripped ISO, and each directory labelled sequentially.
All of this makes post-processing a lot easier; The system can be loaded once a day (before I go to work), and when I get home, it will have ripped about 13 bluray discs. It only takes me a few minutes to rename each ISO to match the disk title from the image, after which it's placed in the pending folder which the ripper autoloads periodically.
But this setup requires knowledge of basic programming and some basic understanding of how robotic tasks are performed; And a significant understanding of electronics and assembly. Any of the homebrew microprocessor kits out there can perform the interface tasks as long as they have GPIO pins. Arduino, for example, has pre-built shields for controlling stepper motors to further simplify this process. The hardest part for me was building the actual robot arm; For that, I looked to how 3D printers are assembled as they've largely solved the problem of using stepper motors and precise placement within a 3D space without significant feedback.
Just make sure your robot's "sucker" can reliably release the optical media and not drag it; it only takes a little bit of moisture or stickiness to lift the optical media slightly and misposition it in the tray, and once the LOAD command is sent, your drive will eat the disc, permanently damaging it. It's also difficult to detect this in software -- the only indication of fault will be an unreadable disk and drive being unresponsive to load/eject commands. Make sure your apparatus fails safe, and I suggest testing all possible failure modes with throw-away media before using on production material.
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All of this makes post-processing a lot easier; The system can be loaded once a day (before I go to work), and when I get home, it will have ripped about 13 bluray discs.
Unless you are just storing the ISO images, I have found that all the other stuff that has to be done to the movie (cropping, filtering/color correction decisions, which audio tracks to keep and in what format, identifying which playlist corresponds to which TV episode, accurate chapter placement, etc.) take long enough compared to the 20-40 minutes it takes to get the Blu-Ray onto the hard drive that I have plenty of stuff to do on the last ripped disc while the current one rips in the background.
If I am r
IDE to USB.. (Score:2)
I know it's a bit late now, but instead of voiding the warranty on your new shiny, you could've just gotten an IDE to USB adapter. A raw CDRom drive may not be the prettiest thing sitting on the desk, but once you get all your CDs ripped, you won't be needing it again until you buy a new CD, if even then. 15 min. to rip a CD isn't much when you only have one. You can rip that out while catching up on the days /. and email.
Wrong solution. Think parallelism. (Score:5, Interesting)
Years ago when I had to rip all of my CDs to MP3s, I had about 500 to go through. I was a Linux user, so take this with a grain of salt if you're not one, but I simply went to the local university surplus yard, picked up 12 2x SCSI CDs for about $5 each, and connected them to some spare SCSI adapters and powered them with junk PC power supplies and 4-pin Y-cables. I'm sure you could cook up something similar these days with SATA or even USB and cheap eBay bare-board SATA->USB adapters. You could probably piece together at least a 4-6 drive solution for less than $100.
Then, I wrote a shell script that leveraged some basic shell tools. I don't remember what they were (I haven't done this for years), but one was cddb-something (queried online CD databases) and of course cdparanoia and lame and I think one called id3tag.
I scripted things up with the following logic, run on all drives simultaneously:
While (forever):
Poll drive for inserted CD.
If one is in, query cddb, save names in shell variables.
Rip using cdparanoia and default filenames, encode with lame.
Rename all files using track names in shell variables and folder using album and artist in shell variables.
Use id3tag to tag MP3 files according to file and folder names.
Eject disc.
End while.
Ran this on all 12 drives simultaneously in a terminal. Whenever a tray popped out, I took out the CD that had just been ripped and tossed it in the "done, recycle plastic medium" pile, and then stuck in the next CD in the queue and closed the tray.
With all drives cranking, it took no more than a couple days' intermittent CD-inserting (in the midst of doing whatever else I was working on--browsing the web, writing, studying, etc.) to move through the queue. And then I was done.
When I was done, I stuck all of the basically valueless drives in the garage, and I think years later they ended up at the dump.
If I'd had to nurse along a single drive, I don't think I'd be done to this day. Too big a PITA. 12 slow drives with an automated script > 1 fast drive by hand.
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Friends don't let friends not upload their source.
Wrong approach (Score:5, Funny)
ASUS DRW-24B1ST (Score:3)
Never had a single problem with this drive. Available here: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827135204 [newegg.com]
Seek/read timing:
[53:27.17]: 18ms seek, 0.30ms/sec read [45.0x]
[50:00.32]: 17ms seek, 0.30ms/sec read [45.0x]
[40:00.32]: 20ms seek, 0.33ms/sec read [40.0x]
[30:00.32]: 16ms seek, 0.37ms/sec read [36.0x]
[20:00.32]: 21ms seek, 0.41ms/sec read [32.7x]
[10:00.32]: 25ms seek, 0.48ms/sec read [27.7x]
[00:00.32]: 50ms seek, 0.63ms/sec read [21.2x]
LG HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GH24LS50 YP01 (Score:3)
I have a cheap, bog standard LG brand SATA drive that seems to do OK. I don't rip audio CDs very often, but last time I did (I just do "cdparanoia -B") it didn't seem to take long.
Here's my output of "cdparanoia -A" (I did this three times with similar result)
This is on Linux 3.6.5 on x86_64.
grogan@getstuffed:~$ cdparanoia -A
cdparanoia III release 10.2 (September 11, 2008)
Using cdda library version: 10.2 /dev/cdrom for cdrom... /dev/cdrom for SCSI/MMC interface /dev/sr0
Using paranoia library version: 10.2
Checking
Testing
SG_IO device:
CDROM model sensed sensed: HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GH24LS50 YP01
Checking for SCSI emulation...
Drive is ATAPI (using SG_IO host adaptor emulation)
Checking for MMC style command set...
Drive is MMC style
DMA scatter/gather table entries: 1
table entry size: 524288 bytes
maximum theoretical transfer: 222 sectors
Setting default read size to 27 sectors (63504 bytes).
Verifying CDDA command set...
Expected command set reads OK.
Attempting to set cdrom to full speed...
drive returned OK.
=================== Checking drive cache/timing behavior ===================
Seek/read timing:
[74:21.35]: 62ms seek, 0.32ms/sec read [41.8x]
[70:00.32]: 56ms seek, 0.32ms/sec read [41.5x]
[60:00.32]: 57ms seek, 0.35ms/sec read [37.9x]
[50:00.32]: 61ms seek, 0.37ms/sec read [35.7x]
[40:00.32]: 58ms seek, 0.41ms/sec read [32.8x]
[30:00.32]: 61ms seek, 0.45ms/sec read [29.7x]
[20:00.32]: 62ms seek, 0.51ms/sec read [26.2x]
[10:00.32]: 73ms seek, 0.58ms/sec read [22.9x]
[00:00.32]: 71ms seek, 0.74ms/sec read [18.1x]
Analyzing cache behavior...
Approximate random access cache size: 16 sector(s)
Drive cache tests as contiguous
Drive readahead past read cursor: 234 sector(s)
Cache tail cursor tied to read cursor
Cache tail granularity: 1 sector(s)
Cache read speed: 0.14ms/sector [94x]
Access speed after backseek: 0.71ms/sector [18x]
Backseek flushes the cache as expected
Drive tests OK with Paranoia.
I'm impressed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Hitachi GH15F and cdparanoia (Score:3)
I'm using a SATA connected Hitachi GH15F and cdparanoia. This drive, as far as I can tell, is, or was, an extemely common OEM item.
It works absolutely fine with cdparanoia and, if correct offset is set, gives identical results to EAC in Windows (you need cdparanoia 10.2 or newer; older versions had real deficiencies). I checked this with multiple comparisons where I ripped various CDs, some in poor condition, both with cdparanoia in Debian and with EAC in XP and then md5 hashed the raw pcm output: non-different. I also did rips on different drives on different PCs and achieved bit identical results on those drives which passed cdparanoia -A. Obviously this wasn't a huge dataset and doesn't prove anything but it was good enough for me to stop caring any further.
Here is the output of cdparanoia -A:
CDROM model sensed sensed: HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GH15F EG00
Checking for SCSI emulation...
Drive is ATAPI (using SG_IO host adaptor emulation)
Checking for MMC style command set...
Drive is MMC style
DMA scatter/gather table entries: 167
table entry size: 524288 bytes
maximum theoretical transfer: 37074 sectors
Setting default read size to 27 sectors (63504 bytes).
Verifying CDDA command set...
Expected command set reads OK.
Attempting to set cdrom to full speed...
drive returned OK.
=================== Checking drive cache/timing behavior ===================
Seek/read timing:
[47:10.36]: 55ms seek, 0.36ms/sec read [37.4x]
[40:00.33]: 61ms seek, 0.39ms/sec read [34.6x]
[30:00.33]: 51ms seek, 0.42ms/sec read [31.9x]
[20:00.33]: 51ms seek, 0.48ms/sec read [27.7x]
[10:00.33]: 63ms seek, 0.58ms/sec read [23.1x]
[00:00.33]: 66ms seek, 0.74ms/sec read [18.0x]
Analyzing cache behavior...
Approximate random access cache size: 16 sector(s)
Drive cache tests as contiguous
Drive readahead past read cursor: 234 sector(s)
Cache tail cursor tied to read cursor
Cache tail granularity: 1 sector(s)
Cache read speed: 0.16ms/sector [85x]
Access speed after backseek: 0.71ms/sector [18x]
Backseek flushes the cache as expected
Drive tests OK with Paranoia.
As you can see it isn't going to be quite as fast as your old IDE drive but it isn't exactly slow either.
You can safely ignore fetishists who feel EAC is magically unique and that cdparanoia can't do secure ripping. It can, as long as the drive passes the cdparanoia -A test. If you feel the need to compare your rips with rips made by properly configured EAC or dbpoweramp or similar then you need to set the offset correctly.
Almost all the cdparanoia GUI's ignore the offset and don't allow the user to set it, so their rips will have a different checksum than an offset corrected rip by other tools. This doesn't have any bearing on the quality of the rip, only on the ability to compare it. It hasn't done much for cdparanoia's reputation but if you use it with a fully configurable command line front end such as ripit or abcde, or just by itself, you can get 100% secure rips equally good as those produced by magic tools with proprietary voodoo and vociferous fanboys.
ripit is a perl script front end to cdparanoia, it will:
"do the following without user intervention:
getting the audio
LG USB much faster than IDE (Score:2, Informative)
cdparanoia and LG (HL-ST-DT) drives don't mix! (Score:2)
I've done a lot of work on streamlining my own ripping process (I've got well over 900 CDs to be ripped and tagged) and in the process, I got involved in helping out with developing rubyripper, a wrapper for cdparanoia. In the process, I've learned a lot about doing accurate rips and figuring out the various intricacies of the CD format. One of the things I observed was the relatively slow speed of ripping on my LG Blu-ray drive: it behaved exactly like you described: It would take 15 minutes to rip somet
Solve the problem backwards (Score:5, Insightful)
Since we're talking about a manual process of inserting disks and clicking buttons, the different between five minutes and fifteen minutes can be rendered insignificant if you plug in enough drives. Since we're talking about a SATA system here, any reasonably high-end PC can easily support 6 to 10 SATA ports -- with enough channels to handle CDs certainly.
In your case, I'd focus my efforts not on finding a good ripper, but in configuring ten mediocre rippers. Your over-all speed with easily multiply.
Is this really important? (Score:3)
I ripped + encoded + tagged my entire collection with some shell scripts, just using cdda2wav to get the data. It was all auto pilot after some initial testing. IE every time the disk tray ejected I just dropped the next disk off the stack in. Sometimes I was in front of the computer doing other things, other times the display was off I was just walking past it.
I have since been listing to my collection for years on a variety of devices and never once heard an audible error I can reasonably attribute to the initial ripping/encoding. I used shorten at the time ( like I said years ago ), but have since converted to flac.
Knowing what I know about the technology I am certain the rips were not error free, most errors should have been fixed, but the unrecoverable errors must therefore be preserved. My point is it really does not impact my ability to enjoy the material though. Even if someone did have golden ears, would a few bad frames spread across several moments for audio really distract? Seems hard to believe.
I think the article poster should consider he might be solving the wrong problem. Rather than trying to get perfect rips done fast, maybe he should try to get very good rips done fast.
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What I don't get is, he can do it now with an old drive.
But when he's done with this large number of cds he has, he'll have his collection in digital form.
Why does he worry about not having this old drive in a couple of years ?
By that time if he gets an new CD he only has one or very few CDs to do, so the time it takes to do is (almost) irrelevant, right ?
So let's stop talking about the time here.
The DRM issue is a real issue. How do you do that in a couple of years, when your old drive has died. Will you s
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)
With the drive that the poster already has, it will take 112h30m of continuous time in front of his computer to simply swap the discs. By comparison, the faster drive mentioned would result in a completion time of 37h30m.
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Why would you care how long a drive takes to rip a CD/DVD? Do you sit and watch and wait for each one to be ripped? Are you using some strange OS that only lets you do one thing at a time? I did the same thing a few years ago. I just had a big stack next to my primary computers, and just swapped them out while I was working on them. How long each one took wasn't relevant.
Now I don't know what you do at your computer, but no matter if it's watching a movie or playing a game or studying or coding or whatever, interrupting myself all the time is rather annoying and detrimental to my enjoyment/performance. Been there, done that and I for sure cared how fast I could get it over with. These days I have double hard drives, it's as good a backups as the discs were since they were on-site anyway or I could get an external HDD for the same security as off-site discs. I only restored
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Why would you care how long a drive takes to rip a CD/DVD? Do you sit and watch and wait for each one to be ripped? Are you using some strange OS that only lets you do one thing at a time? I did the same thing a few years ago. I just had a big stack next to my primary computers, and just swapped them out while I was working on them. How long each one took wasn't relevant.
Now I don't know what you do at your computer, but no matter if it's watching a movie or playing a game or studying or coding or whatever, interrupting myself all the time is rather annoying and detrimental to my enjoyment/performance. Been there, done that and I for sure cared how fast I could get it over with. These days I have double hard drives, it's as good a backups as the discs were since they were on-site anyway or I could get an external HDD for the same security as off-site discs. I only restored from them once, you know what the worst part was? Discs that had slight reading problems, they'd eventually finish but it could take up to an hour to read one disc. If you want to spend a week of your life swapping discs in case of a disk crash, optical media is a great backup. Otherwise I'd only take backup to another disk or online.
It's the same number of disks, the same number of interruptions. The difference is the faster drive will interrupt you more often for a given period of time, so if you want less interruptions per session you would go with the slower drive. If I'm watching a movie I'd rather be interrupted only six times instead of 18.
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In my case, I sit in front of the machine while ripping. I've got a lot of weird metal albums that aren't in Musicbrainz at all, have somewhat inaccurate information, or aren't titlecased properly (mostly poor titlecasing / ignoring the case used on the album where the case is actually significant). With sub five minute rips it's a quick process of pop the disk in, make sure the tag data is looking OK, and then pop the next disc in (well, at least once I finish beating abcde into submission and make the rip
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You said you were re-ripping, right? So why didn't your submit your corrected title and track information back to the databases? Seems like if you'd been a team player everything would be there ready for you to use.
Second, why don't you just write a script that grabs the track and duration and other identifying information from a newly inserted CD and then use that to locate the same piece of media from your previous rip and just move the meta-data from there?
Third, if you actually were in a hurry you'd be
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It's quite relevant.. if one drive takes 3x the time the other does, that means the whole job takes 3x longer. If he has 20 cds, you're right, who cares. If he has 300 or 3000, that's a big deal.
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Informative)
The OP states he only has linux in the house. I did this exact same thing a few years back, using abcde which is an interface to cdparanoia and cddb.
I set up an automounter script that automatically ran abcde when a CD disc is inserted. It reads the TOC in a couple of seconds and asks you to confirm the CDDB entries, which in most cases is just pressing enter twice. When it's finished it can even eject the disc for you. I'd literally just pop to the computer room every 10 minutes or so and just swap the disc and let it carry on. Probably about 10 seconds per disc.
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i wrote a similar thing for mencoder when i ripped all of my DVDs. I was a bit lazier though. It trusts the disk name in the TOC and handled collisions by adding a time stamp.
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Exactly, under Linux it's brain dead easy to do. So even if a Drive took 2 hours it does not matter.
In fact there is even a plugin for XBMC that does exactly this, if he has a XBMC box for his home entertainment system. That way it is in a obvious place near the stereo.
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been using abcde for a decade (I'm the only who added the local cddb cache support, as a wee lad!), and the cddb editing stage is the problem here. It'd be nice to rip in the background while editing cddb, but unfortunately way too much of the script relies on the cddb info being ready before ripping starts. I'm guessing from comments that it's intentional that you have to edit before ripping, so that you can watch the ripping process. I guess that makes sense for people not using --never-skip.
Looking at the source again, it looks like it'd be less frustrating (hacking on a 10k line shell script and all) to set up abcde to batch rip and only rip into the work dir, and then "resume" with a different config and edit the cddb then. Of course, to add support for extra tags and grabbing the ISRC from tracks I've already rewritten cddb-tool in Scheme... the maintainer is going to love me when I submit all of my patches.
The only problem I have with batch ripping and resuming to tag/encode later is ... if I do too many of them at once(enough to make it worthwhile to either parallelize or wander by the computer every ten minutes), it would probably end up taking longer as I have to hunt through N cd cases to verify the info, especially in the case of multiple disc collections. Decisions, decisions.
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
Rip it all and then use something like beats to figure out the audio fingerprinting and correctly tag things for you.
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Yeah, except he, like me and others, has a collection of CDs that's over 400+. On top of that if you trust any completely automated process to choose metadata and artwork then you're as stupid as you are arrogant. He likely doesn't want this process to stretch out for ages and he wants to be able to feed his machine CDs at a fairly rapid pace with fast enough ripping that he's not twiddling thumbs in between waiting on it. I do this now with two drives in my system (one of which sucks for ripping) for frien
Re:Online storage?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Online, as in actively spinning media inside of my computer, that I have RAIDed and backed up. I've disambiguated the text.
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what? the grandparent has a point.. pressed cds theoretically could last centuries if reasonably cared for. It's CD-Rs that decay...and even quality CD-Rs can outlive most humans if well cared for. I can see the convenience of having them on a hd but the pressed disc is still going to last longer than a complicated 'active' device that depends on the existence of complex protocols and interfaces to function. It's not just the media, it's the support electronics as well. In contrast, a cd reader is very s
Re:Online storage?! (Score:4, Funny)
Keep your cds in a box somewhere as a catastrophic recovery, and have one duplicate of your ripped files offline somewhere.
So glad you told him this. Too bad that he had already thrown half of his CDs into the furnace before he heard your advice.
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what? the grandparent has a point.. pressed cds theoretically could last centuries if reasonably cared for.
Anything on my hard drive is far more likely to outlive anything on pressed CD. It has nothing to do with the lifespan of the media, but the lifespan of the data. When a pressed CD dies, that's the end of its data. Some of the data on my hard drive, on the other hand, has been with me across half a dozen hard drives. It's more than convenience, it's the security that comes from a medium that is convenient to backup regularly. Anything not on my hard drive is far more likely to be lost to me, regardless
Re:Online storage?! (Score:5, Informative)
> Nothing on my hard drive can be lost short of a fairly cataclysmic event that would simultaneous destroy
> all copies in existence, and frankly I'd probably be dead then too, so what would I care?
Don't be so sure.
I came TERRIFYINGLY close to losing 20+ years' worth of files permanently last year when my SSD, my Velociraptor-300, AND my 2TB Seagate hard drive all kicked the bucket within a 3-month window of time. At the time, I had the SSD backing itself up to the Velociraptor daily, was backing up the Velociraptor (including the SSD backup) to the 2TB drive weekly, and had the Seagate drive itself backed up to a 3TB external drive once a month or so (the Seagate drive was normally stored at my best friend's house ~15 miles away).
The problem was, as the drives failed and I replaced them, I ended up with multiple copies of recently-modified data, and ended up having a HELL of a time figuring out which was the new and which was the old copy. It took SO LONG to straighten out the resultant mess, that drive #3 ended up failing before I'd finished fully restoring everything from drive #2. And worse, because it took an eternity to do a full backup of the 2TB drive to the external drive (and 4-16 times eternity to restore it), I lost about a month's worth of stuff, and was in cold-sweat panic when I ran out to the store to buy yet another external drive to back up my last surviving copy of the data in case THAT drive failed, too.
Yeah, 2011 was a really, really bad year for my data. In addition to the two external drives, I now also have a complete backup of their contents on ~50 BD-R discs sitting at my parents' house. It took me about a week to burn, and a loss bad enough for me to ever NEED those discs would be devastating... but at least I can sleep at night now knowing that I still have one backup of last resort to fall back on if necessary.
After the crisis, I did a lot of soul-searching and research to find the most robust way to back up my data. What I learned (besides the fact that hard drive reliability has totally gone down the shithole over the past 5 years) was eye-opening.
I'd argue that the SAFEST media for long-term archival backup of files is probably non-LTH BD-R media. It's phase-change magneto-optical, unlike the organic dyes that were the norm for CD-R/RW and DVD+|-/R/RW.
For the record, "LTH" BD-R media uses organic dyes, just like older media, and anecdotal evidence suggests that data written to them has a half-life of approximately 6 months before they start getting correctable errors, and an estimated 18-30 months before they start getting their first uncorrectable errors.
In contrast, most of the phase-change magneto-optical media made by Matsushita and Sony ~15-20 years ago is still readable today (assuming you can find a working drive), and there's no real reason to think BD-R will be any worse (fundamentally, it's the same process now as it was back then... just smaller particles and tighter laser & magnetic fields). In case you're wondering what's magic about them, it's because MO drives use the laser to briefly liquefy the substrate so metallic particles within it can move, and use magnetism to align those particles while it's liquid. Once they re-solidify a moment later, your data is basically "cast in stone" and has no real expiration date.
Incidentally, Millenniata M-disc is basically a DVD-R that's built like a MO BD-R disc. It's one of those cool products that never existed in the format's golden era, but later became possible as a side effect of some newer technology. Kind of like some new gigabit ethernet cards & switches that can also be induced to do 100base-T4 (100mbps ethernet over 4 pairs of cat-3 cable). It was never widely supported back when 100baseT was the norm because it cost too much to add as a feature few cared about, but the technology behind it ended up being used to make gigabit ethernet. Once you have the hardware to do gigabit ethernet, adding retroactive support for 100baseT4 is basically an a
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Theoretically. Theoretically?
I have lived in the tropics for the last 15 years, and that cost me half of my CDs. They were - I dunno - eaten up? In any case, there were tracks in the silver like some animal scurrying and eating through the layer. I can't be sure, and didn't try a microscope either. I only noticed the loss, ripped all of them and considered the originals as write-offs.
Re:Online storage?! (Score:5, Funny)
That's the problem with WORM media.
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I have no intention of ditching the actual discs (they often have fancy artwork and whatnot, and I paid for them)... they live in a pair of closed acid free binders in slots made of whatever plastic doesn't eats CDs (probably should have gotten a third one, since I'm not sure where to find stuff like that any more... or if it even matters). But I have a RAID1 in my computer and can make backups of it. There's also the pesky issue where a lot of discs in my collection are from smaller bands (got them at sho
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flac is lossless, like zip files are lossless. The original data is recovered on decode.
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Who uses cd's anymore...
How about people who enjoy better quality music and/or those with better hearing?
They said the same thing about CD's and albums/tape back in the day and despite any arguments to the contrary, there is a great difference between digital and analog music. Just because you can't hear it (I can't either by the way, but I know it's real) doesn’t make it unperceivable to people with better hearing. Most of todays "pop" crap is designed with low quality digital files in mind and people who don't have an ea
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People who don't just want to listen to badly encoded 'web mastered' (yeah that's what some idiots call it now) mpeg files on their beats by dre headphones. screeching caused by file corruption is fucking irritating and when you rip 500 cds, you don't want to have to check each track by ear.
Re:Online Storage? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's if the digital 'locker' doesn't decide to change its policies and then wipe your files, or your internet connection goes down, or you run out of bandwidth for the month... It's still better to have a local copy and pressed cds are about the most reliable backup option there is. They'll outlive any human for sure if well taken care of. hard drives require IO ports that are constantly changing and take the media with them when they die. when the cdrom reader dies, just throw it away and get another. your data is still safe.
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Similar story here. My old (as in 3 PCs ago) yamaha scsi cdrw was the best audio cd ripper I have owned. Much better than the IDE or SATA DVD drives I have had since.
Problem was the scsi card I used was very cheap, but it worked just fine until support was dropped in the kernel. So one day I did an update, rebooted, and swore a lot.
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Plextors are generally regarded as the fastest/most accurate although they really don't make them anymore (they do but they are just rebranded Lite-Ons).
I've had good luck with both Lite-On and LG optical disk writers (there's no savings in getting just a reader, and the writers are generally more forgiving).
I just tested, and my Lite-On Blu-Ray writer [newegg.com] took 2:10 to rip a 66 minute CD to WAV, while the LG DVD writer [newegg.com] took 2:33 for the same disc. I had to do a re-rip of my 500 disc collection a while back, and these times agree with my memory that by using both drives, I didn't really have time to get up to do anything...I just sat there feeding discs to alte
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That was true ~15 years ago. Since then, Plextor's firmware gets along very badly with the rippers that try to be frame accurate, because Plextor tries to implement a much lighter-weight more error prone version of the same algo on the drive. The drive still doesn't do a realiable job, and it seriously mucks up the ripper.
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You said you're ripping to FLAC this time, i.e. lossless. Once you're done ripping, will you ever have to re-rip from these discs en-masse again? Probably not, so the longevity of your magic drive is actually not an issue.
Is he going to stop buying CDs? I'm guessing not.
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This is a completely valid point, optical drives are cheap as dirt. Throw brute force at the problem if it's that big of a deal, then when done you have a bunch of spares for when/if they die or other PC builds.