Ripping music CDs - program that is good with multiple optical drives

Marland V. Pittman marland at mvpittman.com
Wed Jun 11 14:55:42 UTC 2008


Hello Fedora Users I need some suggestions for ripping CDs.

I've got a few towers with lots of 5.25 bays, and lots of optical 
drives. I'd like to rip all of my CDs to .ogg Vorbis files, because 
freedom is awesome, and I don't want to be patent encumbered, or 
whatever I've been brainwashed to believe. I realize there's not a lot 
of portable player options, but I'll probably just end up getting some 
ultra-mobile PC that runs Linux rather than the iPod/Zune/PlayPtation 
Portable/Rio Karma/CD player that plays MP3s and WMA files that I've use 
in the past.

I've used iTunes and Windows Media Player a few times to do this task, 
and both work fine, but I'd love to have a Fedora/Linux-ish solution for 
this. I didn't keep all my proprietary formatted rips from before, so 
all I have is the CDs. I've got time to do it, but I want it to be 
automated as much as possible. I want to put a CD in as many drives as I 
can attach to the computer, have the CDs read, ripped, tagged, and 
ejected without intervention (other than changing the discs, of course). 
I'm not really tied to a structure or naming convention at this point.

Most of the problems I'm seeing are that lots of programs that will do 
this will only do it on one CD at a time. I've got a dual dual-core 
Opteron 2218 box (4 cores, 2.6 GHz) and 8 GB of RAM and at least 4 
DVD+/-RW drives that I can throw at this, so I really don't want to 
waste effort going one disc at a time.

I've read a few blog posts that recommend shipping the CDs off to a 
service, but I don't really want to pay for that. I just want to get the 
media digitized, in a free format. I am thinking maybe about just doing 
a lossless format FLAC and maybe transcoding to .ogg/.mp3/.wma or 
whatever as necessary, but I'm not an audiophile, I just want to take my 
music with me, and not change CDs... maybe stream it through the house.

Suggestions? I'm a GNOME/GUI kind of person, but I am not averse to 
using a KDE application, like "Amarok", or a command line script like 
"abcde". Grip, Rythymbox, whatever... just something that is as 
hands-off as possible, and won't make me crazy because I have to poke at 
it to get it to use all the optical drives I have at my disposal. Is 
Banshee good a ripping from multiple drives?

If it came down to it, I could build a few old, slow machines in empty 
towers, and have them all dump files into networked storage, but I 
imagine that the quad box with 4 optical drives will do just fine. I am 
really just looking for a recently updated application that will use all 
the drives I can throw at it. If it sucks at playback and organization, 
that's fine, as long as it's good at ripping and using multiple drives.

Thanks in advance for all the suggestions and help. Just for reading, 
I'll treat you to this picture of a bunch of old, beige, slow drives 
that I won't be using, but would if I felt that ripping slow didn't matter.

http://photos.mvpittman.com/CD-ROM_drives/DCP_0386.JPG




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