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

Craig White craigwhite at azapple.com
Wed Jun 11 15:36:28 UTC 2008


On Wed, 2008-06-11 at 10:55 -0400, Marland V. Pittman wrote:
> 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.
----
I ended up using iTunes on one of my Windows systems in my office that I
rarely use...set it up to scan and eject.

I have approximately 600 CD's and it took quite a while - as you said,
one at a time. I would bring a stack of approximately 20 CD's into my
office, insert and when it was done, it would eject and I would insert
the next CD and I never really looked at iTunes or the Windows system as
it was going on.

Some things that I would like to point out...flac lossless is probably a
good idea but...experiment because the idtags are important (even if
they are often wrong).

It makes sense to rip them to uncompressed wav files but storage becomes
a major hurdle because uncompressed is approximately 700 megabytes per
CD and in my case, 420 Gigabytes of storage in uncompressed format. The
benefit of having them uncompressed is that you get full fidelity for
local playback but can write a simple shell script to compress a copy of
them for the format of the moment (AAC/MP3/FLAC), without losing any
quality which is a problem if you want to convert from AAC <=> MP3 <=>
WMA formats which all involve loss.

Also, check out the Nokia N810 (I don't know which formats it supports
but scores high on cool).

I don't know how practical it would be to try to rip more than one CD at
a time - even with multiple processors but perhaps someone else has
tried.

Craig




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