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

max maximilianbianco at gmail.com
Wed Jun 11 16:25:36 UTC 2008


Craig White wrote:
> 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
> 

I have done this using Rhythmbox , I have two optical drives, i have 
inserted cds into both drives and then queued both to be  copied to the 
library. Both cd's copied but i don't think it does it simultaneously 
though, I believe it just queues them up and does one and then the 
other. It recognizes two drives without a problem and fetches the tag 
info . Worth an experiment or two i'd say.

-- 
An unwillingness to embarrass oneself makes learning more difficult




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