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Hi. I am moving overseas for a few year and wanted to rip all my cds onto a hard drive to take with me. The problem is, I have 2 months to do this and over 3000 cds to rip.Was hoping for some advice as to what OS, ripping software and harware would result in the fastest YET ACCURATE rips? Would a linux based computer work better?
One option was to use a program that would automaticaly check the album name/tracks (thus, EAC is out even though it is othewise my favorite) and to rip straight to uncompressed files ... transcoding will probably eat up more of the valuble and limited time I have.
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I'd split the work up to 2 or 3 computers. Rip to HD's in each computer. When you fill up an HD, remove it and put in another HD and resume ripping. Treat your filled up HD's as portable storage. Integrate them into your future computer later. Get'em ripped first.
As I said PlexTools can rip a CD in about 3 minutes. There is the overhead of inserting the CD and creating the directory to store the CD. So let's say 5 minutes per CD. That is 12 per hour. 3000/12 = 250 hours. Assuming you had 8 hours per day, that is 31 days!Don't forget you haven't even encoded and tagged to check the track names are correct (freeDB is not 100% correct).
You may want to consider a ripping service like http://www.musicshifter.com/index.html
How they can do it at 79 cents per CD and stay in business I don't know. I also don't know if they use a secure rip. Probably not because time is money?
Maybe they have a huge online repository and only need to copy the CD. Which would mean if you had say an XRCD version, they may not actually rip that?
I have not used that service since I am doing mine in small batches. I have time...
....loads of error-correction options, and also control of drive speed.If you use high speed settings, I'd use 2 drive and alternate them, giving them a chance to cool down between rips.
Also, you might consider downloading the entire Freedb database to use 'locally' (although I havn't tried this yet). It's a 383MB 7-zip file which un-compresses to about 2.5 GB (IIRC).
... I just noticed - since I downloaded it a few months ago it's been changed to a 'bz2' archive.
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With a Plextor drive it is a secure rip as well. It does download titles from free DB. Interface is not as good as EAC. But I just rip to FLAC then have my own scripts to convert and tag everything to FLAC.
Does not plextor use the C2 cache which some say causes jitter? Also, which program do you use to tag the flac files?
Yeah I beleive the Plextor does use C2. You can also set it up so that if if C2 check fails you can specify:How many times it retires.
Whether to read at a slower speed
How to recover - I normally use the highest recovery "Recover the best bytes (least errors) per sector"I have compared EAC to Plextools and it produces identical results.
I rip to WAV and then I have a Cygwin/UNIX bash script that invokes flac to encode and tag. I find this faster than any GUI interface. But I am a software engineer so I wouldn't recommend this method to the average person.
Here is my script for you computer geeks (you need to have Cygwin/Bash installed). I edit this with the right tag info for each CD:
#!/usr/bin/bash
artist="Mo'Guajiro"
year="1999"
genre="Salsa"
album="Pueblo Alegre"for i in *.wav
do
track=`echo $i | cut -d" " -f1 | sed 's/^0//'`
title=`echo $i | cut -d" " -f2- | sed 's/.wav//'`"C:/Program Files/FLAC/flac.exe" \
-V -5 -T "Artist=$artist" -T "Title=$title" -T "Album=$album" \
-T "Date=$year" -T "TrackNumber=$track" -T "Genre=$genre" "$i"if [ $? -ne 0 ]
then
echo flac conversion failed on $i
exit 1
fi
done
***One option was to use a program that would automaticaly check the album name/tracks (thus, EAC is out even though it is othewise my favorite)...***EAC does do this. You have to configure it to lookup the freedb database, either off the internet or you can also download the freedb database to your hard drive.
As for hardware, I would pick up a Plextor PX-230A. This was rated pretty high for read quality and ability to read copy-protected discs. Check out this thread/review on the best rippers/burners:
Thanks for the advice on the cd drive choice. That was very helpful.I am not sure however about the EAC. I have the .95 version and it does not automatically check the Freedb database. I have to click Alt-G to get the info. What version are you referring to?
I believe there is a setting in EAC that will allow it to automatically look up Freedb info. Can't remember where it is though.
I have version 0.95 beta 3.I simply go to the EAC menu and click on freedb/Database options. Then under the freedb tab I select the server to use (and I think it requires you to enter an email adress).
Another thing I didn't mention before, in case you don't already know this - you should also use AccurateRip with EAC.
I was surprised how well a laptop drive did. Panasonic 845J has very few less than 100% rips with EAC. Maybe because the drive is slower.
I don't know about what programs you can use - but I will say that if I were going to rip over 2 terrabytes of wave files, the first thing uppermost in _my_ mind would be how to store it and back it up -I have somewhat of a lack of confidence in todays consumer level drives_grin_ as do some other folks _bigger grin_
Probably the best solution for you would be
Infrant ReadyNAS RNV1-S2-0000 or similar with 4 500 gig enterprise class drives and run it on raid 5, with a spare drive , you can hot swap the spare in if one drive fails. even so I don't think you'll get the whole collection on there - Then take the drives with you in a carry-on and put the case in other luggage.
I didn't read the specs fully, so do your own due diligence on an NAS.
Are you sure you have enough time to do this? gonna take quite a while. If you have any other packing and moving prep to do, it could be a real problem.
I'm watching with enthusiasm to see if anybody posts a software solution for you
Thanks. I know it is a lot of storage space. But imagine when I have it all on the computer how much more accessible it would be for me to play with! I have found myself consistenly listening to music stored on my computer more often than those in disk form.Actually, I have already ripped around 300 onto my comp. So am making progress. I agree that I will probably have to leave a few out... I do have a few eminently forgettable cds that I will probably not miss if I dont have!
I intent to have the cds on a server running slimserver and feeding a few of the squeezeboxes. The backups will probably be on a bunch of external hard drives. I have a few of those lying around... rarely used. I agree I will need 100% redundancy however. The thought of having to burn all these ever again makes me a bit sick... and I have not even finished ripping them the first time!
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