Ripping station proposal

[Sequences]

My parents have a ton of music cd's (say between 800 and 900) that I plan on digitizing and storing. To do this, I foresee getting as many CD ripping drives as possible (maybe up to 12 or something) so I can rip in parallel. I have a HAF-X case, which can store up to 6 and I will probably just leave the others outside the case while burning.

I think I will need:

• Ubuntu compatible sata controller: I plan on going to newegg and picking a few to google around for compatibility. Are there any recommendations on what to look at or avoid?
• 1TB drives: I don't need high availability, I figure any reputable brand would do.
• rip software: I am most familiar with linux commandline, so will be using LAME to copy to disk with high bit rate.
• labeling software: Not sure about this one. I looked at a few of the disks and it seems that the file names are labeled properly. However, I need to be able to organize the folders directly and I'm not sure how best to approach this. Any help or pointers for this is greatly appreciated.

I will be using a ASUS Sabertooth X58 board for this, which comes with 6 Intel SATA ports and 2 Marvell. I will be using 2 of the Intel ports for OS and storage drive, which leaves 4 Intel and 2 Marvell ports for CD drives. I imagine whatever sata controller I get will depend on how many CD drives I want.

Did I miss anything?

 

[DaveSimmons]

I'm not sure I'd bother with that much for a one-time task. 1-2 drives won't be as fast but then there is no extra expense or setup time.

dbPowerAmp costs a little but has AccurateRip for making sure the rip is good. It can encode to lossy MP3 but can also encode to lossless FLAC. It will tag the CDs automatically as it rips. It can also transcode between formats -- rip to FLAC then transcode to MP3 for use on an iPod.

I have a bit over 1,000 CDs ripped to lossless FLAC and it used a little over 300 GB of storage space. 192 kbps MP3 would use around 100 GB.

 

[Sequences]

I'm not sure I'd bother with that much for a one-time task. 1-2 drives won't be as fast but then there is no extra expense or setup time.

That is true, but I don't live with my parents anymore and won't be able to this slowly over the course of a month. Drives are cheap, so I don't mind spending a little extra for some fun. Who doesn't like controlling 10+ CD drives at one time?

dbPowerAmp costs a little but has AccurateRip for making sure the rip is good. It can encode to lossy MP3 but can also encode to lossless FLAC. It will tag the CDs automatically as it rips. It can also transcode between formats -- rip to FLAC then transcode to MP3 for use on an iPod.

I have a bit over 1,000 CDs ripped to lossless FLAC and it used a little over 300 GB of storage space. 192 kbps MP3 would use around 100 GB.

I am not an audiophile, but I would like to get quality sound so I will try to rip at lossless FLAC. I had imagined doing this in linux as I can script this all up. Does dbPowerAmp allow concurrent ripping? I am pretty adamant about sticking to my plan.

 

[TerryMathews]

My parents have a ton of music cd's (say between 800 and 900) that I plan on digitizing and storing. To do this, I foresee getting as many CD ripping drives as possible (maybe up to 12 or something) so I can rip in parallel. I have a HAF-X case, which can store up to 6 and I will probably just leave the others outside the case while burning.

I think I will need:

• Ubuntu compatible sata controller: I plan on going to newegg and picking a few to google around for compatibility. Are there any recommendations on what to look at or avoid?
• 1TB drives: I don't need high availability, I figure any reputable brand would do.
• rip software: I am most familiar with linux commandline, so will be using LAME to copy to disk with high bit rate.
• labeling software: Not sure about this one. I looked at a few of the disks and it seems that the file names are labeled properly. However, I need to be able to organize the folders directly and I'm not sure how best to approach this. Any help or pointers for this is greatly appreciated.

I will be using a ASUS Sabertooth X58 board for this, which comes with 6 Intel SATA ports and 2 Marvell. I will be using 2 of the Intel ports for OS and storage drive, which leaves 4 Intel and 2 Marvell ports for CD drives. I imagine whatever sata controller I get will depend on how many CD drives I want.

Did I miss anything?

The right answer for this task is Sony VGP-XL1. Has support in dbpoweramp. http://www.dbpoweramp.com/batch-ripper.htm

As a bonus, as the drive is DVD-RW its also able to rip DVDs and burn both. Supported in dvdBatchRip and Imgburn.

You'll need a FireWire card.

 

[alkemyst]

Keep in mind, ripping audio is pretty CPU intensive.

 

[alkemyst]

I'm not sure I'd bother with that much for a one-time task. 1-2 drives won't be as fast but then there is no extra expense or setup time.

dbPowerAmp costs a little but has AccurateRip for making sure the rip is good. It can encode to lossy MP3 but can also encode to lossless FLAC. It will tag the CDs automatically as it rips. It can also transcode between formats -- rip to FLAC then transcode to MP3 for use on an iPod.

I have a bit over 1,000 CDs ripped to lossless FLAC and it used a little over 300 GB of storage space. 192 kbps MP3 would use around 100 GB.

I had a 1000+ CD collection (until damn burglars stole them all except most of my empty CD cases).

Accurate Rip technology is invaluable. I used to use EAC and the front-end GUI (LAME?). I had two really good drives and a decent PC...overall I got better results just doing a disc at a time. That was way back in 2001-2005 though. I don't really buy CD's anymore. I just get digital music to begin with and re-author it into lossy versions if I need quantity over quality.

 

[mfenn]

My parents have a ton of music cd's (say between 800 and 900) that I plan on digitizing and storing.

To be fair, CD's are already digital and storage, so you could just declare victory now. :awe:

• Ubuntu compatible sata controller: I plan on going to newegg and picking a few to google around for compatibility. Are there any recommendations on what to look at or avoid?

The common Sillicon Image and Marvell controllers have decent Linux support. In particular, this 4-port card is supported by the generic ahci driver. Though honestly, you should just use the 7 of your mobo ports for drives and 1 for an HDD.

• 1TB drives: I don't need high availability, I figure any reputable brand would do.

900 discs is only 1.4 TB raw, and probably less than 1 TB when compressed. Just pick up a single 2 TB drive and call it good.

• rip software: I am most familiar with linux commandline, so will be using LAME to copy to disk with high bit rate.

Do yourself a favor and use a lossless codec like FLAC. Lossless codecs will produce bitwise identical results to the original media, so you'll never have to go back and rip again if you decide you want a higher quality.

• labeling software: Not sure about this one. I looked at a few of the disks and it seems that the file names are labeled properly. However, I need to be able to organize the folders directly and I'm not sure how best to approach this. Any help or pointers for this is greatly appreciated.

I'd use a tagger that supports audio fingerprinting to determine the album and creates tags from that. There are a lot of clients for the crowdsourced musicbrainz database. Try a few out on some test albums and see which one you like best. In particular, abcde is a nice all-inclusive command line tool that will rip the disk, encode it, and tag it based on musicbrainz data.

 

[DominionSeraph]

Did I miss anything?

Some sense.

You're looking at making yourself a complete slave to CD drawers for ~5 hours straight. Instead of making this a grueling job whose level of multitasking will have you hating your life 20 minutes in, take it waaay down to where the task is so simple so you can do it as a background process while you concentrate on something more enjoyable.
Try two drives. You can sit back and watch League of Legends replays and the ripping will barely be a distraction. It'll take a lot longer but you'll hate yourself a lot less.

 

[Sequences]

To be fair, CD's are already digital and storage, so you could just declare victory now. :awe:

Hard to search through that, hence me doing this.

The common Sillicon Image and Marvell controllers have decent Linux support. In particular, this 4-port card is supported by the generic ahci driver. Though honestly, you should just use the 7 of your mobo ports for drives and 1 for an HDD.

I have 1 drive already so I will probably max out my mobo first. Once I have a series of well oiled automated steps, I will buy more drives with a sata card.

900 discs is only 1.4 TB raw, and probably less than 1 TB when compressed. Just pick up a single 2 TB drive and call it good.

Do yourself a favor and use a lossless codec like FLAC. Lossless codecs will produce bitwise identical results to the original media, so you'll never have to go back and rip again if you decide you want a higher quality.

Storage is cheap, so I figured I would use lossless codec. Might as well encode with max quality.

I'd use a tagger that supports audio fingerprinting to determine the album and creates tags from that. There are a lot of clients for the crowdsourced musicbrainz database. Try a few out on some test albums and see which one you like best. In particular, abcde is a nice all-inclusive command line tool that will rip the disk, encode it, and tag it based on musicbrainz data.

abcde looks interesting, I will try it out with a few disks to see how well it works.

 

[Burpo]

As mentioned earlier, storage & rip tool all in one.. $200 & holds 200 discs Sony VGP-XL1B2
http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listi...condition=used

Sony VGP-XL1B2 Media Changer
" you can then push one button and rip everything to the hard drive, unattended. It takes a long time -- I clocked it at roughly 2 hours for 25 discs -- but at least it requires zero human intervention, aside from loading and unloading."

 

[mfenn]

Storage is cheap, so I figured I would use lossless codec. Might as well encode with max quality.

Lame is an MP3 encoder, which is a lossy compression codec. That's why I suggested FLAC, because yes storage is cheap when talking about audio.