best brand of cd-drive for ripping

[Spoon-]

Re: best brand of cd-drive for ripping

c2 is the ability to detect errors.

[vance43211]

Re: best brand of cd-drive for ripping

hi I'm new here

what's C2 error support? the ability to play scratch discs?

I had a sony or pioneer dvd rom only player (I sold that drive to my brother. I'll look for the model no. next time I see his computer) that excelled at this. it rip discs that would not even load into any other cd player home or computer. years ago I ripped everyone on my scratch discs to my computer then back them up to my other computers. I no longer have a need for it, because now when I buy a cd, I burn 2 copies, rip it and put the original up.

the funny thing was I started buying that name brand dvd burner and roms because of this feature and I could never find one that could rip as good as that one

[Spoon-]

Re: best brand of cd-drive for ripping

FUA is not used on 230a, any of the above you listed will be accepted.

[PigsOnTheWing]

Re: best brand of cd-drive for ripping

It [PX-230A] does cache, setting 1024 KB will not hurt (it is really around 580KB)

Thanks, Spoon. I'm assuming I need to enter something manually ... since hitting the 'Detect' button comes back with '(none).'

What is the proper syntax?

1024
1024 KB
1024KB
1024 K
1024 kb
1024kb
1024 k

Would I be correct in assuming FUA Support is a no go?

Why is this drive better than my Plexwriter Premium again?

[bmw]

Re: best brand of cd-drive for ripping

I've the Samsung SH-203N I hope it's good.

[Spoon-]

Re: best brand of cd-drive for ripping

It does cache, setting 1024 KB will not hurt (it is really around 580KB)

[PigsOnTheWing]

Re: best brand of cd-drive for ripping

I can confirm the praise for the P230A.

I just picked up a 230A to replace my Plexwriter Premium. I'm confused about the settings for this drive, though. dMC says the 230A does not cache, and EAC (prebeta 4) says it does. Which is actually correct?

[Spook]

Re: best brand of cd-drive for ripping

Thanks for all the advise!

I'm probably setup okay with exception of a true CD-R drive. The MP3 CD-R made in the DVD-RW seem to have problems playing back in my other equipment.

My biggest time drag is getting the meta-data/tags right on my classical CDs.

Heh, I know what you mean. I don't have that many CD but the few classical I've done so far have cost me hours to get tagged as I want.

[pls1]

Re: best brand of cd-drive for ripping

Kurt, i can't prove it but my guess is it's getting the drivers right. I use XP and it's as fast as what you report for Vista.

I've got an overclocked XP Quad core with reasonably advanced performance monitoring and the ripping or encoding won't use much more than 50% of a core or significantly load my Raptor systems disk, where as on a dual core P4 at similar clock speed, ripping and encoding can use 100% of a core.

The dedicated IDE or SATA add on card gives a faster rip for me than the MOBO IDE/SATA (insert your own speculation here). However, since most of my CDs are not in accuraterip and therefore need ultra-secure mode, burst speed doesn't really mean much in terms of elapsed months. Usually I['ll run two or three instances of dbpoweramp at the same time. I'm pushing 1000 cds ripped and at least 4000 to go. My biggest time drag is getting the meta-data/tags right on my classical CDs.

Phil

[Kurt_S]

Re: best brand of cd-drive for ripping

Nice post pls1 and good advice.

I really think the fast RAID 0 is probably most responsible for my performance jump of 3x but I would like to hear opinions. What ever I did most certainly like it. I know I have more wrestling with Vista to do but at least now I can support the "all feet in" direction I took with new tech for my hifi.

[pls1]

Re: best brand of cd-drive for ripping

Spook:
First consider how many CDs you plan to rip and whether most are in AccurateRip. If almost all are in accuraterip and you are getting "Accurate" matches I wouldn't worry.

If you have thousands of obscure CDs then you should consider alternatives since in that case ripping everything as "Burst" mode as Kurt S is doing would not be prudent because you will get errors on some of your tracks. How many depends on the condition and age of the physical CDs in your collection .

If you want to build an external setup, you should take a look at the thread I started called "Plextor No C2 support" for the hassles I had getting error detection to work. I still have not been able to get C2 support on any firewire interface (including the Plextor firewire drives). Now I could just be doing something stupid but I haven't gotten any suggestions that worked, so I have given up on firewire.

What does work is what Kurt S uses (assuming your existing media software doesn't conflict) and your drivers are up to date. Getting the conflicting software off your machine and getting the right drivers will work but this might be a frustrating task.

What i did was install an add-on IDE or eSATA card connected to drives in an external enclosure. I've built two identical machines where one uses an eSATA card and the other an IDE card. They both work fine with dbpoweramp C2 error detection and any combo of drives.

Wikipedia will give you the interface descriptions but roughly speaking, IDE is the older physical connection with flat ribbon cable and a published limit of 18 inches of cable. The eSATA limit is just under six feet. for a laptop you could get a PCIMA to eSATA card for about $40 and connect to the external drive that way.

The connectors at the drive end can be a little tricky using eSATA and you might need an addonics IDE to SATA board on the back of your drive. As to which models use which interfaces here is an example JUST for most Plextor drives. If there is not an SA or UF suffix on the model number it uses the IDE connector. UF is the external model of USB or Firewire while the SA suffix uses the SATA interface. If you want a specific interface you should always check the mfg website and gent an EXACT match on the model number.

If you are lucky your collection is in AccurateRip and you can forget about all this and enjoy your music.

Phil

[Spook]

Re: best brand of cd-drive for ripping

Can anyone expand on the interface types, and if there is any known reasons to steer towards one or the other?

..I am sort of notebook bound and my experience ripping tracks to files using the in-built DVD/CD/Writer has been workable but I am thinking that I should look for a USB or Firewire chassis and pair it up with a bonafide CD reader.

Similarly, interface type aside, is there any arguement for/against using a CD reader Vs. CD-R/RW drive? (I dunno if even plain jane CD reader only can still be found )

Lastly, unless it'd be best for another topic -- is there any major compelling reasons to not use multi-format capable drives for low duty ripping only?

Thinking about perhaps a USB/1394 1-4-ALL drive now that Blu-Ray has apparently been embraced as the latest VHS.

[Kurt_S]

Re: best brand of cd-drive for ripping

Joni Mitchel's Blue just finished in 2:10 elapsed time. Sweet!

[Kurt_S]

Re: best brand of cd-drive for ripping

I can confirm the praise for the P230A. I have a three Plextors in on PC now, P230A and PX-760A on IDE and a PX-712 on a SATA channel. The P230A beats these and a few others I have used to rip hands down. Thanks for the recommendation Spoon.

I just finished building a PC with new X38 Intel chipset, CPU Duo E6850/3GHz and 3.0 GBs RAID 0 local disk. I am ripping FLAC and the path in CDGrabber is a ReadyNAS+. Had all kinds of trouble getting Vista 64 to work at first with dbPoweramp. BSOD and always pointing at the Video driver at first and actually punted back to XP. Once I built out RAID 0 using the Intel Matrix storage software and got all the PCI IDE controller driver updated I went back to Vista 64 which was a struggle but now the performance is 3x what XP was doing. Now I can rip a typical CD and have the FLAC on the NAS in 3 to 4 minutes tops. I have seen the app report ripping speed of as high as x49. I am using the LU - Service add on. In burst mode because the drive never has a problem.

No I don't work for Microsoft... I rather don't like them but the music server is my most important app and I could not get a Linux solution going like this.

[pls1]

Re: best brand of cd-drive for ripping

I am doubting CDRLabs testing of (certain) drives for DAE, their review of the PX-708a:

http://www.cdrlabs.com/reviews/index.php?reviewid=203

States it does not support c2, when it does. Also their audio reading test seems not to test the drives too much, many drives score top results, so there is not differentiation.

Yeah cdrlabs give too many drives high marks but it seems that any drive that doesn't get a high mark is probably best avoided since those of us not in the business will not likely have a wide sample of drives or the tools to test them. For anyone with a very large CD collection, the cost of buying the right drives to rip our collection is a very small cost compared to the costs of the thousands of CDs and the time investment to get an accurate rip.

My own testing of about 10 models of drives, on their ability to read damaged CDs, showed that the Plextor 7xx and re-badged Plextor 230 drives have been able to read all but the most damaged and rotted discs with consistent check sums. So far, I have not found a drive that will read these discs if the best drive of each Plextor model won't. So as far as "best" for my project I'm done with the drive selection. However, the "best" of four different PX-760 drives is still a little "worse' that the "worst" of four different PX-230s at reading damaged discs.

It is just a pain, if you are paranoid, to rip twice when the CD is in NOT Accurate rip or when there is only 1 entry. I have seen anomalies when the album has a single Accuraterip entry. An example is Monteverdi Madrigals Book Four on the small Opus111 label. All but one track matched as accurate(1) and the one track that was labeled not accurate was in the middle of the CD. Multiple rips on my part, on different drive models, always give the same Checksum on that track so I am convinced the accuraterip result for that track is wrong.

I not complaining about dbpoweramp, I think it is a great product, now that I have some experience with it, or Accuraterip for that matter even though it is of marginal use to me given my obscure collection.. It's just a lot of work to preserve your CD collection and I'm glad I didn't try DAE before 2008.

Phil