Is there a guide for using multiple drives with a single PC to simultaneously rip Cds

[julien43]

I apologize if this has been asked and answer before. My search strings must be lacking. I don't have a large enough collection to justify a robot, but I need a more robust way to rip my collection that one at a time.

Thanks for taking the time to read my post

Julien

[schmidj]

Re: Is there a guide for using multiple drives with a single PC to simultaneously rip

Julien,

I don't know of a guide, but I routinely run multiple instances of dBpoweramp. Most of my Caribbean music albums are not in Accuraterip, so to get a secure rip they are ripped three times. That averages about 15 minutes per CD.

I typically have 5 or 6 instances of dBpoweramp running on a reasonably fast PC without issue. Music is stored on a NAS, connected by Ethernet, not Wifi.

You will be best with multiple monitors. I would find that having more than two instances as separate layers on the same monitor will result in hopeless confusion as to what drive is being displayed...

The controlling factor here is metadata. You really have to spend some time checking and correcting the metadata before you rip. Accurate metadata is vital to a good usable collection. If the information is wrong, you may well not ever find where the CD went on your drive! And not having some consistency with tags, particularly the artist's name makes searching difficult. Unfortunately, all the online databases are rife with errors, misspellings and mistakes. And they often don't have the metadata the way you want your collection organized. This is often just as true with popular CDs as with more obscure ones. In my case a fair number of my Caribbean CDs aren't in any of the metadata databases and I have to spend sometimes 10 or more minutes typing in the metadata, and scanning the album art.

In case you haven't figured this out, just start dBpoweramp, select the CD drive you want, minimize it or slide it to a different monitor, double click on the shortcut again to start another instance, which will come up with the same drive you just selected. Change the drive with the dropdown list to another drive. Repeat for as many instances as you want. You can even have the instances with different options, burst versus secure, different metadata sources, etc. Just remember that after you change a setting, future instances will open with the most recent changes.

I also have the settings display the log at the end of each rip. I consider any rip with rerips suspect, most have actual errors, and I try to redo them, both after cleaning the CD and trying a different make drive. And if you aren't watching the progress, because you are minding a different instance, you'll never know you had a questionable rip.

Good luck! I'd suggest you start with only a couple of instances until you get familiar with the flow. Otherwise you will be like me and screw things up.

One other thing, you will probably find it worthwhile every now and then to open your entire collection in a metadata manager like mp3tag and scroll through the entries multiple times with the database sorted on different columns. Sort on Album Artist and look for all the blank ones at the beginning of the list... Oops... Sort on Artist, look for misspellings, look for artist and album artist different and make sure that is correct. Sort on Genre and make the selections more usable. You get the idea. Time consuming, but you'll be surprised how many errors there are, no matter how careful you are. You might even find that album that disappeared completely because of bad metadata... (Actually, if you notice it at the time of the rip, you can open up file explorer on the directory with the albums and sort it on last modified time to find the vanished entry.)

Good Luck!