External Multi Ripper Ideas & Help

[TheWolfe]

I'm new and starting to rip my CD collection (hey, that's an original start to a thread!)

I just have a single slimline external optical drive right now. I'm looking at the best way to expand without breaking the bank. I've seen the batch rippers like the Nimbie, while cool, that's outta my price range. I've also seen the monster ripper machines some have built. I am limited to an external system (my gaming PC and laptop are limited in size and do not have room for an internal optical drive but are both very capable machines). Is is best to just buy a few more external slimline drives? I also thought about building an external multi-internal drive ripper in a duplicator case or RAID HD case. I'm not sure where to start here, but looked like a possible option? I imagine I need some sort of controller board to bring all the SATA together and a power supply to power the drives. I tried to do a little searching on the forum for something like this with no luck, thought I would pose the question!? I look forward to hearing your suggestions!

[schmidj]

Re: External Multi Ripper Ideas & Help

Well, how large is your collection? That would probably influence your collection. If you only have a few hundred CDs, it will probably take you longer to get your Nimbie working than it will just to rip the CDs. Also from my experience, I often take longer sorting out the metadata before ripping a CD than it actually takes to rip the CD. The online metadata is full of obvious and less obvious errors. And then you may have your own ideas of things like Genre and Style which may well be different from the online data. If you go to using a Nimbie, you basically have to fix that after you rip, much harder IMHO than fixing before you rip.


I have 5 or 6 drives connected to my desktop, two or three via USB. I have 3 monitors and run two instances of dBpa per monitor, up to six overall. While Spoon doesn't really support multiple instances the software handles them pretty well, with minimal interaction. Spoon suggests the batch ripper software, but I found that to lose many of the metadata editing features in the main ripper. The only issue I see is that when my underpowered NAS box decides to run its backup or maintenance software, everything grinds to a halt, and that has nothing to do with dBpa!

In my experience, most internal drives work better than external drives. And, with a very small sample size of one, my DVD burner drives work better than my BD burner with scratched CDs. (they are getting harder to find, though.)

But you don't need anything more than some USB ports on your computer to use internal drives externally. There are several makes of SATA and IDE to USB converters that work fine. And the good ones even come with a brick power supply to run the drive.

You don't need a (expensive) case for the drives, mine are piled on top of the tower computer case or sit on the desk next to my laptop. You do need to treat them with a little care, I lost one when I tripped over the power cord and it crashed to the floor and broke the SATA power connector off... But other than that, I've used drives like that for years with no problems.

You need to spend some time experimenting with settings before digging into this too deep, I and many others say that based on experience and doing at least part of the collection twice. (And, if I were doing it a third time, there are things I'd still do differently...) Read around in the older posts here for loads of suggestions. And don't be afraid to ask questions (preferably after you've read some), many of us users are willing to give advice.

[TheWolfe]

Re: External Multi Ripper Ideas & Help

Thanks schmidj for the reply! I'm probably guesstimating around 400 or so CDs. In all honesty, the project started with my dad's frustration when he got a new truck and they didn't put CD players in them any more and he couldn't play his Righteous Brother albums when he was driving. As a gift I told him I'd rip all of his music. I also wanted to get all of my stuff ripped too! So his immediate collection adds another 50 or so. It's no 1000+ CDs, but it is a commitment of time and effort!

I have been reading over the set-up stuff and making some decisions on my formatting and metadata plans. As you suggest, It looks like time spent on the front end makes you happier in the long run! I certainly plan to go the route of FLAC, but I probably need to think a bit more on my metadata.

I had been looking at those SATA to USB converters. They looked like a good route. I thought of picking up a cheap empty duplicator case or similar to throw a few drives in and hook them up with those converters, but I wasn't sure how robust those were for the use they would get with ripping. I wondered if there was a multiple drive controller board and power supply or usb hub that would work well to consolidate/clean things up and not break the bank.

I appreciate the feedback and I look forward to taking advantage of the forums here!

[garym]

Re: External Multi Ripper Ideas & Help

If you had 4000 to rip, maybe a nimbie, etc. But, for example, I ripped about 900 CDs in about 2-3 weeks, one CD at at time with one external CD drive while doing plenty of other stuff on my computer, working, etc. . And I was able to pay close attention to my metadata while doing all this.

[schmidj]

Re: External Multi Ripper Ideas & Help

For a few hundred CDs, no need for a Nimbie. I recently acquired what now appears to be about 2000 pop CDs (for free) from a radio station that was about to dump them. I've been spasmodically ripping them for perhaps 10 weeks now, with a couple of breaks when other business interfered. Never more than 3 hours an evening, and that included entering them in my database index of what I have, which has nothing to do with actually ripping them but probably takes as long as actually sorting out the metadata and ripping them. Without over stressing myself, I've ripped one to 1 1/2 boxes of a couple hundred CDs a week. Now that is with my setup with five rippers at the same time, although I often are spending enough time sorting out metadata that all five aren't ripping, and sometimes none are ripping while I sort out the metadata that is really messed up on a CD or have to manually type in the data and scan the artwork for a CD which has no data online.

I've been using my drives for about 7 years now and have only had two drive failures, one the one I dropped and broke the connector and another that had a CD explode in (Yes, really, don't try to play a CD with a crack, you'll never get all the broken pieces out of the drive!) I had one external drive power supply that came with one of the SATA converters die, apparently infant mortality under warranty. The drives don't seem to wear out. It is good to have several drives of different makes and models, some rip CDs that others won't, particularly if they are scratched or poorly burnt CDR's Garym on here got at least some of his drives by salvaging them out of defunct computers.

You may want to think twice about using a USB hub, at least with USB 2, as all the data from the multiple drives will be going through one USB port, and you may exceed the available bandwidth. Also the converters are USB powered, and unless the hub has external power, there may not be enough power to run them all. I use separate USB ports for each converter/drive. And as I said, I don't have a case or anything, although I've thought of bending a couple of pieces of sheetmetal to hold mine so they don't fall on the floor again.

One thing you have to find out is how your father's radio works. Is he going to put all the data on a chip in his phone and use bluetooth? If so, with most any player, the filenames don't matter at all but the tags stored in the files are vitally important, as that's what the players best use to select music. If you are planning to use a USB thumb drive, you need to investigate how the radio lets you select what to play. Better ones use tags like the phone players, but there are still quite a few that select by file name, really lousy if you have anything more than a few dozen CDs on the drive.

Although I'd strongly recommend keeping your master library as FLAC files, (or ALAC if you use a Mac) you'll probably want to convert them to m4a or mp3 to play back in the car, to save storage space. But you can use the FLAC files to play back at home with CD quality. Look at Spoon's TuneFusion program for syncing the FLACs to the compressed files for the car.

[TheWolfe]

Re: External Multi Ripper Ideas & Help

Thanks for the advice guys. I carefully walked through the set-up recommended by Spoon. It made things easier. I looked up my external drive on the drives list and oddly enough my drive was the very first one on the list! (HL-DT-ST - BD-RE BP50NB40) So, I guess it works pretty well!? I'm sure I'll wreck those statistics!

I decided to take a "rip and see" approach. I found an older IDE drive that was from an older machine (TSSTcorp - CD-DVDW SH-S182F that has about a 98% accuracy) that I ordered a USB 3.0 connector for it that I could also connect another SATA drives to. I figure I might pick up another inexpensive SATA internal drive down the road (it sounds like it's good to have a few different drives to rip problem discs with). If you have any recommended drives let me know!

I've managed to get through a few dozen CDs so far. It has been pretty good so far. Flew through the CDs in good shape. Struggled through a few of them. Have a few tracks that there were errors with (even though they sound good when listening to them). Also had a few that have some scratches that I'm fighting. I'm going to look up some suggestions, but if you guys have any quick ones that would be very appreciated! One of them I've played around with the toothpaste, baking soda, polish and wax tricks. Those techniques will need to be refined before I use them on others (It didn't fix the track btw)!

Oh, and btw, I threw a few on a usb drive and tried it out in the truck (dad and I have the same). The Ford SYNC 3 system plays the FLAC very nicely and does a good job with sorting and accessing them, so a win there!