Rip x 6

[Ashke]

I am new to this product and could not find any answer to my question on this site, so I thought I would ask it here.

My CD collection is roughly 5000+ CD's and I have 600+ DVD & Blue Ray movies.

The computer I built has a tremendous amount of USB 3.1 ports on the motherboard. (More than 6)

I want to hook up 6 external Blue Ray/DVD/CD burners/readers and just swap disks in and out as I walk by and see them ejected. I know it will take time to rip all my music this way, but it seems economical in the long run.

Can this program rip 6 audio CDs at a time via the external drive, USB port method I am thinking of?

Thank you in advance. Apologies if I missed this question being asked already.

Ashke

[garym]

Re: Rip x 6

You can run multiple instances of CD Ripper on your computer, with each instance you start setup up to use the different CD Drives. This is not automated as with a batch ripper. Each time a CD is ejected, you'll need to go to that running instance of CD Ripper and click on the appropriate buttons to begin ripping the next CD you insert. So this is a manual process, but at least you're doing 6 manual processes at the same time rather than only one.

[Michael Sargent]

Re: Rip x 6

Start with 1 or 2 drives and see if you can keep up with them.

I find I spend as much time ensuring the metadata (album title, song titles, cover art, etc.) is the way I want it, as CD Ripper does actually doing the ripping. I doubt I could keep with with two drives for most albums.

The secret is that if the CD matches Accurate Rip then it rips very quickly (a couple of minutes). So if the CD has good metadata look up, so you don't need to do much massaging, and it's in Accurate Rip so the disk can be read with just one pass, then I don't think a second drive would help me (and I have ripped over 6,000 CDs).

However, if you have CDs that you need to lookup and enter, or correct, the metadata, and they aren't in Accurate Rip, then multiple drives might be worth it. But it never has been for me.

(Popular, big selling albums will generally have good metadata lookup and be in Accurate Rip. Obscure, small selling disks are more likely to require manual metadata massaging and are less likely to be in Accurate Rip, so ripping will be much slower.)

So, try ripping a bunch of disks and see whether you thing that multiple drives would actually be useful for you.

Mike

[garym]

Re: Rip x 6

Start with 1 or 2 drives and see if you can keep up with them.

I find I spend as much time ensuring the metadata (album title, song titles, cover art, etc.) is the way I want it, as CD Ripper does actually doing the ripping. I doubt I could keep with with two drives for most albums.

The secret is that if the CD matches Accurate Rip then it rips very quickly (a couple of minutes). So if the CD has good metadata look up, so you don't need to do much massaging, and it's in Accurate Rip so the disk can be read with just one pass, then I don't think a second drive would help me (and I have ripped over 6,000 CDs).

However, if you have CDs that you need to lookup and enter, or correct, the metadata, and they aren't in Accurate Rip, then multiple drives might be worth it. But it never has been for me.

(Popular, big selling albums will generally have good metadata lookup and be in Accurate Rip. Obscure, small selling disks are more likely to require manual metadata massaging and are less likely to be in Accurate Rip, so ripping will be much slower.)

So, try ripping a bunch of disks and see whether you thing that multiple drives would actually be useful for you.

Mike

I couldn't agree more. I could have written the above statements verbatim regarding my own experience. I tried briefly to use two instances, and it mostly just confused my work flow. The careful review of metadata, reripping insecure first tries, etc. all needed my attention. I ripped about 5,000 CDs with dbpa. That said, even one at a time, I could do ripping, while also doing other stuff (email, browsing the web, etc.). I'd just take a stack of 30 or 40 CDs and deal with them throughout the day while doing other things on the computer.

[CaryB]

Re: Rip x 6

Just to throw my two cents in. I built a computer specifically for ripping CDs. It has 9 Optical drives in it (A LARGE tower). I originally was going to use batch ripper, but found that I am too picky with my MetaData for it to work. So I started running 9 instances of CD Ripper. (I have 3 monitors hooked up to the computer.) I would load up 9 CDs to rip, and initally fix all the metadata and the cover art, then start all 9 cds ripping at once. Since each CD is different lengths, and all the CD drives seem to rip at different speeds, they would all take different times to rip a cd. As one finished, I would replace it with another CD, fix the data, and start it ripping. Juggling 9 cds was pretty hard, but it allowed me to go through my collection of over 3000 cds in a couple of months. Now, if I pick up a batch of CDs, I uusally just opend 2 or 3 instances of ripper. You just have to be carefull opeing more than one instance of ripper, as changing settings in one instance will affect all of them sometimes, such as changing from Secure to Burst (If I had an especially scratched cd or it had too many errors.) This also helped as I have 2 cd drives that seem to rip older, scratched cds much better than the rest. If a cd was giving me problems, I would stop the rip, take the CD out and clean it as best I could, then use one of the CD drives that handles problem cds better.

I know this is extreme for some, but the thought of ripping 3000 cds with just one drive would have taken way too long. This way, I could sit down, work on them for an hour or so, rip a couple hundred cds, take a break, then go back and rip more later. Saved me from getting burned out doing it one at a time. Even with three monitors, I really could have used more screen space to organize it. I usually had 9 instances of CD ripper open, two or three file explorer instances open, at least one browser open with probably 4 to 6 tabs open, an instance of Paint to tidy of the cover pictures, and a copy of Collectorz Music to keep informatin on the CDs I had done, and what Genre I had filed the artists under, etc. Got pretty busy at times.

[schmidj]

Re: Rip x 6

Hi,

My setup is quite similar to Cary's. Currently a tower I built myself, a pretty fast Intel processor purchased in 2020, Windows 10 pro, 4 SATA drives in the tower, another 3 (soon to become 4) sitting on top, connected with SATA to USB adapters. Three older (4X3) monitors. Ripping to FLAC, temporary storage on the M2 C drive in the PC, final storage by dBpoweramp now to a almost new QNAP NAS, via gig Ethernet. I typically start 6 instances of dBpa, 2 per video monitor. I have an assortment of drives, some purchased new, years ago, some purchased used on eBay, some salvaged from old PCs.

There is a lot of variability of drive performance. The drives (Samsung SH224) that by far deal best with damaged/scratched CDs unfortunately seem to max out at 8X, even with perfect CDs. The other drives, both direct SATA and SATA via USB (of various makes and video capability) rip clean CDs at up to 40X or sometimes faster, towards the end. And sometimes a Samsung drive will just choke, slow down to nothing, on a damaged or warped CD but one of the other drives will rip it either securely or with inaudible errors. Failing that, if I care about the material, I look for another used copy on eBay, or capture the audio from a YouTube video.

There is a fair amount of Interaction between the instances. As Cary said, changing a setting, like to Burst from secure, on one instance, changes all the instances. Loading a new CD on one instance can slow all or some of the instances down until the new CD TOC has been read, etc. Spoon has stated that the non-batch version of the ripper was not written specifically to allow multiple independent instances. I suspect that even though you are running individual copies of the main exe file, it is calling on the ripper's library of DLLs for various functions, and either it locks the DLL while it is executing which keeps the other instances of the ripper from running that DLL until it has unlocked, or possibly that in some cases the instances are sharing a DLL, both of which can cause slow-downs and unexpected interaction.

But I chose to run the multiple instances instead of the batch ripper for the same reason as you, I need all the options for sorting out the metadata, which I'm somewhat picky about. And the multiple instances work well enough for me, so that is how I continue to operate.

Much of my base collection is ethnic music, mostly soca, calypso and steelband. A good portion of that has no metadata in any of the libraries, so I either have to type it in, or cut and paste from someone who has it for sale/listening on line. Needless to say, I can only keep one or two instances ripping, as locating and entering the information, and even more often, scanning the artwork, takes longer than the ripping. However, most of those CDs are also not in Accuraterip, so the secure rip takes several times longer, so the extra time with the metadata sometimes balances the extra ripping time.

But I also acquired several large collections of more common pop music and jazz where most of the metadata is there (but I continue to be amazed and disheartened an the poor quality of the on-line metadata, it tends to be riddled with stupid errors). And when all the metadata is pretty good, I can keep most of the instances ripping most of the time. Needless to say, this greatly speeds up the process. But I have to keep my wits about me, it is easy to screw up when trying to juggle all the balls. I don't want to admit how many times I've accidentally removed a CD mid-rip when I meant to remove a different one. And if I get going too fast, I forget to check things like how many CDs there are in a multi-CD set and which one I'm entering the metadata for (particularly troublesome, because often the same CD has been issued alone and part of a set.) And if I get too tired, my errors can start to skyrocket.

FYI, I've got about 120,000 tracks in my collection. The first few thousand were originally ripped to m4a using Winamp and I soon found out the value of Accuraterip, so many skipping, failed rips. And so much bad metadata. So I started over with dBpa, ripping to FLAC. I first started ripping the CDs that hadn't been ripped at all, and the m4a rips that I knew were bad. When I completed that, I started re-ripping the rest of the CDs previously ripped to m4a. I've still got a few hundred to re-rip, eventually.

I hope you find this of interest, many of us have different approaches to ripping, but sometimes similar.