Discussion of Automated CD Loaders

[bhoar]

Re: Discussion of Automated CD Loaders

please excuse my ignorance, could someone explain how i go about my first batchrip...

i own the following MFDigital robot

http://www.mfdigital.com/downloads/ScribeEC_Data.pdf

(i want to rip my entire CD collection to FLAC...i have downloaded the batch ripper & converter software, dbpoweramp and appropriate codecs.)

do i setup a network cable between the scribeEC and my pc or does the music get ripped to the internal HD of the scribeEC?

presumably i need to get the drives of the scribeEC to appear as (for example) E:/ or F:/ drives and then configure them in the batch ripper configuration option

Hey bren, glad to see you finally got the equipment.

This is one of the MF-Digital models that is standalone, has a keypad, but does not run windows, right? e.g. If you look on the back, verify there is no a place for keyboard, video and mouse to connect. If so, it is truly standalone.

And if this is a truly standalone system running an embedded OS (linux or a DOS variant), then you'll need to externalize both the drive connections (simple) and the robot connection and make it a peripheral to a windows computer.. Don't worry, the control for the robot is just two wires (RxD and TxD) for the serial port.

The other question is, are the drives in the unit currently SCSI drives, IDE drives or firewire drives?

It's probably best to send me links to or emails containing a few photographs of the unit, including the back paneling.

Once I verify it is what I think it is, I can send you a driver that should work.

You can post links here and I've just PM'd you my email address if you need to send me the pictures. I'll need your email address to send the drivers.

-brendan

[sonyman]

Re: Discussion of Automated CD Loaders

Dear Brendan,
have you new information about the
DTP-800 Driver?

Thanks
Bastian

[bhoar]

Re: Discussion of Automated CD Loaders

Dear Brendan,
have you new information about the
DTP-800 Driver?

Thanks
Bastian

Sorry, schedule is still too busy to go over your logs. I know I'll need to write up some notes and ask you to verify some of the commands, not sure what else I need yet...

-brendan

[sonyman]

Re: Discussion of Automated CD Loaders

Sorry, schedule is still too busy to go over your logs. I know I'll need to write up some notes and ask you to verify some of the commands, not sure what else I need yet...

-brendan

Ok,
let me know i can help.

Thanks!

Bastian

[bhoar]

Re: Discussion of Automated CD Loaders

FYI, there are a several of the MicroOrbit-based Kodak units on ebay, originally made for the Kodak Photo Kiosks (I've seen the robots at Target, for example).

Search ebay for: Kodak duplicator.

Yes, they're only 50-disc. And they don't have separate accept vs. reject - just one input and one output.

And...replacing the drive, if you wanted to, would be a custom job (you need to cut notches in the tray for the lift levers to move through...and only some drives have the gear track in the right place for that to work).

But!

You can probably get one for approximately $100 including shipping (to the US, higher elsewhere), as long as you all don't compete against one another:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=320307337446

And even less per unit you buy a lot of 10 of them.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=320306600736

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=320306996105

...like I just did.

-brendan

PS - spoon - should this thread be moved to the batch ripper subforum?

[jim7]

Re: Discussion of Automated CD Loaders

They are actually kind of nice little units. Mine was shipped a few days ago and it seems to be brand new and it was packed well -- almost too well, the box was gigantic for all that was in it.

The drivers for the USB-to-IDE and the USB-to-serial converter were auto-installed by Vista and I played around with it a bit with PuTTY pointed at the virtual COM port and the commands on your wiki. It seems like the relevant ones are just "I" for inserting a disc into the tray, "G" for getting a disc from the tray and "A" to drop this disc (on the floor since it doesn't come with a bin).

Besides batch ripper, do you know of any software that works with these? I'm more interested in general recording/burning software. If I could get the thing working with something like Nero or ImgBurn that would be perfect. I think I probably will try to swap in a DVD drive since it seems like the small physical changes to the tray that you mentioned would be all that's needed.

[bhoar]

Re: Discussion of Automated CD Loaders

Yup, they were made for retail use, so they have to be tough.

As far as I am aware, other than my drivers for the batch ripper (and the kiosk software for kodak which I've never seen), there's no software written for these. The command set is extremely close to the amtren/discmakers units, but the requirement for a "G"rab and Close-tray before an "A"ccept means you're unlikely to coerce software to work with these. Most robots only need those two before a "R"eject.

Before swapping drives, get familiar with the placement of the toothed rail on the bottom side of the drive tray and the cutout locations. Any replacement drive will need to have the toothed rail located far enough away from the left and right sides of the tray that cutting out notches won't break the the teeth.

-brendan

[jim7]

Re: Discussion of Automated CD Loaders

It seems to work okay just using a batch file. Just need to use "mode" to open the com port and "copy" to send the serial commands, along with some way of opening/closing the tray and sleep to give the robot time to execute a command. And of course some program that accepts commandline input to rip/burn/whatever.

It's not pretty, but it's good enough to do some useful work.

[bhoar]

Re: Discussion of Automated CD Loaders

It seems to work okay just using a batch file. Just need to use "mode" to open the com port and "copy" to send the serial commands, along with some way of opening/closing the tray and sleep to give the robot time to execute a command. And of course some program that accepts commandline input to rip/burn/whatever.

It's not pretty, but it's good enough to do some useful work.

You could also use the ULCLI in a batch file as well (the ULCLI is included in the kodak driver file for the batch ripper). That way you could detect "end of input" situations.

-brendan

[bhoar]

Re: Discussion of Automated CD Loaders

FYI, there are a several of the MicroOrbit-based Kodak units on ebay, originally made for the Kodak Photo Kiosks (I've seen the robots at Target, for example).

Heh. Looks like the bidding wars have started and they're topping $100 (delivered). Wonder if that's due to my post or a sudden market interest?

Out of curiosity, who here has purchased or bid on one of these? If you want to wait until the auction is over to talk about it, that's fine, of course. But I'd like to get a feel for how many of the purchases are coming from batch ripper/ULCLI users...

Edit: oh lookee! Someone else bought a lot of 10, and another person bought a lot of 5. Neat!

-brendan

[hofftodd]

Re: Discussion of Automated CD Loaders

This may have already been answered elsewhere, but I couldn't find an exact answer to this question:

Has anyone used one of the Aleratec CD towers that has a direct USB connection to a PC (non-standalone duplicator)? I'm wondering if one of these towers will show up as 3,4, or 8 drives under windows when you plug in the USB, and thus can be used w/ BatchRipper for some parallel ripping.

Thanks!

[bhoar]

Re: Discussion of Automated CD Loaders

Has anyone used one of the Aleratec CD towers that has a direct USB connection to a PC (non-standalone duplicator)? I'm wondering if one of these towers will show up as 3,4, or 8 drives under windows when you plug in the USB, and thus can be used w/ BatchRipper for some parallel ripping.

Typically, those towers only put either a single optical (CD or DVD) drive on the USB connection (for burning the master), or, alternately, only put the internal hard drive on the USB (if it has one, for storing multiple masters).

If you want a multi-drive parallel tower, you'll need to build one yourself.

-brendan

[sunstealer]

Re: Discussion of Automated CD Loaders

Could dBPowerAmp be used to batch rip non-music CDs? I am a hospital doctor and we have a large number of magnetic resonance scans stored on CD that we want to batch copy to disk. We have a Datatronics MiniCubis and I've been trying to figure out the bulk USB commands to control the robot with limited success - although I can program, I knew very little about USB until now. What I really need is a dos executable that allows me to give each separate robot command so that I can write a batch script to do all the copying of the CDs to hard disk - otherwise the relevant .c and headers would be a great alternative, and I'll do it in C. Any help with finding this code or if it doesn't exist, with guidance on how we could write it would be very helpful. I get the impression that an SDK exists for controlling this robot - is that right?

thanks in advance

[bhoar]

Re: Discussion of Automated CD Loaders

Could dBPowerAmp be used to batch rip non-music CDs? I am a hospital doctor and we have a large number of magnetic resonance scans stored on CD that we want to batch copy to disk. We have a Datatronics MiniCubis and I've been trying to figure out the bulk USB commands to control the robot with limited success - although I can program, I knew very little about USB until now. What I really need is a dos executable that allows me to give each separate robot command so that I can write a batch script to do all the copying of the CDs to hard disk - otherwise the relevant .c and headers would be a great alternative, and I'll do it in C. Any help with finding this code or if it doesn't exist, with guidance on how we could write it would be very helpful. I get the impression that an SDK exists for controlling this robot - is that right?

thanks in advance

If you buy the dbpoweramp R13.1 *Reference*, you get the batch ripper and you can download the baxter drivers for the batch ripper, which include command line clients load.exe, unload.exe, reject.exe, etc. Yep, command line clients.

They may work perfectly well outside of dbpoweramp, but I doubt spoon will fully support their use in such a manner, though he may decide to not explicitly forbid it either.

In addition, if you send me a PM, I may be able to help with a non-dbpoweramp utility (based on some coding for a project I did a few years back).

-brendan

[Spoon]

Re: Discussion of Automated CD Loaders

Illustrate do not place restrictions on our programs in such a manor, so yes you could use the load.exe commands etc to load the drive from an external component (you would have to specify the drive letter on the command line also, see the batch command line help).