Rimage Robots?

[Peakoverload]

I work for a charity in the UK where we make audio books for blind and visually impaired people. Unlike 'normal' audio books that come on CD-DA our books are produced in a format called DAISY which allows for much greater navigation.

Although we record many books ourselves we also buy in audio books on CD-DA from other libraries which we then convert into DAISY and this process first involves ripping the CD to WAV files.

We have just been donated 2 old Rimage Amigo II systems Details Here which we are currently trying to get to work with the intention of using them to rip all our CD's.

Can Batch Ripper be used with these systems? I don't know much about the Amigo II yet as we've only just received them and haven't been able to set them up yet but I do know that there is a Firewire and Com port connection from the robot to the host PC and a USB connection from the Prism Printer to the host PC if that helps?

Assuming Batch Ripper does work with this robot how does the ripping actually work?

What I mean is that all of the books we buy in will come on anything from 4 to 20 CD's and none of them will have their titles detected by any CD look-up program because they arn't registered with these services.

So what we would need to be able to do would be to set-up some kind of batch process job where we load the Amigo II with all the CD's in a known order, we then add a title and CD number to the ripping software so that it knows that the first disc it rips will be, for example "The Bible Disc 1", the 2nd disc "The Bible Disc 2" etc and, ideally that all the discs for each book would be ripped to individual folders. Once all of this has been set-up we just press 'go' and the software and robot just gets on with all the ripping. We would be looking to rip around 100 - 150 discs at a time which would comprise around 15-20 individual books.

Hope that makes sense. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[bhoar]

Re: Rimage Robots?

I'll leave the question to spoon on the process of batch ripping audiobooks.

I can only answer questions about the robots, since that is what I do: robot drivers. There are no drivers as yet for the newer RImage units. I just picked up mid-history RImage units, (a Protege and a Producer...not Producer II) and look forward to attempting some driver development with them early next year.

My technique has been, for robots with esoteric command sets, to use the manufacturer's software in a "monitoring" configuration (with Sysinternal's Portmon) to document the command set.

Unfortunately since RImage tends to sell their units with accompanying preconfigured server hardware (vs. a software installer...though the one-drive models might come with an installer) I don't have the duplication software for either of the above units, only the GEMPlus firmware updater software, which I use for unit hardware/firmware identification. From the little bit I already monitored using GEMPlus, I can say that the command sets for these units is a bit more unusual than most (e.g. "{escape}!e0C" as the "hello who are you?" string. Really?). I'll need to secure a copy of the RImage duplication software suite before I can do anything with them and will look into doing that over the holidays. And even then, the commands for the Protege and Producer might not work with the Amigo II or they might or maybe partially (e.g. no reject support) ... that's all up in the air.

Some more caveats: I'm moving from a free "business" model to a for-pay business model for my drivers on a per robot basis ($100 base for 1-drive, $200 for 2-drives, +50 for each additional drive) in the coming year. There'd be some additional software to use the robots outside of dbpoweramp as well (as an incentive for those who use the existing dbpoweramp drivers to sign up, and because it'll be fun). That said, I'm open to giving discounts on drivers or free drivers to those who help or helped in development, to charities or in trade for services.

-brendan

[Spoon]

Re: Rimage Robots?

Batch Ripper cannot work with DAISY.

[Peakoverload]

Re: Rimage Robots?

Bhoar: Many thanks for the update. I know what you mean about the Rimage's and preconfigured server hardware as the two Amigo II's we've been given didn't come with an PC and we are having a hell of a time trying to build a PC in the exact way that it seems to want it. We are making progress but it's slow.

I guess this is going to be a bit of a waiting game. We would certainly be interested in obtaining a software solution to work with our hardware as currently we are ripping around 350 discs a month every month by hand which apart from being an incredibly boring process is also very lengthy.

Spoon: I think you misunderstand. We don't need dbpoweramp to rip DAISY discs. We just need it to rip standard audio CD's, CD-DA, to WAV files which we then later convert to DAISY ourselves. Each book will typically be on around 10 CD's usually with 1 WAV file per chapter. We simply need to rip each disc automatically naming each track as "Book Title CD# Track#.wav". Ideally we'd prefer to be able to rip the discs in mono BUT not to simply sum both tracks to mono as this just gives a 3db boost to the audio but to be able to just rip the left or right track as this uses up less space on our server and as all our books are mono we don't need both tracks (This we currently can do in the PlexTools software we currently use).

Hope that makes sense.