What is the Proper way to batch rip CDs using 7 or 8 optical drives?

[currter]

I am not sure if this has been addressed long ago.
Again, is it possible to "batch" rip CDs (Compact Discs) from several connected
optical drives like maybe 7 of them connected to a computer?
I had done this long ago (2016, 2017 or so) but I may not have
done it the proper way by running several instances /threads of dbpoweramp
or the CD ripping software and running each one once each of the CDs were loaded
into the 7 optical/DVD/Blu-Ray drive connected. Also all of the "parallel" runs of the
rippers were run and the audio files were stored or ripped to a rotational/mechanical hard drive
and not an SSD type of drive at the time. I used a Western Digital Passport type of HD at the time
to store the ripped audio flac files.
Though it worked for the most part that way, later on I discovered there could
have been some cross-contamination of a few of the audio files --like a part of
one song being included or inserted into another song...maybe discovered this 3
instances and not sure why that happened.


I may want to rip another client's CDs and want to do things the right and proper
or official way this time around.

So is there a way to rip multiple CDs in "parallel" or without just using 1 optical drive and
use 5 to 7 optical drives to load 5 to 7 CDs to be ripped and without running multiple instances
of the ripping software like I did last time to give the appearance of running these processes
in parallel?

Thank you again.

[Spoon]

I would not put more than 4 drives on a single sytem.

[CaryB]

I built a rig just like that for ripping my collection of over 3000 CDs. It had 10 cd rom drives in a huge tower. I also had a 16 core AMD with 64gb of ram. I never ran into any problems with the CDs writing info into the wrong racks. I did find that changing any settings of any open instance of ripper affected the other open instances of ripper. I first tried batch ripper, but wanted more control over the metadata that batch ripper provides.
In my observation, the best way to work with this rig was to load up all 10 CDs, edit all the metadata to my liking, such as cover art, artist names, etc. (I was extremely anal about the metadata.). Then started all the cd drives ripping. Since there were about 6 different brand name drives, they all seemed to rip at different speeds. I also noticed that 3 of them were much better ripping non pristine CDs. As the rips progressed, and a cd finished, I had it set to eject on perfect rip. I would then load a new cd into the finished drive, edit the metadata, and start it ripping. Any CDs that had errors, I would re-rip in one the drives that handled the scratched CDs better. I also made sure to clean that cd with a good anti static cloth. In the end I had less than 100 CDs that had 1 or more bad tracks. Not bad out of 3000 plus CDs. I also had about 100 CDs that weren’t in the accurate rip database. Those CDs took longer to rip as I had the system set to rip any such cd 3 times to verify.
All in all I was able to rip 150 to 200 CDs per day before going stir crazy sitting in front of the computer.

A bit of advice. Make sure you are 100% comfortable with you naming scheme before you start. And make sure you figure out how you want to deal with multi disc sets. And compilation CDs. You don’t want to go back and re-rip a bunch of CDs because you didn’t think it through carefully.

[currter]

I would not put more than 4 drives on a single sytem.

Thank you for that advice and it would be more manageable to use 4 optical drives.

[currter]

I built a rig just like that for ripping my collection of over 3000 CDs. It had 10 cd rom drives in a huge tower. I also had a 16 core AMD with 64gb of ram. I never ran into any problems with the CDs writing info into the wrong racks. I did find that changing any settings of any open instance of ripper affected the other open instances of ripper. I first tried batch ripper, but wanted more control over the metadata that batch ripper provides.
In my observation, the best way to work with this rig was to load up all 10 CDs, edit all the metadata to my liking, such as cover art, artist names, etc. (I was extremely anal about the metadata.). Then started all the cd drives ripping. Since there were about 6 different brand name drives, they all seemed to rip at different speeds. I also noticed that 3 of them were much better ripping non pristine CDs. As the rips progressed, and a cd finished, I had it set to eject on perfect rip. I would then load a new cd into the finished drive, edit the metadata, and start it ripping. Any CDs that had errors, I would re-rip in one the drives that handled the scratched CDs better. I also made sure to clean that cd with a good anti static cloth. In the end I had less than 100 CDs that had 1 or more bad tracks. Not bad out of 3000 plus CDs. I also had about 100 CDs that weren’t in the accurate rip database. Those CDs took longer to rip as I had the system set to rip any such cd 3 times to verify.
All in all I was able to rip 150 to 200 CDs per day before going stir crazy sitting in front of the computer.

A bit of advice. Make sure you are 100% comfortable with you naming scheme before you start. And make sure you figure out how you want to deal with multi disc sets. And compilation CDs. You don’t want to go back and re-rip a bunch of CDs because you didn’t think it through carefully.

[currter]

Thank you for your advice. I ripped about 1300 CDs in my personal library long ago (2016) in parallel using 8 optical drives at the time
and by running an instance of the CD ripper software in various desktops set up on Windows 10 computer.
I believe the CD ripper has to perform some synchronization with the optical drive before it starts the process and I believe
EAC does something like that as well.

Anyway I believe I lucked out that I was able to rip all of those CDs one by one, loading each into the optical drives
after each was completed (I set that the CD would eject once completed). I let the software perform the metadata stuff
though some did require some attention, but for the most part, everything worked out automatically.

It was just that maybe a year later I did notice after playing a few songs that I would consider album filler or tracks
I may not have played that there seemed to be some cross contamination of only 3 of the songs (not many)
and wondered if it was due to running all of those rips in parallel and maybe I did not take the proper approach
by doing a batch rip the proper way. For those songs with "cross contamination", I corrected those few by
either re-ripping the CD for that one song or I had ripped the CDs before I discovered dbpoweramp software
using iTunes and ripped the CDs beforehand into .WAV files and I just used the .WAV file to convert that to
.flac and then added the metadata to that manually (that Folder.jpg file) of the album art that was present after
ripping the CD to flac

In the end I believe things are okay with how I did it but if I should rip a lot of CDs again for a friend, I just
wanted advice how to do it the proper way. I did rip several 100 CDs for a relative as well in 2018 or so and pretty much
using the same method before but I used only 5 optical drives that time.

Thank you again... if I do this again, I will just use 4 "portable" USB optical drives.

[linkman]

All in all I was able to rip 150 to 200 CDs per day before going stir crazy sitting in front of the computer.

Yeah, you described a painful method. A purpose-built CD changer like a Nimbie is a much easier way to do it. Loading 100 in a stack and "let 'er batch rip" is a much easier way to go. Even if 100 discs were to take 10 hours it doesn't matter unless you need the job done quickly. You only have to interface with it once per 100 discs and the human part of the unload/load is very quick. Clean up the metadata and deal with rejects/inaccurate rips after the fact.