Starting a large batch ripping effort. What station should I go for in 2023?

[luthier]

Hi, I have around 15,000 CDs to digitize and am just getting started with preparations. My first question is, what ripping station should I go for?

I saw that the nimbie is recommended but given that it only loads 100 discs at a time, I'm looking at larger options with more capacity and drives for simultaneous ripping. I only want to do ripping of audio CDs. I want to be sure I'm getting the best setup for the job, even if it is costly.

What is the best recommendation? Right now the options I'm looking at are:

Cronus DVD/CD Publishers without Printer - 6 Drives

https://www.vinpowerdigital.com/products/cronus500-s6t-np-bk-series

MF Digital Ripstation 7604 II

https://www.mfdigital.com/ripstation.html

It's very hard for me to tell what is a better device or if there are other options I should be using. Thank you for any help here!

[Spoon]

Re: Starting a large batch ripping effort. What station should I go for in 2023?

They should all work fine, the Primera are the only systems with known issues.

[luthier]

Re: Starting a large batch ripping effort. What station should I go for in 2023?

Ok thanks for the heads up. I see that the Vinpower Digital Batch Ripper Driver R1 says "Models Supported: Ripbox, Cronus."

Does this mean that the Titan Supreme and Aero lines from Vinpower will not work? Such as https://www.amazon.com/Supreme-Robot...dp/B001E50G1I/. I see that they offer some very large capacity models which are attractive, but I'm wondering if Cronus is the best for ripping purposes.

[Spoon]

Re: Starting a large batch ripping effort. What station should I go for in 2023?

Each disc would take around 5 mins to rip, so even 100 discs is 500 minutes which is 8 hours

[luthier]

Re: Starting a large batch ripping effort. What station should I go for in 2023?

I'm having lots of loading issues with my Cronus machine unfortunately. It has not been able to finish a full batch of 500 discs. I need an alternative:

1) Is it possible to use dbpoweramp with the Titan Supreme from Vinpower: https://www.amazon.com/Supreme-Robot...dp/B001E50G1I/

2) Is it possible to string up like 6 acronova nimbies to the same PC all at the same time and use them instead?

[Spoon]

Re: Starting a large batch ripping effort. What station should I go for in 2023?

You can get about 4 acronova on the same computer before the internal USB pathway is saturated.

[ghibliss]

Re: Starting a large batch ripping effort. What station should I go for in 2023?

Buy a used MF Digital machine on Ebay for around $600.00. With 4 drives you can rip around 50-60 CD's per hour once you have all of your options set properly. I have these machines as well as one with 6 CDROM drives and average 65-75 CD's per hour as long as it is not opera or classical music being ripped which takes about 35% longer due to the length of the CD's which are over 70 minutes with many close to 80 minutes.

Using these machines as they were delivered will result in slower through put ie about 30 - 35 CD's per hour tops as they have older processors and do not support current versions of Windows. I replaced all of the internals with new motherboard, CPU, Memory, Windows 10 and new drives. The older machines do not use SATA drives and are slow. Rebuild cost is around $800.00 with 4 drives. You should only use drives from Vinpower who are the owners of the Optiarc and Plextor drives. The commercial drives differ from conventional consumer drives which do not fully extend when the tray opens consistently which will cause the loading and unloading of discs to jam. The replacement drives cost about $100.00 each and are good for approximately 6000 cycles per drive ie 4 drives are good for about 25K rips. I speak from experience having replaced my drives in more than one machine and verifying the number of ripped CD's.

If you are ripping a large number of classical or opera cd's then you should only use GD3 for metadata as Freedb and others do not provide composer metadata which makes them completely worthless in my opinion. If you cannot perform a search of your classical cd's by composer you are pretty much lost. GD3 provides composer metadata and has an a excellent library so you will get metadata and coverart for most every commercial cd.