Will Industrial Ripper ever see the light of day?

[MusicTrax]

For a year, there's been a mention of the possibility of an "industrial ripper" add-on for dBpowerAMP. I haven't seen any announcement beyond that, so forgive me if I missed past discussions.

Any chance that this will ever see the light of day? There are a bunch of multidisc CD/DVD-ROM changers out there, some of which would be ideal for this purpose. This would be a terrific addition to the program, especially for people trying to rip hundreds (or even thousands) of CDs.

[EliC]

Re: Will Industrial Ripper ever see the light of day?

Would be nice to see as long as it has the reference core w/ use of accuraterip.

[Spoon]

Re: Will Industrial Ripper ever see the light of day?

Now R12 is done and we have a CD Ripper 2nd to none, we are investigating implementing this.

[EliC]

Re: Will Industrial Ripper ever see the light of day?

Hopefully HTOA takes a higher priority.

[willyhoops]

Re: Will Industrial Ripper ever see the light of day?

spoon is this the robotic arm thing again? if you are working on something i will order the hardware so i am ready to go as soon as you release.... so let me know what to buy please...

[Spoon]

Re: Will Industrial Ripper ever see the light of day?

At this stage I would not order any hardware until it is completed.

[bhoar]

Re: Will Industrial Ripper ever see the light of day?

At this stage I would not order any hardware until it is completed.

If anyone out there already has a baxter, dupliq or pico unit, drop me a PM.

-brendan

[willyhoops]

Re: Will Industrial Ripper ever see the light of day?

Why have you got dbpoweramp to work with one? I would buy one if the software worked with one...

[bhoar]

Re: Will Industrial Ripper ever see the light of day?

Why have you got dbpoweramp to work with one? I would buy one if the software worked with one...

Sort of. But I am stymied due to the distribution rules over the hardware SDK components.

-brendan

[kevinoconnor]

Re: Will Industrial Ripper ever see the light of day?

How about a having a loadable module (with a published interface) for the robot? There are so many different robots out there, you'll only be able to support a tiny percentage.

For instance, I found a couple of NSM CD100 changers on eBay really cheap. With a little hardware hacking, I've replaced their old 2X SCSI drives with recent 52x IDE drives. I wouldn't ever expect you to support that old device directly, but if you provided some sort of plug-in interface, I would write a plug-in for it and share it with other users.

Failing that, how about adding scripting ability to the CD Ripper so I can automate it myself? At the very least, I would need to be able to tell the ripper the CD has changed and to start a rip and be told in return if the rip succeeded or failed.

[Spoon]

Re: Will Industrial Ripper ever see the light of day?

> but if you provided some sort of plug-in interface, I would write a plug-in for it and share it with other users.

We will be doing this.

[bhoar]

Re: Will Industrial Ripper ever see the light of day?

For instance, I found a couple of NSM CD100 changers on eBay really cheap. With a little hardware hacking, I've replaced their old 2X SCSI drives with recent 52x IDE drives. I wouldn't ever expect you to support that old device directly, but if you provided some sort of plug-in interface, I would write a plug-in for it and share it with other users.

Kevin - I'm curious about the hardware hacking part - I've got a few NSM-based libraries (an "MDI" NSM, and two "Disc" NSMs). What steps were involved in swapping the drives? e.g. tray removal, etc.

-brendan

[kevinoconnor]

Re: Will Industrial Ripper ever see the light of day?

I'm not very familiar with NSM apart from this particular changer. The other NSM changers I've seen were radically different looking, so none of this may apply.

The CD100 series is a 100-disc changer set up as two stacks of 50 discs in thin trays on the right and left sides of the unit. Between them is a tray loader that moves up and down and pulls CDs out of either of the left and right stacks. It brings the CDs down to rest on an open-top CD-ROM drive.

Hacking a modern CD-ROM drive in was a quite a bit of work. We had to build a platform for the drive (and the height has to be perfect for the mechanism to work correctly) and then tear apart the drive. Bits and pieces of the new drive had to be ground away where they interfered with the loader.

Also, the loader relied on a signal from the drive to tell it that a disk was loaded. We had to put together a simple circuit to get this signal from the new drive.

As for interface, we used a cheap IDE-USB cable for the drive and the NSM already had a serial interface for the changer portion.

[kevinoconnor]

Re: Will Industrial Ripper ever see the light of day?

> but if you provided some sort of plug-in interface, I would write a plug-in for it and share it with other users.

We will be doing this.

Excellent. Obviously, I would be willing to test this.

[bhoar]

Re: Will Industrial Ripper ever see the light of day?

Ah yes, one of these:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=300121481755

I was always reluctant to grab one off of ebay of those due to the large sheet of plastic/glass on the front - my experience with buying off ebay is that those sorts of things end up breaking in transit.

In my menagerie of automated disc units the only ones that have "open-top" drives are the two Ultraplex units I have. The closest NSM I have to the CD-100 is the CD-150, like this one:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=150133469762

As you can see from the second to last picture, while the picker seems similar, the actual drives are slot loading instead (there are four modified drives mounted in the upper right). It uses the trays that the discs sit in as both a part of the conveyance process as well as a replacement for the normal sliding drive tray in that the disc+tray get pushed into the drive as a unit via the now-open front. And yes, they too have custom circuitry to detect the disc load at the robotics level without having to talk to the drive at the scsi level.

Sounds like you went out of your way to get the newer drive tech in there. That's the only way it's going to work, of course, since the manufacturers tend to charge an arm and a leg for newer drive types (e.g. $2000 for a replacement CD-RW, $3000 for a replacement DVD-RW, etc.), and thats only for currently supported machines, unlike these.

Impressive!

-brendan