how to select best processor for multi-rips

I have a large collection to rip and want all the music in place before I mortgage my soul to get a Linn DS. I can build a PC with upto 6 drives for ripping and can use whatever motherboard is best for the job.

First question is does the software separate quad core processors into 4 processors to select? It seems to from the screen shots, but wanted clarification.

Second: What is the best processor for the job. In practical terms what is the maximum number of drives supportable for best speed of ripping overall. (No poitn in adding another if all it does is slow the rest down)

I imagine the bottleneck will be the writing of the FLAC files, so thought I would stripe 2xSATA drives.

Third: I saw the recommendation for Teac DW2245L drives, but dammned if I can find them for sale anywhere? Any ideas?

Many thanks

>First question is does the software separate quad core processors into 4 processors to select?

Yes

I recommend 1 processor per DVD/CD drive, max 4 drives per system.

For internal drives, look for Plextor 230A, or Plextor 708a or Plextor 716a, these 3 are well respected drives.

Jus as an update having now experimented a long time with many options. The processor I am using is a 3Ghz AMD Plethon quad core. I have installed 4 x SATA DVDRWs all of different makes and an IDE 48x CD reader. The hard drives are 1 x IDE system drive and 2 striped RAID0 SATA drives for data. (you need a 750W PSU for this!) The processor never gets above 70% utilisation.

I have found there is a far greater difference between accuracy of rip between using the batch ripper and not, than between the drives. A drive which may kick out a couple of tracks as inaccurate will usually come good when used with the stand alone software (even though batch ripper is calling it).

However, the main point is that having tried 8 different standard OEM and retail DVD drives, all seem to perform really quite well. When using 5 drives together I typically get a combined ripping speed of up to 160x and if you are handling jewell cases, this is about as many as one can reasonably handle.

What works for me is I have another PC with a single drive in which I re-rip the odd one which batch ripper objects to. I turn off all the paid for tags on this machine and the tracks are overwritten (I am writing to a NAS box) leaving artwork and directory structure.

There are differences in the way that batch ripper handles the tags to the stand alone software (probably a bug) and it is a shame that batch ripper is considered "commercial" and therefore the retrieval is different. It is a bit irritating to get the album cover when playing it free under Windows media but often not on the batch ripper. But what a good product overall.:smile2:

>s a far greater difference between accuracy of rip between using the batch ripper and not,

Likely there is a transfer bottle neck off the dvd drives, which would impact the accuracy of the drives (ie you cannot have 10x drives of certain interfaces, the speed drops to a maximum, hence why we recommend 4 drives per system).