Hello,

I did some ripping a few years back with EAC. It worked fine but it was a little clunky and I am looking to restart the project to rip a few hundred discs.

I have two old desktop machines, Pentium 4 3ghz with about 2gb RAM each. I found and purchased (in 2015) two of these drives from the 2014 accuracy list, they were ranked *11:

Drive: LITE-ON - DVDRW SHM-165H6S (189 users): Submissions: 11810 accurate, 157 inaccurate, 98.6881 % accuracy

My intention is to just re-image these machines with XP and with new ("fast" or SSD) drives, buy a 5 pack dbpoweramp license, and run both machines, one drive each, at the same time to get through the discs faster.

Hardware questions:


1. What is the slowest link in any CD ripping chain? Is it the CD-ROM/DVDRW drive? The DVDRW bus (IDE or SATA)? The speed of a hard drive? Amount of RAM? CPU for encoding?

2. I had great luck with the SHM-165H6S (both of them) but strangely it has disappeared from the accuracy list. Related to the above, wondering if I should buy new drives that are SATA anyway? I am wondering if there were a huge run of bad rips that dropped the device score, which statistically would be hard to do based on the * of submissions.

Software questions:

1. If I were to disregard my old hardware and buy a new multi-core desktop box, and put these (or any two) DVDRW drive in the same chassis, can you open two copies of dbpoweramp at the same time and double my ripping capacity that way? If so is that one or two licenses?

2. I can see that the dbpoweramp metadata import looks pretty smooth. I intend to rip to .WAV. I understand that not all devices will interpret .WAV metadata the same, but is it still as easy as it looks to download/add metadata in dbpoweramp for WAV as it is for FLAC?

Any information is appreciated. Thanks!