Project

[Techybec]

Im building a project - it is a PC case with 5 cd/dvd players with a power supply and SATA host/hub. Using dbpoweramp I want to rip 5 cd drives either simultaneously or one after another. Does anyone have any experience using multiple optical drives at the same time?

[garym]

Im building a project - it is a PC case with 5 cd/dvd players with a power supply and SATA host/hub. Using dbpoweramp I want to rip 5 cd drives either simultaneously or one after another. Does anyone have any experience using multiple optical drives at the same time?

yes, this can work with dpba. Others use this setup.

[schmidj]

I'm ripping from typically five or sometimes six instances of dBpa, five drives, all "internal" drives, three actually connected to SATA ports in the PC, three using external SATA to USB converters and power supplies. Three 4X3 monitors, two instances of dBpa per monitor. FLAC Files written to a QNAP NAS. It runs well, there is some interaction between the instances, when you put a CD into a drive if others are ripping, they will often all pause for the time it takes for the drive to recognize the new CD, and some similar issues. Spoon says dBpa wasn't really designed for multiple instances, that the batch ripper is, but I tried the batch ripper and it did not give me the necessary flexibility in editing metadata I need

Metadata is the bane of my existence, the online sources are such a mess. If the metadata is good, I can keep all five drives going. If I come on a CD with missing or messed up metadata, then the other drives will complete and be sitting there waiting for different CDs, while I'm spending far too long straightening out the metadata on just the one that has bad data.

My NAS is slow and "long of tooth". I have it doing scheduled backups to an external USB brick. And when it is doing the backup, or other housekeeping, communications between dBpa and the NAS slows to a crawl. Not dBpa's fault, I just have to blow my budget on a new, faster NAS.

But, having the multiple drives really does tremendously speed up the ripping process. You just have to keep your wits about you as to which instance is which, and connected to which drive. I've accidentally stopped the wrong instance, opened the wrong drive mid-rip etc. Most often happens when I run into a bad CD and a track comes up requiring 25,678 reripps...

[garym]

@schmidj addresses your questions well, and I agree with his last point. Every so often I'll have 2 instances of dbpa running ripping from two internal CDs (I have two monitors too), and even with only two I sometimes confuse myself.

p.s. Re: NAS I'm thinking that one could rip to the PC's local drive and then after a ripping session transfer all your newly ripped files to your NAS. For example, I rip to my local C: drive (C:\tempmusic) in a ripping session. Then when done ripping a bunch of files, I look at them with a tag editor, etc. just to make sure I'm happy with everything, and didn't miss some tag edit I should have done at ripping time. And once happy, I then Copy/Move these files over my network to the separate HDD attached to my music server (which is a different computer on my network). Seems like you could do the same thing with a NAS.

[digdug]

+1 for the metadata problem. i'm ripping on a mac with 3 connected cd drives to an external hdd. runs fine, but when metadata is bad, it's the correction, that slows you down, not the lack of more cd drives. on accurate rip it occurs, that re-ripping sectors blocks the other drives nearly completely.