Originally Posted by
Michael Sargent
Start with 1 or 2 drives and see if you can keep up with them.
I find I spend as much time ensuring the metadata (album title, song titles, cover art, etc.) is the way I want it, as CD Ripper does actually doing the ripping. I doubt I could keep with with two drives for most albums.
The secret is that if the CD matches Accurate Rip then it rips very quickly (a couple of minutes). So if the CD has good metadata look up, so you don't need to do much massaging, and it's in Accurate Rip so the disk can be read with just one pass, then I don't think a second drive would help me (and I have ripped over 6,000 CDs).
However, if you have CDs that you need to lookup and enter, or correct, the metadata, and they aren't in Accurate Rip, then multiple drives might be worth it. But it never has been for me.
(Popular, big selling albums will generally have good metadata lookup and be in Accurate Rip. Obscure, small selling disks are more likely to require manual metadata massaging and are less likely to be in Accurate Rip, so ripping will be much slower.)
So, try ripping a bunch of disks and see whether you thing that multiple drives would actually be useful for you.
Mike