Slashdot Mirror
Automated Ripping with CD Jukeboxes?
apago asks: "I am ripping my large collection of CDs to MP3 one at a time. This takes forever. I would like to know if there is a way I can use my Sony 200 disc jukebox to help automated the ripping process. I can already drive the jukebox thru Sony's S-Link interface using a Nirvis Slink-e device. The juke has SPDIF output. Can I get a sound card with SPDIF input and start ripping thru the digital optical connection? Will this be the same quality as the CDDA data streams?" Now if something like this is possible, it would finally sell me on those multi-CD devices. I too am in the process of sending my CD tracks to MP3 format. It's a fun process, but a little bit of automation couldn't hurt.
If this is possible, I can imagine that the pace of ripping would still be way faster than encoding. You'd need some serious space on your machine to compensate, unless you slow it down considerably .... I could see myself turning this on ang going to sleep, only to wake up with a machine crammed full of .wavs...
... and even at that pace I have to slow down for a while to let the machine catch up.
I have 3 scsi cdroms on my box
Then again, depends on your processor, so ymmv.
Quick, change the headline before someone notices!
Acceptable choices include:
Automated Ripping with CD Jukeboxes?
Automated Ripping with a CD Jukebox?
Use the Preview Button! Check those URLs! Don't forget the http://!
Replace the CD mechanism in a jukebox
with a Plextor reader??
Is there a nice automated ripper that pulls track info and builds the ID3 and all just from dropping a CD in the tray?
Starman97@Gmail.com (bring it on spammers)
Processing power would be the first, but relatively easy to meet. The main issue would be the size of the HD, making sure there is enough room. Just script the rest if there isn't some other easy way to do it. Auto-It is what I would recommend if you are using a Winblows system.
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
Most of my music is already ripped, but I guess its time to redo, especially when .ogg is done.
.... tons 'o Divx on your server.
Imagine if you did this with a DVD jukebox. Throw them in, turn on
http://autorip.sourceforge.net/
i've been hacking on autorip to support a multi-cd tower (mines on scsi so at least that part is easy).
autrip is a perl front-end to cdparanoia/freedb/ and a wav to mp3/ogg converter.
it's written for one device, but easily hacked for multiple (even if just the cheap way of forking it a bunch of times)
it does track at a time converting so you don't need to worry about a disk full of wav's that need to be converted.
unfortunately i've put the project on hold -- i can't get a stable 2.4 kernel on my PPC box that supports XFS. Currently when I launch cdparanoia the kernel bombs.
The SPDIF connection on your juke is 100% digital. The signal doesn't go through a D/A conversion, so it'll sound perfect, what your sound card does with it remains to be seen, though they all should do well. Creative labs has an add on to their PCI cards that add optical and coax digital connections. The problem is that the juke will only send the data out in real time. So where it takes but a few minutes to rip to MP3 on your computer using you internal drive, using the Juke it would take up to 80 minutes.
-- Chris Martin, System Administrator
This is certainly possible, and perhaps better. The SPDIF output from your Sony has been error corrected by the CD mechanism inside. Using CDDA on a CD-ROM is prone to more errors since the data isn't error corrected the same way. On newer drives this usually isn't a problem, but it can be. One thing though, since you can only play the CD's out through the SPDIF in real-time, your idea will certainly be much slower than ripping from a 40x CD-ROM
-apg
---------------
"Oh, Precious Roy you get us every time..."
-Sifl and Olly
How would you get track info?
CDDB etc. use the track lengths etc. to work out which album it is but this information won't come along with the audio, so you'll need to post-process the ripping operation to look up the album and rename the files or you going to have 1.mp3 through 3000.mp3 which would be a PITA!
http://www.thehungersite.com
If this is possible (and I don't see why it wouldn't be), couldn't encoding the output be a way around the new "uncopyable" CDs?
If you can't rip them (due to the "defects" added to them to induce clicking noises), you can certainly encode the digital output (assuming you have a sound card that has the proper inputs), and get your mp3s that way.
Hhhmmm... it seems that the first person/company to come up with a self-contained device that does this could make a lot of money...
libertarianswag.com
Problems with using external home audio jukeboxes are:
S
1. Top ripping speed is 1x... slow
2. No disc info, so no CDDA type track ID info, are you going to type in all the track info?
3. No standard interface for controlling the external jukebox.
So although it would be GREAT to rip 50, 100 or more CDs at a time, there is no inexpensive way to do it.
A few years ago there were SCSI jukeboxes commonly available. I have a couple 7 disc ones sitting on my shelf, one 2x, the other 4x. Sadly both are so old they do not support audio ripping.
Unfortunately that market seems to have all but disappeared to be replaced with SCSI jukebox towers. You can build one yourself using cheap SCSI CD-ROM drives, and a big SCSI tower case. ComputerGeeks sells 24x SCSI CD-ROM drives for $15 each:
http://www.compgeeks.com/details.asp?invtid=240
You don't even REALLY need a case, you could just stack them up, tape them together, and use an old AT power supply to give them juice. Heat is not an issue since you are only using one at a time.
There should be a very stupid way to do this. From this guy's website: http://ling.cornell.edu/plab/techtips/tipdigitizin g.htm it appears that he has done SPDIF Dat to computer. As long as you have any program that accepts input (his was a program from creative) it seems that you could write a macro that would allow you to automate a record. Here's what you would need to have in your macro:
1) Start the computer program
2) Start recording
3) Stop recording and save when the song is over (this is done by listening for a special "click" sound)
4) Start recording next song
5) Encode song just saved
This would take a lot of effort to code a macro like this, so you might want to look for a speciality program or write your own.
1) How will you automate separating the tracks? If you are recording from spdif it's all going to be one long mp3. I'm sure you could write a filter to do silence detection, but that doesn't work even close to 100%, many song have pauses in them.
2) You won't be able to automate the naming of files and id3 tags. You'll have to name every track manually.
...you're actually creating legal MP3s?
Sorry, we can't help you with that one.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
This would be way cool, but I forsee two major problems:
.mp3 files, you need to solve the TOC problem.
1) Speed. AFAIK, multi-disk CD changers only read at 1X. Even with the highest qualtiy settings, I can encode at 3-4 times that rate on my dual CPU PIII.
2) Access to TOC. This is the real killer: if you want all the nice freedb lookups to work right, you need to extract the TOC from the disk and compute a hash of it. I am almost positive this doesn't go down the SPDIF line.
The speed I could deal with (just leave it running when you go on vacation for a week or so), but unless you want a hard drive full of unnamed
Comment removed based on user account deletion
PowerFile is a 200 CD/DVD jukebox over FireWire. Hell they even sell a re-writeable version. Not sure how it would work on a PC, but on the Mac its AppleScriptable and along with iTunes 2 you could load this puppy up and have it rip all weekend. I have one of these at work for archiving and I will bitch about its ease of use, though with some tweaks to their provided scripts, it worked fine.
Anyone know how this could work on PC/Linux? They have a M$ SDK here which includes visual basic samples.
People think Microsoft is the answer. Microsoft is just the question, "No" is the answer.
What you want, really, is two jukeboxes (jukeboxii?). One that has real music CDs in it to be ripped, the other which can feed a CD writer. Depending on your writer, you'd need a gig or two of free space. Rip rip rip until you had an MP3 CD's worth of music, then write, write, write... Condensing music CDs down to MP3 cds, with a nice little back up of the music in the process. The software would let you either file the on-line MP3s somewhere or remove 'em to make room for the next batch.
in one of these 200 disk devices with a computer based CDRW? Or even a DVD-RAM/CDRW?
:)
I bet that it is do-able, just not very easy.
I would love to setup an archiving system using 200 CDR's Everyday it would do an incremental backup to a CDR.
Or even better, put 20 CDR's and 180 music CD's in and in a few days, pull out 20 CDR's full of mp3's.
I would also think that it would be cool to automatically download all the usenet porn and automatically make CDR's full of them everyday.
Send your CD collection to me, and I'll rip it at your prefered bit rate, all with proofed ID3v2 tags. I can't guarantee, tho, that a copy of the MP3s will not stay on my 160Gb Maxstore MaxAttach NAS that I maintain just for my .mp3 collection.
I'm serious - really.
I actually hired a neighborhood kid to do that. A friend of mine was moving out of the area and I decided to make a local mirror of his collection so that I could continue to "borrow" CDs from him. It was around 400 CDs or so that I was interested in ripping but I quickly realized what a major hassle it was.
Then I got an idea and called up another friend and ask if his younger brother (age 13) wanted to earn a little money. I offered to pay $40 to rip them for me. I brought over a stripped down Win98 box with a fast CD-ROM and he got it done that weekend. All he had to do was stick the CD in, wait for CDDB to fill in the names, and click the convert button in MusicMatch or whatever the hell I was using back then. Rinse, repeat.
I mean, kids these days are usually familiar with the process anyway. A completely low-tech solutions but hey, if this is a one time deal why buy hardware that costs ten times as much?
- JoeShmoe
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
*cough* apago and Cliff, why not use Ogg Vorbis?
Oh I hate music thieves!
Aye aye aye aye, I am the Frito bandito.
I must admit that I am extremely disappointed by this article.
After I've discovered Napster in August 1999, and have known for MP3 for some time, I started immediately to convert all my CDs - by hand (the downloads from Napster convinced me that it was actually feasible to have all my music in MP3-format).
The disappointement is that such a question surfaces 2 (two !) years too late - at least on my timescale that is. Call me a troll, but since I'm on the road most of the time, I can't afford to bring unnecessary hardware with me, and have therefore eradicated the problem at the root.
ha! I'm actually burning oggs right now. Honestly, I'm liking them much better than mp3s. I get a higher bitrate at about the same file size. It's old news to a lot of people, but I'm a convert now.
windac32 pro does it for windows. $30 if i remember correctly.
.wav's in the decoding process - it rips the data and feeds it straight into an encoder (lame, ogg, what have you) so the disk you have is only used by the final encoded bitstream.
this is a good program, because its halfway intelligent. it doesn't even store
a good product, and it has excellent scratch repair. its very much worth $30.
http://www.windac.de/
I must say, of all the Slashdot 'editors', Cliff is the least retarded, and even seems cool. The rest... ugh. Especially now that VA Linux's former CEO is posting more nonsense stories. Keep up the good work cliff.
Is it really true that degradation can't happen as long as no d/a conversion? How about jitter/clocking errors and stuff like that?
Can I get a sound card with SPDIF input and start ripping thru the digital optical connection? Will this be the same quality as the CDDA data streams?
;-)
Every bit of audio present on a CD will be retrieved with a SPDIF connection. Enough quality for ya?
As for the interface and ease of writing discrete MP3 tracks when the SPDIF stream changes, tagging, etc., well, that's where a SPDIF connection becomes more of a hassle than normal ripping. But that's all really just a software issue -- all the hardware is available. Like the poster, I also have a Slink-e from Nirvis. Great box and it lets you pull approximate TOC info from the CD in a single or multi-disc Sony player (via an S-Link cable) to retrieve CDDB (or equiv) info for tagging or naming. You'll need another connection (S-Link, for example) alongside the SPDIF connection for player/disc/track data.
The Slinke hardware is platform independent, though the software the give away with it is entirely Windows. Search around and you'll see some Linux and Apple support for the Slink-e also...
in Python
someone's project & some links
HA support
By the way, the Slink-e is great for general infrared in/out in addition to controlling Sony (and a few other manufacturers') CDs, MDs, receivers, TVs, etc.
I love tossing a "Taco" salad with sour cream once a day.
40 lousy bucks. I can't believe the kid agreed to do it. What is that? $1.20 an hour at best. You're a jerk.
-- "The reward of suffering is experience." - Aeschylus
This would be a bit pricey for personal use (the jukebox is about $8K), but it's worked out extremely well for high-volume ripping and encoding.
ripping thru an spdif will be slow since u wont't really be ripping....u'll be playingthe cd into the computer and then encoding to mp3
having an SPDIF means u will have perfect digital quality to WAV it's numbers not wavs remember...
the disadvantage is that the entire cd will be one big wav file...u can't get a wav player to know where the tracks start and end...it's just like if u use analog inputs with a tape deck or any audio source...it's one long recording session...
you sit for hours at your computer every day and if u have a decent CPU u won't even notice the ripping and encoding much at all (specially if u have SMP) i'd say it's easier to install more than one cdrom if u want the speed
Kenny Sabarese
www.kennysabarese.com
40 lousy bucks. I can't believe the kid agreed to do it. What is that? $1.20 an hour at best. You're a jerk.
Or the kid lacks basic math skills. Or the kid's parents/guardians don't have much influence on what/where he wastes his time!
Besides, you said it: "the kid agreed to do it." It takes two to mambo.
Now if something like this is possible, it would finally sell me on those multi-CD devices.
Of course it would be cool to throw all your CDs in a 50 CD changer and have it auto rip.. but would you buy one? The real question is, would you use it a second time?
Once you rip your collection, you only need to rip your new CDs (likely purchased one at a time) as you buy them. This you can do with a conventional CD drive.
I think at the cost that mp3 home audio is going for now, it isn't worth it to market or purchase something that is designed for this type of single use convienence.
--------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
If you haven't already done so, I suggest you invest in Musicmatch Jukebox and a fast CD/DVD-ROM drive like this Sony. It encodes at speeds up to 20x on a Duron 850 - a regular CD is mp3-fied in 3 minutes.
I've also been ripping my CDs (1400+) and converting them to mp3s. What I usually do is have EAC (Exact Audio Copy) rip the CD in the background while I'm doing other things (like reading slashdot). When the computer beeps, then I put another CD. After 12 or so CDs, I run LAME and encode all the songs at once. Unfortunately, a lot of my CDs aren't in the FreeCDDB, so I end up typing a lot. I gave up looking for the fastest way to get everything done, slow and steady will eventually get everything done. When I'm done, everything will be streamed over to my Diamond Rio Receiver.
You should check out this cluster which was built for ripping. pretty impressive.
I am told there's a few Nakamichi changers that extract DAE over the scsi bus.
you really don't want to be stuck with a 1x system (spdif). even 4x beats that. plus, when you extract over a computer bus (not spdif) you can ID the disc and even read its TOC to get the song lengths, and use that to get the network cddb info. with an spdif stream, none of that is do-able.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Buy an Apple computer. Install iTunes. Modify iTunes preferences to automatically rip cd's upon entrance in the CD drive, at your desired bitrate of course. This is not rocket science, merely Apple's continued foresight.
...a few with a gui. i prefer rip. if you look around on freshmeat there are quite a few more.
-- john
The kid probably got a lot of free music along the way.
Too bad it was mostly Neil Diamond and George Benson.
I've actually not been able to find something for linux that would divide the wav up into parts (if it was one huge one for the whole cd)...Until tonight that is, so I report my findings here for anyone else who might have been looking and didn't want to resort to **gasp** Windows.
http://freshmeat.net/projects/tape2mp3/
Put all your CD's in the carousel, go to Starbucks, and when you return, this device will have connected over the Internet to CDDB, catalogued all CDs in the carousel (including artwork) and ripped them on the hard drive inside. Then you can play them on your home stereo system. http://www.escientconvergence.com/fireball.htm Or try the cheaper alternative.... http://athome.compaq.com/showroom/static/ipaq/musi c_center.asp
Warning: PowerFile's largest investor (IIRC) is Escient, the company responsible for turning the CDDB into Gracenote.
You can buy a 200 disk DVD/CD jukebox for $999 from PowerFile. 32X read of CD, CDROM, etc., 6x read of DVD, DVDROM, etc. This thing talks IEEE-1394. Note that it doesn't decode anything; it just reads and ships the stored bits. You need a separate decoder. Proper Linux interfacing is left as an exercise for the student.
That's a pretty expensive way to do something that WMP has been doing for ages. I think he wants to automate the process, though. Instead of sticking all the disks in his computer's CD drive one-by-one, he wants to stick 200 in his carousel, leave it alone for a few hours (or days if it only rips at 1x...), and come back to find them all on his hard drive.
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
I had originally written a script (based on ripit) that did mass-encoding into ogg or mp3 format on my FreeBSD box. The advantage it had over typical rippers is, other than total automation (auto-eject, auto-insert detect), it had a seperate fork for encoding and ripping. So you could rip 3 CD's while you were still encoding the first. You batch up 40 CD's in the rip queue, and wait overnight as the encode queue catches up. CDDB for ID3 tags and filenames, of course.
However, now that I'm using MacOS X as a desktop, I use iTunes, which is actually better, oddly enough. While it doesn't have the seperate rip/encode queues, it does have auto-eject & auto-encode on cd insertion. Where it beats out my old cd-slayer is speed. cd-slayer had seperate processes, iTunes does encoding as it's ripping!
The speed is pretty incredible, on some tracks (Front Line Assembly), it does the rip/encode process for 192K/s songs at 15.5X. More typically, I get 8X performance. iTunes smokes anything I've used by not only combining both processes, but having a nice SMP AltiVec Fraunhoffer based encoder.
So, this still means a single CD takes 4 minutes, but that aint half bad. It still means spending 13 hours on the weekend inserting a new CD when you hear the completion sound and the gears turning as your CD drive ejects. Slot drive encouraged!
So, if someone has a nice G4 around, do what my roommate does.. "Hey Thomas, can you rip these for me real quick?". Just an idea!
Where can I get info on my CDs based on UPC? I'm not looking to use FreeDB - it's impractical to stick every CD I own into my CD-ROM drive. Instead, I've got a bar-code reader which will read the UPC. It doesn't look like FreeDB uses UPC at all, which is a shame since it's exactly this type of into I'm after.
This is for a personal, non-commercial project to inventory my discs. Therefore, licensing expensive databases with "commercial" pricing is out of the question. I'd consider hacking together a script which would submit it to an online vendor (such as an amazon or cdnow) and parse the results, however I haven't found anyone who accepts UPC searches.
Any ideas?
DON'T USE MP3!!! USE OGG VORBIS!!! I'm FUCKING SERIOUS!!! MP3 is BAD in EVERY WAY by comparison.
If you (like me) have one of those 50, 100, or 200+ cd changers lying around, and tons of cds, and you want to have them in convienient mp3, that is to see easily searchable and playable, why not think about making the computer control the cd changer?
Admittedly this only works if you are focusing you music listening around a home system, but it seems if you have enough cds to fill up your huge changer, you might as well use it, right?
My changer (few years old Sony 200cd CDP-CX205) seems to only take input (control signals) via S-Link, which I've never used, and what I presume is a carrier on the standard stereo lines. Any possiblity of using a soundcard's audio-out to send controls to an audio device? You save track info locally on your computer (still the problem of naming everything pops up), and update as you put new cds in. Just an alternate perspective...
Green-voting, republican-registered, socialist-libertarian.
Wow, a cool grand for the entry model!
:-D
Ah well... time to tell the boss how badly we need a CD jukebox.
-----
The bottleneck isn't encoding. Period. Admittedly, I used CDex, which, from my understanding, is a Windows implementation of LAME, and it worked fantastically for my purposes.
.wavs at 1 or 2x, however, is completely unacceptable. That would've increased my time to completion by a factor of "a whole bunch."
Having said that, if I had to do it all over again, it would make a lot of sense to rip the CDs to wavs on a linux box, then have a cronned script to encode them.
By and large, the ripping took longer than the encoding. I was normalizing my CDs, so maybe that had something to do with it, but it'd be really nice if I could rip, rip, rip, then have my linux fileserver's processor manage the encoding while I was gone.
I think this concept maximizes the time that a human actually has to be around, and lets the computers do all of the repetitive crap. Which, of course, they are good at.
Ripping to
Take your time, convert it to a format you WANT, and let the computers do as much work as you are comfortable with.
Speaking from experience, you definitely will NOT want to do this again.
ceci n'est pas un sig.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I did this once late one night at a unpopulated computer lab at a university. I did it during the holidays when most of the students had gone home. 100 computers, all ripping at the same time. You can pace yourself so that as you get the last computer, the first computer is done. You'll be pretty busy for the two hours it'll take you to rip a hundred CD's
http://www.republika.pl/mparvi/digital.htm
http://www.geocities.com/jonrisch/jitter.htm
Btw.: Many [most?] sound cards use 48khz as an internal sample rate and upsample any sound signal that has a lower frequency. A 44.1khz CD track would therefor be upsampled to 48khz if input via the SP/DIF connector on the sound card. This, of course, degrades the sound signal somewhat.
A few months ago, I encounted a similar problem.. 40 or so CD's that I wanted to rip but I wasn't interested in sitting in front of my PC and switching out the discs. So, I started building a lego mindstorms mechanism to do it for me.
:(
:( maybe I should try to reconstruct it. This time I could build a better unit now that I know where some improvements could be made. I'll work on it next week, if anyone is interested in the source or a small how-to, feel free to email me.
When a CD was finished ripping, the PC would automatically eject the CD. The machine would sense the tray being out and pick up the CD (using a piece of double sided tape on the end of an arm). The CD would be dropped to the left of the CD tray (using a little pneumatic "solenoid") and the mechanism would go off to the right of the CD tray, pick up another CD, drop it in the tray. The whole process was timed perfectly so the drive would know when to close. The to-be-burned stack was simply stacked onto one of those spindles you get when you purchase a bunch of blank CD's. It worked pretty well but I took it apart before I documented it.
Now that I've been laid off
Geoffeg
http://jukebox-control.sourceforge.net/
Interfacing to grip, lame, etc is fairly easy. It has FreeCDDB interfacing and can grab the TOC from the disc. It also will write the title information back to the jukebox so that you can easily select discs from the front panel.
-- http://www.swcp.com/~hudson/
I bought a Sony Vaio computer a year ago on one of the auctions, purely because it had a SPDIF output and an SLINK connection.. The pre-installed sony software included a minidisk manager that was supposed to be able to talk to changers.. Unfortunately, it only knew how to talk to 200 disk changers.. But it could see the first 200 disks in my 300 disk changer. It got the titles correctly from the cddb as well.
What I'd like to know is if anyone knows what speed I should open the serial interface to talk out the slink cable on my machine.
I don't really want to go out and buy a slinkie, as the entire project isn't worth another $300, but it would be worth my time as a programming project.
I love being able to listen to my music while playing Tony Hawk, but it's painful to get to that point. Can't wait until they get this thing online so it can download the names from the CDDB.
What is your address?
I am sure the RIAA would live to help you out there.
I'm not going to discuss if this is possible so much as is it practical. Let's say it can be done. The next question is would you really want to do it. At the end of this process you are left with 20 gigs of mp3's per 400 CDs. The cost of the HD is minimal, but now you have a 400 CD archive that takes up space and an expensive card and changer that's collecting dust. Next week you buy 4 more CD's and then what? Wait until you have 400 to repeat the process? If the changer can connect to the computer, play the music with the CD player. I can't see needing 350+ hours of mp3's for anything other than a LONG road trip. Of course if the question is really "My buddy Larry is gonna loan me his whole CD collection for a week", then buy the changer at WalMart and return it when you're done. Just an observation.
Carpe Deez
..brother of Joe, I got me some crack, I want me some hoes!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Now if I could get a 200 disc changer for MP3 Cds that would be nice.
I've backed up all my cd's and downloaded so many more.
Get your Unix fortune now!
There are many commercial cd-rom jukeboxes out there. I know Pioneer make good ones, there were about 50 of them driving Music Choice Europe last time I looked. That's how I know they're very good at digital ripping.
These things are pretty cool, they have up to 4 drives per box, all SCSI and a cool robot arm that whizzes around changing disks (think the movie Eraser). They also provide good support, and I believe Linux support for the robotics.
The price is the sticking point, although not for everyone. I'm guessing you could pick up an old model used for under $1k.
Get a "Powerfile" unit from powerfile.com, throw all your CDs in there, get a command-line ripper and write a short script to load/unload the drive, and voila. It will take a little work, but it's doable. The trick is that the Powerfile does SCSI over firewire, so you get true CD ROM capabilities from the external changer. And there are two drives in the unit, so you can rip two discs simultaneously.
:(
The bad news is that it only works on Windows or Mac. Actually, if it works on OS X then it shouldn't be too ugly to do this. Don't know if it does though. Oh yeah, the other bad news is that the Powerfile costs $1800, last time I checked.
What do I mean?
Look at it: A 200 disc audio CD changer that can be computer controlled through an easily accessible interface.
Now, why isn't that CD drive a CD-ROM, or better yet, a CD-RW drive? Who here wouldn't want to have approx 140 gig of optical R/W storage - cheaply?
There are larger changers available as well - 400 discs and more. They are cheap.
Oh, yeah - they do make "commercial" CD-ROM/RW jukeboxes - but instead of being $250.00 - they are $5-15K! WTF? It must be because it seems like a niche market.
I have a ton of CD-ROMs and CD-Rs that I would love to be able to load into a jukebox to use at a click of a mouse. I have even thought about what it would take to build my own jukebox, or possibly convert an existing cheapo jukebox.
I know some of you are thinking "Dude! Get a few 100 gig IDE drives and shut up!" - All I have to say to that is that you are forgetting that these hard drives can crash, and there is no cheap way to back up - while a CD will last a very long time - you don't have to worry about it much.
I just can't understand the large difference for something that would be cheap and easy to do for a manufacturer...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I do this using what has become known as the "Tower of Changers". I have 7 Nakamichi 16x 5-disc changers in an external SCSI case. I just load it up with 35 CDs, run my script (which encodes from all 7 drives at once), and a few hours later I have a couple dozen GB of MP3s. Very handy. Not quite as sexy as using a 200 disc changer, but it works very well.
I've ripped and encoded about 1000 CDs. Lessons learned:
1) Ripping requires significant manual work if you want good results - in particular, cleaning up missing or incorrect or inconsistent data from FreeDB/CDDB, and cleaning/repairing/retrying discs that you can't get a clean rip from the first time. (And normalizing if you want that.) Even if you could reduce manual CD-changing to zero, it'd still be a tedious process.
2) Ripping isn't easy. You really want a player with fast reliable DAE and software you can trust to detect possible errors. Ripping a large collection is enough work that you don't want to redo it because you eventual discover sporadic errors in your first results.
3) CDROM drives are cheap and well-supported. CD changers are expensive and require kludges. Instead of messing with a changer, it makes a lot more sense to stick a few extra CDROM drives in your system. Borrow some good drives and an extra IDE or SCSI controller, or buy/sell them on eBay to effectively get a cheap rental. Then rip the discs four or five at a time at 15-20x using cdparanoia.
Bite the bullet and do it by hand ... The problem with damn near everything proposed so far is its far more work then actually *doing* the work.
...
... its gonna take you a few days to do them all ... but all your doing is inserting discs and clicking -- it ain't that hard.
Get yourself 3 things:
Fastest computer you can get your hands on,
Fastest Plextor CD-ROM/CDR you can afford,
and a skipdoctor (skipdoctor.com) to repair thrashed discs
Do them in your spare time, if your watching tv, just get up every commercial break and insert a new cd
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
I ripped all of my ~400 CDs to WAV format stored on a Linux RAID which is shared on my home network. I have two Western Digital 120GB drives striped in RAID-0, which gives me about 220GB useable online storage -- easily enough for 400 uncompressed CDs.
Granted, the ripping process was not automated with a juke, but it only took about 5 minutes per CD with my Plextor CD-ROM/R/RW drive.
The most time consuming part is converting WAVs to MP3. I've decoupled the ripping and compressing processes, and automated the latter. I do this with LAME running on multiple machines against a common data store (on the RAID).
I have a simple "multi-processing" script which runs on Linux and windoze clients; I run one copy of it per PC on the net that can reach the input WAV repository and the output MP3 repository. These two repositories can be on the same RAID, or can be at different locations on the net.
Each album is represented by a single directory of WAVs, and each copy of the script (running one copy of the script on each of several PCs) "owns" the crunching of a single album directory from WAV to MP3.
Since the crunching process is primarily CPU bound (not I/O bound) throwing multiple machines at it radically speeds the conversion process. The 100Mbps NICs and switch I have are more than enough I/O bandwidth. I can even use some PCs which live elsewhere in the house (on the other side of a ~10Mbps HPNA2/phone-net bridge).
I can process the entire collection from WAV to MP3 in about a day using 7 PCs of various vintage. House stays nice and warm too.
Since I haven't yet found the "best" LAME command line incantation for me, I've found that I've re-crunched the WAVs->MP3s more than once. My plan is to keep all the original WAVs around until I find a set of LAME conversion options that create MP3s nearly indistiguishable [to my ears] from WAVs.
-----
Juke auomation idea is pretty darn cool. I could have physically loaded 200 CDs in a fraction of an hour. Less than a day later (assuming 8X rip speed is somehow possible), the RAID would have been ~1/2 full with no further intervention by me.
They've got this great service whereby their
site confirms that you own a CD, and then you
can use their catalog of MP3's on the fly, saving
the trouble of ripping all of your CDs one at a time. It's a classic example of the American dream, where innovation with new technology creates new markets, expanding the horizons of creativity and comfort while driving the economy to everyone's benefit.
Oh, wait, the recording industry, which takes huge profits from the work of creative artists long after any of its contributions to production and marketing have been recouped, and sells product to consumers at monopoly prices, thus gouging both sides of the buyer-seller equation, might not benefit.
Oops...never mind.
--
Make mine methylphenidate.
I have been using Grip on Linux. It is the best tool I have yet seen for this.
It will read the audio at full speed, buffer it on the harddrive while converting, eject CD, start new rip when next CD is inserted.
So it takes a few minutes per CD, and you could easily do 20-50 CDs in a few hours if you have harddisk space for them to be buffered before conversion.
What, nobody has come up with an interesting hack for using a Lego Mindstorm Kit and some Perl scripts to automatically load, rip, and encode the CDs? Geez, this crowd is getting lazy.
First off, I agree with you wholly that you should be able to without having to worry about the RIAA.
However, I feel I should play Devil's Advocate here. The RIAA sees every MP3 created as a CD not purchased. If you went to MP3.Com, for example, and downloaded all of the 2000 (200 CD's x 10 songs per CD avg?) songs so that you don't have to swap CD's all the time, then they'd say 2000 more pirated songs were downloaded.
Is their logic correct? Heck no! But they use this flimsy logic to get the courts to pass silly laws like the DMCA. They don't see it them as backup copies, but rather copies intended to distribute to other people so people don't buy the CD's.
In a sense, I can see the RIAA being worried about this. The thing is, though, I think more and more people want to listen to individual songs and not CD's full of filler. This is scary for the RIAA because if people get their way, then they would only buy a song for $2 a pop instead of buying the album for $20. On top of that, they'd need media for each individual song. At that point, the individual artists don't even need the record industry anymore, they could sell that service by themselves! That business model suddenly doesn't sound so interesting, does it?
Getting back to your question, personally I'd recommend using Morpheus or whatever Napster clone is available to just build up your collection of songs, then only rip the ones you can't find. That way, instead of ripping 2000 or so songs, you may only end up ripping like 50.
Be careful, though. If the RIAA comes knocking at your door because of this article, be sure to have each and every one of your CD's ready to present to them.
"Derp de derp."
I recently had a similar conversation with a friend of mine - however I'm ripping LP's...
Our solution (theoretical, of course, we don't have time to implement it) certainly applies to CD's. Build a Mindstorm changer!
You don't want to. After ripping 300 of my CD' to MP3's, I only need to rip a few at a time any ore for the new (used) ones I'm getting now. Biggest problems? diskus obscura or the unknown disk error. Worse yet was the mislabeled or inconsistantly labeled track info from freedb (even on dual packs.) Go figure.
I used the dual CD's in my linux server(using mp3c) plus the dual CD's in my Win box (using cdex.) I even created a script that would close the cd tray, rip and eject. So my involvement was slap on new disk, click on a icon (gnome) Took me a little over a week to rip them all.
I would say that unless you have to rip 10,000 CD's, using a massive changer would not be time well spent.
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
I've done this before. I've found a way that is alittle bit faster than doing it manual. It does, however, require two cdrom drives and a good version of AudioCatalyst. In AC there is an option for "continuous ripping". what this does is open up two copies of AC. It will begin ripping from one cdrom and when its done, it will eject, then move to the next cdrom. So, you simply replace the finished CD with a new one and you're set to go. And just as a hint, I would put all the popular CDs together and do them first to make sure AC can find a CDDB entry for it. Then I would do the ones that might not be so popular so you know that you will get the right filenames and an ID3 tag. this is just my opinion
doug
-a.thought.crushed.my.mind-
I have access to a small LAN of 15 machines all 800MHz or better on 100Mb UTP. This would probably make a neato encoding ensemble.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
When I was in the "rip all my CD's" mood I used both of my CD-rom drives to do it. I'd have it do two while I was in the shower, at work, eating, going to bed, etc... it took a little while but it got done. Now whenever I buy a new CD I rip it even before I listen to it.
I used to use one of these with CDParanoia - When it was in a good mood, it'd just give me an endless pile of jitter errors - When it was in a bad mood, it'd flood my SCSI bus and cause General Badness. The same disks ripped OK with my Plextor, but that isen't exactly fair, is it? :)
I guess most people would assume that a $15 SCSI peripheral would be junk, but I thought a comment was worth making before somebody dropped $150 on ten of these things.
the easiest way to rip mp3s I've seen is a program called cdex. you insert cd, you wait for cddb. you click on button, you wait, the whole cd is now mp3s.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Looking above at the Sony SPDIF control system, I guess my question is 'Do any CD-ROM electronics share a reading laser type with the Sony jukeboxes?' That could get you 90% of the way there, if you could just unplug the servo/head electronics and plug them into a CD-ROM chassis.
Personally, I'm Way Too Poor to buy a CD Juke just to tear it apart and play with it. This seems like a really worthwhile idea, tho.
Wouldn't it be possible to take the guts out of a nice 50x cd rom.. and replace the drive in the disk changer? Yeah it could get ugly with cut up hardware.. but it should be possible.
My guess is that the disk changer has a lame latch to hold the cd in place.. that works fine for 1 or 2x.. but not for real fast... you might be able to get by that by installing a bigger spring or something.
-AP
Please use [ informative / summarizing ] SUBJECT LINES
Flame me here
Assuming the average audio CD is 45 minutes, and that ripping is the slowest part of the process. That means 32 CDs per 24-hour period. Someone who wants 32 CDs done "overnight" could certainly do it themselves a lot quicker.
Further assuming you wanted to attract consumers with very large collections, then you really would need a cluster, just to keep up with the slowness of the jukebox. There's certainly no reason to have 200 CD changers, when it would take you 6 days and 8 hours to rip them all.
Seems to me that a commercial "ripping" enterprise would be better to invest in a CD-ROM tower with mechanical disc changer. That would be a better spend for your cash.
What are your Napster/Gnutella/Morpheus/etc. node names please?
hey man i have no CDs in my house since ages ! :)
Do any MP3 rippers support 5 Disc CD-Rom changers, like Panasonic's vintage(SQ-TC520N)? Ripping with x20 speed drive, 5 discs back to back, with FreeDB Table of Contents, using one PC 5.25" bay/power/IDE space, would reduce the malingering over the computer.
WinDAC32 V1.53 ripper reportedly has some CD changer support. Audio Grabber has two cd-rom drive support, similar idea, and much more common, but not a 5 CD changer. NEC and Nakamichi also sold (sell?) changers.
--pi
What I want to do is rip open my 200 disc changer, and mount the drive guts of a CD-ROM rewriter in there, and write some software to manage the changing, and caching to a hard drive of 200 disk worth of data...
but then, 80 gig ide drive are around $270, right?
(sigh)
hmmm, are there rewritable DVD-rom's yet?
--pi
Ripping with Audio Jukeboxes are 1x speed, and kill functions like TOC, FreeCDDB, but you can rip everything at once. (but what did you rip?) Regular computer rip requires too much of your time swapping discs.
Audio Grabber devides the problem by 2, using 2 CD-Rom drives.
IDE and SCSI CD-Rom Changers devide the problem by 4 of 5. Loose no fuctionality. Swap them all and go to bed.
1. Massive copyright violations
2. Child labour
3. Hiring someone to commit crimes for you
The Kinderegg commercial is so right, you can get three things at once. And it gets modded up to +5, Interesting. Remind me to quote it next time slashdot complains about those damn pirates ruining their wonderful fair use world...
Of course I'm inclined to do exactly the same thing myself, so maybe I'm a good slashdot'er too
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
My 40/8/2 Plextor CD-ROM/R/RW consistently rips audio at 8x with no perceptible errors. Other CD-ROM drives I've tried have either been slow, or error prone. If such a drive is error prone, you have to rip in error correction mode ("re-read N times until it comes back the same") which makes it slow anyway.
A 56x drive might read CD-ROMs at nearly the claimed speed, but audio CDs are a different matter entirely.
It is key to have a CD-ROM drive that is effective at ripping audio -- that is, copying data from the audio CD to uncompressed format (WAV or other) on your PC. Some CD-ROM drives are effective, some are not. The Plextor drives have consistently been reviewed as good at ripping audio, so that's why I bought one. It turned out to be true.
My 40/8/2 Plextor CD-ROM/R/RW consistently rips audio at 8x with no perceptible errors. Other CD-ROM drives I've tried have either been slow, or error prone. If such a drive is error prone, you have to rip in error correction mode ("re-read N times until it comes back the same") which makes it slow anyway.
A 56x drive might read CD-ROMs at nearly the claimed speed, but audio CDs are a different matter entirely.
With an effective audio-ripping drive, you can rip at >8x (probly upwards of 16x with newer drives). This amounts to 3-6 minutes for a 45 minute CD. Encoding that same CD from WAV to MP3, OTOH, can be done at about 1-3X depending on the speed of your machine. That's 15-45 minutes to encode. My Athlon [Tbird 1.2G] encodes at nearly 3x, while a PII-450 does about 1x.
See my earlier post here.
The time you'll spend developing a flaky system isn't going to pay off very much. Keep it simple, perhaps just write an automation utility that would automatically rip any disc upon insertion (by monitoring the drive's open/close state), fetching info from FreeDB of course. Then grab a big bag o'chips and some soda, move your couch within arm's length of the cdrom drive, and watch TV or play PS2 while swapping discs every few minutes. Boring, repetitive, but fairly efficient.
With a good drive and a decent CPU (750mhz+), it shouldn't take more than 4-5 minutes per disc, which means 12-15 discs per hour. There also nothing preventing you from using multiple PC's (or just two drives in one box if the encoding is fast enough).
Of course if you have lots of money to burn on a gadget, you could buy a robotic disc changer (or build your own from legos). But the jukebox thing is doomed from the start.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Make sure you have enough space. Ripping 200 full length cd's would take around 130 gigs uncompressed. probably more like around 90 gigs because most cd's don't use the full length of the cd. If you compressed them to decent quality mp3's, it should only take about 18 gigs though. ;)
If I wanted to I could very well script the whole 200 CD task via Apple script on my desktop or something. However I can not think of a way in which I would be able to sync up home stereo equiptment to my computer at more the 1x.
If I could get the thing to cook at a faster speed I could totally run a batch to convert 1x+ audio data in to normal, non-chipmunk, audio.
200 CDs would take about a week to rip at x1. 200 CDs imported from a single 32 or 40 speed burner could be done in 3 to 5 hours.
I'd just convert a few here, and convert a few there. When you sit down to work do a hand full of them...you'll be done in no time.
I have two optical drives, so I did a lot of dual importing when I did this at home. I did over a hundred CDs in a weekend. Just did a bit at a time.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
I keep that one the most up to date.
Thanks,
Greg
Will ripping be optional? What if you only borrowed the CD from the library, or off a friend or something?
What if it's 70's smooth rock and you only wanted to use it to punish your children, but then it worked so well they made you swear never to play it again? And then they wanted to make sure it was gone so they melted the hard disk to get rid of data residue? And so now you're out one jukebox?
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind
try --r3mix as your parameters to lame. the page tells why. only works on newer versions of lame.
Assuming you are using Linux (and maybe BSD), then eject -c n will swap the CD in the the reader, to CD n
I have a script that loops around encoding all the WAV files to OGG in the current directory. (oldest first) When ripping, I start CD-Paranoia to rip all tracks into invidiual files, and when it finishes the first track, I start the script above.
I find this handy as CDParaonia runs a about 1x speed, and oggenc about 0.25x. (My machine is getting well past its prime), thus I can rip a few CDs in an evening, and then leave the machine to encode whilst I am at work
I'd suggest writting another script that uses eject -c and cdparanoia to cycle through your CDs
HTH
It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. --- Albert Einstein
hey.
i put in a feature request a couple days ago wrt cutsom file names. do you get those emailed to you or do you have to check manually?
i really like the program, so does my advisor. he's currently converting his entire cd collection.
Hello everyone!
I think many of you that are interested in automatic ripping might also be interested by the following:
I would like to invite you to join the newly created PAMS forum. PAMS stands for "PC-based Audiophile Media Servers".
This group is about putting together a PC-based audiophile-quality media server that connects to your main hi-fi system for serious music listening.
This group is NOT about ripping to or serving lossy file formats (e.g. MP3), MAC-based music servers, PC-control of Sony jukeboxes (e.g. Nirvis), whole-house low-fi music, etc. These topics are already covered elsewhere.
This group DOES cover topics such as perfect automatic ripping, lossless compression, storage technologies, databases & playback, high-end audio cards, remote control & feedback and any other technologies useful in achieving the main goal above. The forum members are encouraged to share information and experiences.
Welcome to all serious individuals interested!
Join here: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PAMS/
Nemo
Moderator of the PAMS forum.
Automated ripping is available. It is called MusicLoader by Lansonic. It used a standard Sony changer so it rips at 1X and it might be less perfect than EAC.
Here's the link:
http://www.lansonic.com/ml.htm
Nemo