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Automated Ripping with CD Jukeboxes?

Posted by Cliff on from the let-the-computer-handle-the-tedium dept.

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.

6 of 274 comments (clear)

  1. A couple of problems by norton_I · · Score: 5, Informative

    This would be way cool, but I forsee two major problems:

    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 .mp3 files, you need to solve the TOC problem.

  2. Don't know about PCs, but on the Mac use PowerFile by Tide · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  3. Slink-e, S/P-DIF, etc. by dstone · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. iTunes? cdslayer? by helixblue · · Score: 5, Informative

    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!

  5. I've done it and it's GPLed by tramm · · Score: 5, Informative
    I used to have my entire home theatre automated. Much of the work went into reverse engineering the specs and control protocols for Sony S-Link devices. The hardware and software are no longer supported by me -- I've moved and sold my house with the theatre. But you can still download the code, drivers and schematics for the small hardware interface:

    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/
  6. Re:some problems... by Eric+Smith · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.
    If your SPDIF input hardware on the computer lets you access the User bit, that contains the Q subcode from the CD, which has the track number and time information with a granularity of 1/75 second. One user bit is transmitted per SPDIF subframe, and the CD Q subcode bits are packed into those in a pseudo-async fashion, where 16 consecutive zero bits indicates the start of a Q subcode frame, and a one bit is used as a leadin for each set of seven subcode bits.

    Most SPDIF receiver chips (e.g., those from Crystal Semiconductor) provide a way for a processor to examine the Channel and User bits. I have no idea whether common PC sound cards have this capability. Wiring up an ISA card with a Crystal Semi receiver chip would be pretty easy.

    For details, I recommend

    • The Art of Digital Audio by John Watkinson. 2nd edition had detailed coverage of CD subcode in section 12.18 and of SPDIF User bits in section 7.11. These may have moved in the third edition, but I expect that they're still present.
    • Principles of Digital Audio by Ken Pohlman. Chapter 9 has good coverage of CD subcode. Chapter 10 includes information on the SPDIF User bits for CD sources, but not in as much detail as in Watkinson's book.
    • IEC standard 60908. The definitive reference on the CD-Audio format, including the subcode. Not available free, but it's not too expensive (CHF 228.00, about US $133), and you can buy a PDF file online.