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.

Comments

This may sound silly but...

[JoeShmoe]

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

Re:False

[statusbar]

Actually, you are only partly correct.

AES/EBU & SPDIF extract the clock from the incoming encoded bitstream with a phase locked loop. If you use this clock to drive your D/A converters, you are bound to the recovered PLL clock jitter specs. Tiny amounts of clock jitter cause real noise and distortion (Non-Harmonic Distortion!).

HOWEVER, in this case, you are just receiving the data words and storing them. The timing of these words is not important anymore. You don't care about clock jitter. That is not recorded when you store the the words to disk. So AES/EBU & SPDIF clock jitter do not matter in this case.

Anyways, that sucks if your sound card wants to sample-rate-convert the signal up to 48khz. Yes, that will cause distortion. My RME Audio 9652 (24 adat optical in/out, spdif in/out, wordclock, 44.1, 48, 96khz) pci card doesn't do that.

However unless they use a really crappy sample rate converter algorithm, that distortion will be masked by the mp3 encoding distortion.

--jeff