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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.
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
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
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 $15 each:
http://www.compgeeks.com/details.asp?invtid=240
You don't even REALLY need a case, you could just stack them up, tape them together, and use an old AT power supply to give them juice. Heat is not an issue since you are only using one at a time.
1) How will you automate separating the tracks? If you are recording from spdif it's all going to be one long mp3. I'm sure you could write a filter to do silence detection, but that doesn't work even close to 100%, many song have pauses in them.
2) You won't be able to automate the naming of files and id3 tags. You'll have to name every track manually.
This would be way cool, but I forsee two major problems:
.mp3 files, you need to solve the TOC problem.
1) Speed. AFAIK, multi-disk CD changers only read at 1X. Even with the highest qualtiy settings, I can encode at 3-4 times that rate on my dual CPU PIII.
2) Access to TOC. This is the real killer: if you want all the nice freedb lookups to work right, you need to extract the TOC from the disk and compute a hash of it. I am almost positive this doesn't go down the SPDIF line.
The speed I could deal with (just leave it running when you go on vacation for a week or so), but unless you want a hard drive full of unnamed
PowerFile is a 200 CD/DVD jukebox over FireWire. Hell they even sell a re-writeable version. Not sure how it would work on a PC, but on the Mac its AppleScriptable and along with iTunes 2 you could load this puppy up and have it rip all weekend. I have one of these at work for archiving and I will bitch about its ease of use, though with some tweaks to their provided scripts, it worked fine.
Anyone know how this could work on PC/Linux? They have a M$ SDK here which includes visual basic samples.
People think Microsoft is the answer. Microsoft is just the question, "No" is the answer.
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
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/
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.
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.
SPDIF contains the clocking information. So as long as your sound card driver is not buggy, there can be no jitter or clocking errors.
An SPDIF port is really just a 'special' synchronous serial port.
--jeff
ipv6 is my vpn
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."
...a few with a gui. i prefer rip. if you look around on freshmeat there are quite a few more.
-- john
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
for linux there is software that will do exactly what you want. I use a program called abcde, it is really a frontend for various rippers and encoders and cddb. it combines them seamlessly. To encode a cd to mp3 i just put it in the drive, and type abcde. 20 minutes later i have the mp3s on my harddrive, stored in /mp3/artistname/albumname all with proper id3 tags. where the files are stored is configurable, how they are named is configurable, what ripper and encoder is used is configurable. i use lame set for 256k high quality and cdparanoia. you can find abcde at http://lly.org/~rcw/abcde/page/.
-- free as in swatantryam - not soujanyam.
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?
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
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
As a 13-year old, I would definately take $40 for a weekend's work. $40 is a lot to a kid, and most kids don't have that kind of opportunity very often.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
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 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.
Thanks for the suggestion but I already have an Ibook among several other computers. I use GlobalCom web jukebox for ripping now. It's very fast and overlaps ripping CDDA, encoding to mp3 and normalizing volume levels. It looks up CDDB data from freedb.org. However it's still a slow process. I have ripped about 2400 songs in my spare time over the last week. Automation would kick ass and allow me to reencode the cds if I decide the change the encoding method (switch to vbr or some non-mp3 compression scheme) without having to sit in front of the computer for days on end.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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
Is there a nice automated ripper that pulls track info and builds the ID3 and all just from dropping a CD in the tray?
SoundJam on the Mac will do that. Just keep feeding it CDs.
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.
So you're looking at about an hour and twenty minutes of actual work... it comes out closer to $30/hr.
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.
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'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
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!
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
I used MusicMatch under Win98. I can't recommend it very highly. The ripping was not very reliable. If the disk had any scratches Musicmatch would switch to analog mode and record silence.
The biggest problem was management of the volume control. Each time IE or any other application grabbed focus the volume would change. This made it impossible to use the PC for anything other than playback.
I switched to XP and the problems are fixed. However MSFT's player is pretty slick and is not nagware. You have to buy a third party MP3 encoder but the WAV support is built in.
Media player does not handle multple CD Rom drives very well. There is no feature to queue up several disks. But there is an open API and a plug in architecture. So CDROM jukebox vendors should be imposed upon to provide the appropriate plug in.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
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
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. ;)
I have thought about this, but I would be in kinda the same boat you are, but for a different reason:
/.
The lower cost players (such as AIWA and Pioneer) can be nice, but you don't know what kind of CD mechanism they use (ie, who the manufacturer of it was) in order to get a similar mech from a CD-ROM or RW drive by the same manufacturer.
Plus, I would be willing to bet the manufacturers purposefully use different style connectors, cables, etc - to PREVENT this kind of thing occurring. That is just a gut feeling, though.
But you idea is sound. I am thinking one day just picking up a cheap unit off of Ebay, then futzing with it to see if I can get something rigged up. I am thinking a serial port selection interface, and a cheap IDE CD-RW drive on the back end.
If I ever do it, I will be sure to post to
;)
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
And ofcourse the kid can just continue playing his/her games on his own computer, since a puter was brough over for the ripping...
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587