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Multi-drive Ripping / Burning Support?
jasonisnuts writes "I currently have a DVD-ROM (internal), a CD-RW (FW), and a DVD-RW (FW), and I also have a massive assortment of music CDs that I want to rip and catalog. Are there any free, shareware, or commercial utilities for Mac OS X that support ripping CDs from multiple devices at the same time and offer full CDDB/GraceNote support? And does this same utility or another offer burning to multiple sources in multiple formats? This will all be done on a Sawtooth 500MHz (upgrading soon)."
I'm not sure about the multiple drives at the same time, but iTunes is really good when it comes to cataloguing material. (also, wtf is sawtooth?)
I'm not sure if it supports multiple devices, but I'm sure it rips really well, and does that CDDB/Gracenote stuff.
obviously X is his OS.
Well I think it would run fine. iTunes will detect both drives fine and would I'd imagine rip them, however your processor might bug out on you if you did them at the same time, unless you had enough ram like 512MB or above. otherwise I wouldn't generally recommend it. Might add tons of artifacts and poop to the ripped file. Especially if you are only running it all on one bus.
you would probably have sucess taking iTunes or other favorite ripping application and duplicating the executeable.
then just set each instance to a different drive, and voila!
it may be better to use a less "intelligent" application than iTunes, as there may be locking issues with updating the iTunes database. however, a simpler ripper should work just fine.
have you been seen on slash?
haven't ever tried ripping from multiple drives at once, but it should very well be possible, but on your 500 sawtooth, ripping form three drives at once will be pretty slow. maybe 1.5X tops..
but as for burning, you can use toast. you take the copy you have and make two other copies (AFAIK this is not illegal) open each one and set it to a specific drive.
and on this note, i would assume there it is likely feasible to do something similar with an mp3 ripper, iTunes however, will only allow for one copy to be running at a time.
Live EVERY week... Like it's Shark Week
I'm pretty sure abcde will do the job for you. I've not tried it on OS X, but in theory it will work. It's a shell script wrapper for several CD-related programs. I've used it on a Debian box to rip hundreds of disks.
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
Sawtooth was the first 'real' G4 Powermac, the Yikes model came out first but it's motherboard was more like a modified Powermac G3(I think that's where the Yikes moniker originated). Sawtooth G4's can use all sorts of G4 CPU upgrades, the Yikes models can not.
If you are running Panther, you could try making two new users, run iTunes in each one and configure each for one of your drives (how, I don't know.. I don't have multiple CD drives - I would assume that the preferences would reflect multiple drives.) and rip away.
That'd be one for you to try.
Other than that - I got nuttin'
If you're ripping to MP3 and your CD read speed is very fast at all (20x is probably more than fast enough), you're going to be slowed down by your processor and not the drives. However it might be more efficient to have more than one drive so you don't lose time swapping CDs or you can take off while all three complete.
Well, assuming that iTunes meets your other requirements, this AppleScript may prove useful to you:
I haven't used it; I saw it earlier today when grabbing another script from their site. My experience with other Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes has been quite positive. I ripped (in some cases, re-ripped...stupid LAME bug!) all 1500+ or so of my CDs last year, and I used a few of those scripts to make my life easier. Give it a look-through.
This won't be useful for the original question since it isn't Mac OS X, but it is worth mentioning because its the best, simplest, cheapest (free!) solution for doing ripping on windows, and it works with multiple drives (just fire up a new instance). It supports FreeDB/CDDB, a ton of encoding formats (WAV, MP3, OGG, VQF, APE)... makes playlist files, and it works as an audio format converter in addtion to ripping from CD (I do WAV->MP3 with it all the time).
In a world where anything media-oriented has to be "skinned" it looks refreshingly like an actual windows app and not the usual regurgitated fruit salad that everyone seems to want to shove down my throat and call a GUI. :) WHY, Mozilla, WHY?
It doesn't perform the burning, but I personally prefer using a separate program for that anyway... Nero does the job for me and it came free with my burner.
Error: PANTS NOT FOUND. Press <F1> to continue.
Nope.
On a 500 MHz PPC the CPU will be the bottlenech, not the drive(s). So all that RIPping from multiple drives will do is keep the process pipelined a bit better. That is, instead of being able to ignore your computer for twenty minutes as it RIP's one CD, you can ignore if for an hour as it RIP's three CD's.
I don't have multiple CD drives, but perhaps you could test this -- what does iTunes do if you tell it to automatically RIP and eject CD's and you put CD's in multiple drives? I'd guess (since most Apple software is pretty clever) that it would simply work its way through the inserted CD's, in which case you don't need any software -- just load all three of your drives and let iTunes do its work, and stick in new CD's every so often.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
I confirm the "multiple" apps solution; it's really the simplest way to launch 3 times the same tool with different jobs to do. That's for the ripping
Concerning the multiple burning, same solution but I would recommend using the Missing Media Burner (I use 0.6.2 and I'm satisfied). It's not the cleanest apps in the Mac world, but it's free and efficient in burn and overburn, which is quite useful when volume is involved.
Toast is certainly good and is quite a clean app, but it's way too expensive for lightly extending OS functions.
By the way, Missing Media Burner also does the VCD/SVCD/raw thing quite well
Of course you can forget to buy it and use a cracked key, but it's not the good way, not good for the karma as Jobs says, especially when their are cool people working on free alternatives.
ClaudeBBG
what does iTunes do if you tell it to automatically RIP and eject CD's and you put CD's in multiple drives?
I did this with a couple Sony Firewire CD-R drives when I was ripping my 1,000+ CD collection. iTunes will dutifully lookup and rip one CD after the other after the other, and all you need to do is keep all the drives full. All having three drives means is that you have to babysit the process 1/3 of the time you would with one drive. This is the way to go, I think.
~jeff
iTunes's MP3 encoder is quite old and does a bad job of encoding MP3s. LAME is much better; you could use it with some shell scripts to read AIFFs from the mounted CDs (they show up in /Volumes) and encode them with LAME.
TANSTAAFI: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free iPod.
I also had this problem. I decided that I didn't want to ever do it again, so I bought two 120GB HDs and ripped them all to wavs using iTunes. I originally had my pc with 4 cd drives and linux, but getting it to work well was more trouble than it was worth, so i moved to windows and iTunes (try clicking the eject button in iTunes on a multi cd drive machine :) ). I then exported to xml or tab delineated file to get all the metadata and wrote some perl to convert them to flacs. before that I converted the wavs to aacs for my ipod. Now, all i have to do if a new format comes out is modify my perl script and run through all my songs, automagically adding tags etc.
One note though, as far as i know, iTunes only rips from one cd drive at a time.
Dragon Burn has allowed me to burn 3 disks at one time G4 dual 1.25GHz 1.) Internal ComboDrive (Phillips 32X CD-R/RW) 2.) Internal SuperDrive (Pioneer 2X DVD-R/RW) 3.) External Firewire enclosure (Samsung 52X CD-RW) All burn at one time, with no issues, except for making it easy to bleed down my blank media inventory.
If you have fink installed you can try "fink install abcde" which will hook you up with all the required stuff to run "A Better CD Encoder". I'm not exactly sure how this handles with multiple drives, since i've never done that. you could also check out cdparanoia, which is not available through fink, but is here:
http://www.xiph.org/paranoia/
really though, this 3-drive thing may very well depend on your hardware configuration, especially if you're using ATA drives, which i assume you are. ripping from two cdrom drives on the same bus will most likely not work well since only one device per channel can talk at the same time. so, if you have one drive set up as secondary master and one set up as secondary slave (i can say that since i don't live in LA) it might not work well due to the nature of how cd ripping works. it may require more real-time access than is available to be shared between the two devices simultaneously.
not that i need to give everybody permission, but please correct anything here if it's wrong. i don't claim to know everything about modern cd ripping tricks, just speaking from experience.
Depending on your interests, and your time-/cash-flow, you may decide to pay somebody to rip your CDs for you.
This company...
http://www.ripdigital.com/
Never used 'em.
Depending on your interests, and your time-/cash-flow, you may decide to pay somebody to rip your CDs for you.
..charges about $1 per CD to rip it for you.
This company...
http://www.ripdigital.com/
Never used 'em.
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/ 13048
This Applescript plugin for iTunes is really nice. It installs LAME and is very easy to use (just select it from the iTunes script menu). However, it will only allow you to rip one CD at a time per processor, so unless he's got a dualie, this won't help the original poster.
Cool! I guess that jasonisnuts doesn't need any software after all... ;-)
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
the only problem with multiple drives is the eject button.
iTunes can rip from any drive with a CD in it.
Just select the disc, then rip it.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
Granted this was back on OS 9, and I only had two (internal) drives on my Yosemite, but I just set iTunes up to rip on insert, and eject when done. It'd finish a CD, and I'd pop the next one in my stack in and continue doing what I was doing. It was nice because even if I was off in another room, it would still be crunching away on the next CD, so I kept the processor at 100% all evening long. Took me a week or so (over 100 CDs). I think you'd probably spend more time trying to find software that allows simultaneous ripping (and does a good job) than you'd save just doing it sequentially in iTunes (esp as iTunes is so automated).
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
When I really started going nuts and encoding all my CDs in several binge-like sessions, I had my internal DVD-ROM and external CD-RW hooked up. I have the "Import and Eject" feature turned on, and I drop in one CD, wait for iTunes to recognize it, and then drop in the other.
iTunes would encode one, spit it out, and move to the other. Then I'd pop a new disk in the open drive and the process would repeat.
I haven't done this lately as I've imported most of the CDs I really wanted done already, but I don't see any real reason why it wouldn't still work this way.
And it probably would slow the computer down more then 2x because not only is it doing both jobs, but the processes have to keep switching back and forth waiting for processing time, and that swapping will eat up a small but real amount of CPU power. So I don't think you'll get any real advantage to doing them at once - it may be slower than doing them sequentially one at a time.
iTunes uses the processor(s) quite well while ripping, and on a single 500 you definitely aren't going to hit the limit of the drive speed before hitting the processor limit. That is, ripping simultaneously from two drives won't help your speed at all. Just do this:
Setup iTunes to automatically connect to the internet, and to import and eject each disk automatically. Then feed disks into all three drives. iTunes will rip from each disk in turn and eject it. You can go on about your business and check back every so-often to insert a new CD or 2 or 3 and then go on about your business again...
If you can afford to keep your computer running all the time, ie. the noise doesn't keep you up at nights, then the only true bottleneck is the time you spend sitting at the computer.
When I ripped my CD collection, I used a two-step process. I first ripped the CDs into AIFF. This step is lossless, so there's no quality lost. It does take up some hard drive space, 600-700 megabytes/CD.
Step two: convert these to MP3/AAC/whatever with iTunes or iTunes LAME. The simplest way to do it (in my opinion) is to use a smart playlist that has the rule Kind is AIFF. (Convert to XX is in the Advanced menu, assuming you've set the encoder to be XX in preferences.) I did this when I went to bed or to work.
The smart playlist is handy in that sense that after you've converted the current batch to mp3 or whatever, you can select all the AIFF-versions in the smart playlist and delete them (from iTunes and from hard drive) with option-backspace.
And how does this relate to Finder? Well, if you insert a CD and iTunes is running, it can automatically name both the album and the songs within it. If you drag the songs off the CD, Finder will rip them as AIFF. You can later import those files to iTunes and do the conversion I explained earlier.
This method is not without downsides, though. You have to manually name the albums you've inserted as Finder only names the tracks. One could probably invent an applescript to do this.
Hope this helps.
[ Antti Rasinen ]
I really would like to thank anyone who replied, and especially thank those who gave informative info! This is why /. is like crack frankly. On to business: Between late Monday night and most of Tuesday I was rearranging my room, cleaning, and ripping CDs. Although I know iTunes can be buggy with ripping MP3s, I've personally never had a problem or felt it lackluster, so I stuck with it and only it. So I went against those who recommended Lame and other options. On the advice of those who suggested iTunes I did what worked best and most easily; import and eject. I tried importing one CD, and dragging the contents of a second into the library or by invoking the import command and I could not get that trick to work, which saddened me. Sticking with import and eject I ripped CDs at 192kbps (except 165 classical songs which I ripped at 224 with "use error correction when reading audio CDs") and the disks did go sequentially. This batch weighs in at 54 discs, 593 songs. Of those 165 were ripped at 224, the others at 192. I was shocked that the encoding speed stayed very, very close no matter the CD or the drive, though the Pioneer DVR-106 was just a touch slower! On average I would say encoding on a 500 MHz G4 with 512 Mb RAM (100 MHz bus) to a Western Digital 80Gb 8Mb cache drive on an ACARD ATA 133 card was about 7.4X realtime. It varied between 6.2 and 8.9 depending on the disc, drive, and the area on the disc. The drives were a Pioneer 16X/40X DVD-ROM (internal ATA33), I/O DATA 52X/32X/52X CD-RW in an Oxford 911 enclosure (FW), and a Pioneer DVR-106 in an Oxford 911 enclosure (FW).
How did it pan out? It took roughly 11 hours, 16 minutes to get 593 songs from 54 discs. Space required was 3.92 Gb for roughly 49 hours, 10 minutes worth of music.
I am definitely satisfied, though I would like 1 Gb of RAM and a 1.5 GHz G4 (waiting for new 7457 cards). I'd like to see the speeds then!
Thanks for your input!
I will be getting Dragon Burn once the ripping is done and will be doing the buring, as it seems the most likely program to do multiple drive burning on the cheap.
Why can't you set up a bash script to rip all three drives one by one to WAV, then encode them as MP3/OGG? You can load up all three trays, come back in n minutes, and they'll all be ripped.
Have I missed the point here??
Craig
http://www.riaa.org/
You can rip multiple albums. I have a PC and a Mac and to save time I installed iTunes on the PC and used it to also rip albums.
abcde probably just a wrapper for cdrecord, like XCDRoast.
I've wrote a shell script for copying CDs using cdrecord, to use cdrecord in OSX it's necessary to stop the autodiskmount daemon...
#!/bin/sh
clear
sudo -v
sudo killall -STOP autodiskmount
echo
echo "***** PLEASE INSERT THE DISCS*****"
echo
echo "Then press return after the DVD-RAM's light turns green to continue..."
read
sudo -v
sudo dd if=/dev/disk2 |/usr/local/lib/xcdroast-0.98/bin/xcdrwrap CDRECORD dev= $
sudo -v
sudo killall -CONT autodiskmount
sudo disktool -e disk2
Basically you issue the command:
sudo killall -STOP autodiskmount
to stop it
and...
sudo killall -CONT autodiskmount
to start it again when you're done
ripit.pl combined with fink should give you everything you need to rip to MP3 or OGG using your preferred libraries, and you can run multiple copies with the simple command line of --device to do multiple rips. If the rip is CPU bound (not likely), it just keeps chugging along and catches up eventually, all the while allowing you to keep ripping. Disclaimer: I've only done this on linux, but I see no reason why it wouldn't work with OS X.
I am, and always will be, an idiot. Karma: Coma (mostly effected by
It's not illegal, you are correct - Roxio specifically suggests in their website help section that you duplicate the app and run both at the same time to burn two disks at once.
We do it all the time when producing short runs of DVDs that would be uneconomical to press.
I've done this with my whole ~300 CD collection (twice even; once MP3 and then later to AAC):
Using iTunes:
1. iTunes, Preferences, General:
--Set "On CD Insert:" to "Import Songs and Eject"
--Check on, "Connect to Internet when needed"
2. iTunes, Preferences, Importing:
--Choose your Import Settings (MP3, AAC, etc) and bit rate. --Check off, "Play songs while importing"
--Check on, "Create file names with track number"
--Check on, "Use error correction when reading Audio CDs" (this will take longer, but if you're importing your whole library you'll want accurate encodes)
3. iTunes, Preferences, Advanced:
--Ensure you have selected your iTunes Music folder location.
--Check on, "Keep iTunes Music folder organized"
--Check on, "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library"
4. Insert a disc in your fastest spinning CD drive and close the drawer. iTunes will grab the track names online, rip the disc, then spit it back out when finished.
5. Just keep an eye on your machine's CD drawer and when it's open, swap the disc. Using multiple simultanious drives probably won't help speed the process since the major bottle-neck is the processor. But if you're going to drop in a disc(s) and walk away, this should be a great way of mass-ripping your catalog.
I found a interesting app that allows you to store data on miniDV tapes using a DV camera connected to your mac via firewire. You can store 10GB per hour of tape. Perfect if you want to archive/backup large amounts of data. Might want to check it out.
Dv Backup
http://www.coolatoola.com/
...A self respecting slash-dotter doesn't have multiple machines to do do this with? I did my 500+ collection using 2 boxen and 2 laptops all going at the same time.
The meek shall inherit the earth, in 3 by 6 plots. - Lazerus Long