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)."

Comments

use more than one application

[Moebius Loop]

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.

Re:use more than one application

[soundF*!k]

Multiple instance of iTunes, if even possible, would likely wreak havoc with the iTunes Music Library database file, as there is only one, and its location appears to be fixed for any given user account.

Running a second instance of iTunes from another user account (10.3.x) might work, but you would end up with track info logged in two separate databases.

How useful would this be?

[Meowing]

I also have a massive assortment of music CDs that I want to rip and catalog.

When you say "rip", are you also intending to encode these with MP3 or whatever? If so, you're pretty likely to be CPU bound, so ripping from multiple drives isn't going to buy you much. If the idea is just to queue up multiple drives so you can wander away for longer, never mind.

Re:How useful would this be?

[FattMattP]

If so, you're pretty likely to be CPU bound, so ripping from multiple drives isn't going to buy you much.

I disagree. The important variable here is his time, not his CPU speed. If he has a large hard drive then he can rip a bunch of CDs and then let the CPU convert all of them to MP3s (or whatever) while he's away from the computer. By being able to rip two CDs or more at once he's cut in half the time he has to sit at the computer waiting to insert the next CD.

Your CPU will be the bottleneck, not the drives.

[laird]

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.

iTunes is fine.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.