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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)."
Sawtooth is a codename for a particular motherboard that Apple used for certain PowerMacs. There were different G4 500mhz motherboards that had different capabilties, i.e. bus types, etc.
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'
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.
You can rip from 2 drives at once with iTunes. You can click "import" for one, but while that is going, you can't click "import" for the other. You can, however, select the songs by clicking on them (or any combination of shift/control clicking) and drag them to your library. That willl get iTunes to rip the songs from the other CD.
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.
How about the import & eject feature?
Can you import and eject from multiple drives simultaneously?
Does anybody know?
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
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.
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.
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.
So as a quick run-down on where the right place is to talk about what with GUIs:
slashdot.org - Talk about GUIs some here. Some people will love you and some people will hate you. Although talking about looking like a 'actual windows app' isn't necessarily a plus, mostly because you'll get lots of jokes about how real windows apps mostly just look like a BSOD.
bsd.slashdot.org - Talk about how you hate GUIs and you think all mice, especially the digital kind, are infestations.
apple.slashdot.org - Just repeat what Jobs said. Talk about how good blue scrolling bars look. And never, ever put the word 'right' before 'click'.
Tim
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!
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.
The "Rip CD's in a Row" script is perfect. I've used it on up to six optical drives at a time without an error.
And yes, I sent him 10 bucks by Paypal.
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.