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Best Method for Automated CD Ripping?
OzPeter asks: "I have a need to rip about 200-300 CDs in the near future, and I am not looking forward to being a slave to the computer every 4 minutes in order to change the CD in the drive. I have been looking around for automated ripping systems but in general have not been impressed by what I found. This question was asked, 4 years ago, and the best advice to come out of it seemed to be to hire a local teenager to be that slave. Have things improved, or does the advice given in that article still stand? What is currently the best way of automatically ripping a significant number of CDs?"
I was expecting the software to be around the automation of ripping/encoding a CD, but this text here:
"I have a need to rip about 200-300 CDs in the near future, and I am not looking forward to being a slave to the computer every 4 minutes in order to change the CD in the drive."
makes me think you're looking for something hardware based? No 300 CD drives out there, sorry.
What is currently the best way of automatically ripping a significant number of CDs?"
There isn't one. If you were mearly duplicating, there's plenty of robotic/automated (albiet expensive) solutions, but since you're wanting to rip, you can either hire that teenager, or send it off to these people.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
I dont think Its possible. Unless there is a cd changer out there that can handle hundreds of CDs, your S-O-O-L.
Fascism is the greatest political ideology ever conceived. Sorry.
4 minutes? Either you're not looking for lossless ripping or my computer is getting really really old... It takes me much more that that to rip a complete CD with EAC.
There are many different companies that make them. One that comes to mind is primera -
http://www.primera.com/products_duplicators.html
Download it off AllOfMP3.com.
Probably end up being cheaper then a teenager.
Seriously though, for such a specialized situation, there isn't going to exist any reasonably priced automated solution.
Utilize more than one CD drive (borrow them from friends and family?). With 3-4 CDs going at once you're looking at 3-4 dozen disks per hour. You can finish your collection in one evening.
The only thing better than a teenager, is to get two computers and hire two teenagers.
Honestly, why go for an expensive, complicated solution when a simple solution is already at hand.
5 minutes per CD gives about 12 CSs per hour.
That's 25 hours to rip 300 CDs.
$5 per hour comes in at $125. Buy a pizza for lunch over 3 days brings it to just under $200.
If you borrow a laptop or two, there is no reason one guy can't swap out CDs in 3 computers; it's be done in a day. Offer a local teen $150 + pizza for a day's work, and they'll jump at the chance.
So, unless you can come up with something less than $200, you are just shooting yourself in the foot.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
the best advice to come out of it seemed to be to hire a local teenager to be that slave.
That advice is old. Rent a few cartoons, buy some non-sticky candy and get hold of a well-behaved 9-year old. Much cheaper :-P
Have you looked at hiring a cd ripping service like MusicShifter? A lot of these places will rip you collection for cheap because they have massive digital libraries of pre-ripped music. Once they receive your cds instead of actually having to rip all 300 of them there is a good chance that 250 or so are already stored in their library resulting in a relatively cheap and fast service ($.79 per cd from Music Shifter).
(I'm in know way affiliated with any cd ripping services - I've just heard good things about them.)
My boss asked me one day what options were available for automatic CD replication, which ran through completing however many CD copies as requested, with as little human intervention as possible. After we got direction from higher, we were able to have this CD replication system installed, albeit slightly modified. It works so well, that it's definitely one of the coolest purchases we've made.
Use a ripping service like the ones here:
http://reviews.designtechnica.com/guide44.html
Just use Grip with two cdroms. It will take a while, but it's worth it. Just start with the music you listen to most and work your way through with your collection. That is what I ended up doing for my collection when I switched from Vorbis to MP3 (~800 cds).
There are many companies that do exactly this: you ship them the CD's and they'll rip them for you. If your time is worth money, they're certainly worth Googling. The good ones include album covers, etc. I imagine they simply keep a ripped (wav) copy of each CD that passes through their hands to speed up the process for future customers.
Be relentless!
I heard about a guy who made a lego/mechano robot to automatically change cds from one pile to another every X minutes, via the CD drive. If you're programming is OK I imagine it'd be a fun way of doing it. Sorry, I don't have schematics.
I was able to do this over a period of a couple of weeks with a similar number of CDs. This was not rocket science. I simply kept a stack of media to be ripped near the Mac, then configured iTunes to auto lookup, rip to mp3, then eject CDs when done. If i walked by the laptop and there was a CD sticking out, I'd replace with another and keep going with whatever I was doing.
Didn't take *that* long, I spent no cahs, and I was not a slave to the PC, either.
YMMV.
Anomaly
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
I've never used one of those automated CD burning machines before, so I don't know how it controls the robotic arm, or if it's activated by a disc being spit out of the burner... BUT if you load up iTunes instead of the burning software and set it to rip and eject a disc on insertion, it seems pretty easy to me.
If there's a few people around, put the system somewhere central so whoever's closest can swap to the next cd.
If you want to make a game of it, put a jar of quarters/tokens/dollars near the system and tell people to take one for every cd they swap.
Use iTunes with the auto-CDDB-lookup, auto-rip, auto-eject for the rest. Remember to set your file naming and other options first.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts.
There's a difference between ripping and encoding. For a task like the poster is describing, you'd want to rip all of the discs to wav first, then encode unattended later. Depending on the drive and condition of the discs, this could take less than 4 mins each (haven't timed it in awhile).
400 gig drives (to store the uncompressed wavs) are relatively inexpensive these days.
For the hardware side you could make one of these:
http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/tech/changer.html
or one of these:
http://www.redfrontdoor.org/cd-changer.html
Software would be some bash scripting, and a few short programs.
On the other hand, it will probably take more time to make one of these than it would take to do the cd changing by hand.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
Check their offering out which comes to just under $400 for 300 CDs.
buy a dvd burner?
Sony Makes an interesting VAIO now--it's called Sony® VAIO® VGX-XL1 Digital Living System(TM)VGX-XL1.
I don't have $2000 floating around, so I can't exactly test it out for ya, but there are mixed reviews out on the net...
It's an interesting system, actually. In theory, it's a capable media center pc with a 200 disc CD/DVD changer. The specs aren't too bad, although for a PVR, 200 GB seems low. And at that price... seems a whee expensive, but VAIOs usually are...
Anyway, this is probably your best bet, if you're looking to spend a bit of money.
Deja Vu
n. 1. The sensation that you've read this very article before.
I was at Fry's yesterday and saw a Sony media center system that allows you to load up 200 discs in it's CD changer and have them all ripped to your PC automatically.
I googled it and apparently it's the "Sony XL 1" media center, runs Windows Media Center (and is pretty expensive). I guess if you were in the market for a high end media center system then this would be a good route.
"I filter at +6, and have yet to miss out on an important comment." (#822545)
I just remembered this home-made CD changer that could be used to rip your CDs automatically.
/. ;-)
Of course it's an ugly hack and uber-geeky but hey, this is
"I filter at +6, and have yet to miss out on an important comment." (#822545)
Dunno if this is legit, but there's these guys who will do it for you and send everything back on a shiny-new loaded iPod.
Unless you've already got all your cd's in a stack, the most time consuming part of the process is removing them from the jewel case. There's no cost-effective way to automate that without spending more time than you would just doing it. If you're doing 10k discs or more, then it's time to buy or build a robot.
Or is it "Even if CDs do become damaged, replacements are readily available at affordable prices.".
I mean, the RIAA might sue them for not damaging your CD's! I see a way to make a lot of money here. ;-)
Now, open ANY cd-jukebox (I've got a 60-slot model; I couldn't afford the 250-slot model). Mechanically, it shouldn't be too difficult to fit the CD/DVD drive mechanism in place of the existing CD; it's a fairly simple mechanism (although hacking the cupholder will certainly be required,.
Fix up the data cabling to support the drive (piece of cake) and hack the front panel controls to allow for inputs from some form of computer interface (serial perhaps - gotta do something with it) (that looks like the hard part, BTW, but I also know that there are /.'ers out there who will read this and say "no, that's easy!").
I thought about building something like this for profit once, but I'll never raise the VC for it. Can Slashdot produce a hack (with free-as-in-beer instructions) to accomplish this? Or has it been done already?
abcde works well. It's very configurable, rips to any audio format you'd want (I use FLAC) and can eject the CD when done. And it's written in bash.
My blog talks about how I used it. It can run as a daemon so I had it down to insert CD, and change it 15-20 minutes later when it ejected again (cdparanoia and flac took longer than 52x would make you think).
-- Of course I'm paranoid. I'm a sysadmin.
the best advice to come out of it seemed to be to hire a local teenager to be that slave
Assuming you have a desk-job and a machine not locked down tighter than a cat's ass...
Take a dozen CDs per day to work. Set your preferred ripping software to automatically look your CDs up, rip, and eject. Pop one in, start your program, minimize it, and just replace discs whenever the tray pops open. Then just dump them all to a keychain drive (DON'T use it as the intermediate path, copy them at the end of the day - Some rippers and some encoders write and flush sample-by-sample, meaning you can burn through your 100k write lifetime after just two or three dozen ripped discs) at the end of the day.
Anyway... If it takes a total of 30 seconds per disc of human-interactive time, you need a new ripping program (and I say that as someone who manually checks that FreeDB/CDDB gave me results to my liking).
I would suggest separating out any classical, multi-artist compilations, books-on-CD, and some live material (where one song can span multiple tracks, and vice-versa) to do on your own time... They can take a few minutes of research to get the names right. But for standard one-artist-per-disc with one-song-per-track material (ie, the vast majority of modern music), you shouldn't have to do anything more than role-play a CD changing robot.
And hey, what more could you ask for than getting paid for that whopping five minutes per day it takes to rip a dozen CDs?
I just ripped - according to my database statistics - 2116 albums when I combined my wife's (she was a dj) and my collection. She had probably twice the number of CDs that I had and I spent those four minutes reviewing artists and albums I didn't know in her collection using AllMusic. I learned a lot - both about my wife and the music she likes. I'd approach it as an opportunity to figure out if you should catch-up on any artists you previously liked or maybe find some similar ones that you never heard of.
Speaking of cool, old music - have you heard of Wolfgang's Vault? Try Playing Vault Radio. It is kind of neat.
Build an android to do it for you.
I'd say buy maybe 5-10 ideally indentical Pentium 3-ish computers, perhaps from ebay (look for local to avoid shipping fees) or from college surplus auctions (a geek gold mine). Get one setup to automate the process as much as possible and clone hd's.
Have at it. This can be done for much, much cheaper than you might think. I managed to get 12 PCs of this type for $50 at a surplus auction and I could have had about 10 more at around $2 a piece. You could be up and running in an afternoon ripping many cd's at once. Go down the line every 10 minutes or so while you hang out/read a book/watch tv and you'll be done in no time. Plus, when you're done you'll have all sorts of goodies to play with for other projects.
Just be nice to your circuit breaker.
Say I have 1,000 garage-band one-off CDs from the late '80s and early '90s I want ripped.
They won't have any of these in their inventory, and it's unlikely anyone else will ever ask for them again.
Will they just eat the loss/lack-of-profit or will they turn down the business?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I ask merely for information.
A republic cannot succeed till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour.
While saying this might make me off-topic or flamebait, I suppose http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060215-6190 .html would make it (ripping our own cds) moot and academic.
you're posting on slashdot...obviously you're a slave to the computer every 4 minutes at least...
move along folks, nothing to see here
You could use a CD or DVD ROM library such as the R200ROM from http://www.powerfile.com/. A disc library used in conjunction with software which operates it allows discs to be automatically loaded and accessed. This kind of solution is expensive though, so is best used when you will have to do this frequently. Using several PCs or a local teenager may well be faster and cheaper overall.
I do this as a business on the local level. I currently have 2 PowerMac G4 ($200 or less on ebay) with a total of 32 52x CDRom drives in 4 different 8 Bay firewire enclosures. I load all drives up and close the trays. iTunes automatically rips them all and ejects them when done. I check in every couple of hours to reload trays and repeat. My 8 bay enclosure ran about $280 each with shipping and around $150 per ten pack for brandnew 52x LG CD-Rom drives. It could be done cheaper buy building your own enclosure (convert an old server case or SCSI CD tower using firewire or USB bridge boards) and used cd drives, or even a stack of individual USB external burners-$30 $40 bucks each. I dont know if iTunes on a PC will rip multiple mounted discs like a Mac will so YMMV. Also there is software like RIP Monkey for the Mac $1000 that will control the Powerfile networked or locally connected 200 disc cd changers and interface with iTunes.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Anyone can hookup a bunch of CD-ROM drives to a PC and rip multiple CDs at once.
The hard part is getting perfect rips with correct tags so you NEVER have to rip those CDs again.
Perfect means EAC (Exact Audio Copy), with Secure, no C2, no buffering, and using TEST/COPY. Using FLAC (or other lossless) format. Who wants to ever do this much work again? Rip to lossless and never rip again.
You can run multiple copies of EAC at once, it works with external USB drives. I've seen people rip 12 CDs at the same time. Fill up the drives, start them all up, and walk away.
Yes, TEST/COPY takes twice as long, but with a stack of drives running, who cares, the important part is catching errors, and TEST/COPY will catch errors you would miss otherwise!
The truely time consuming part is tagging and problematic CDs (ones with scratches, or bad pressings). Ever type in tags on a complex CD? Takes time. Then there are those precious CDs that won't rip without errors no matter how many times you swap drives, or grind it down with a DiskDoctor.
I agree that this is really the best solution. I ripped my entire collection over the span of about 2 weeks. Pop in a CD, fire it up, walk away. I'd be willing to bet that the original poster spends a lot of time sitting near a computer. Just load up another one and keep it rolling when it ejects.
Check this out. The guy built exactly what you are looking for. Here is another one.
It's funny because I've done exactly that. I'll be at work and need a obscure bunch of tracks for a mix CD for someone in the office. Shit... my CDs are at home, of course. But sure enough, AllofMP3 has it. Do I pay a dollar to save the hassel of lugging around and flipping through a CD album? You bet I do, especially when I get to pick the encoding technique.
The day is saved! Huzzah!
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I ripped my whole collection (~300 discs) over the course of a week at work with a second computer in my cube. Wasn't that big of a deal, I just turned around whenever I felt like it. Even if you only get to them every 10 minutes, that's 6 an hour or about 50 in an eight-hour day. Unless you need them so soon that you feel compelled to run back and forth between an array of machines to knock it out in a couple hours, just do it at your leisure. The task will melt away before you know it.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
You've obviously never met any nine year olds. Spend alittle while in an irc channel, then imagine trying to get that to sit in front of a computer for 24 hours swapping CDs. Yeah...I thought so.
-|BlackErtai|-
200-300 CDs is a big job requiring farming out to a teenager? Sheesh.
I just ripped ~300 CDs to my computer. I offer the following observations.
(1) Use multiple computers. I set up 4 computers, and cycled myself between them as fast as I could load/unload CDs. I ripped everything to a network share on my server, and it went extremely smoothly.
(2) Use DVD drives if you can. My 2 computers with DVD drives ripped 4-5X as fast as the 2 with CD drives only, and I found some CDs that the CD drives couldn't read, the DVDs could.
(3) You can use multiple drives on one computer. I plugged a couple of USB drives into a fast Sony laptop and was able to run multiple instances of my ripping program, each talking to a different drive. The work goes a little slower per drive, but the computer is never idle, and the total job goes much faster. Plus, if a disk is hard to read and the ripping process slows down, only one drive is affected, ripping proceeds at full speed on the other drives.
(4) Set up the computers all in one room. I didn't do this and I got a heck of a workout running back and forth. If I do it again, I will do this differently.
I didn't time myself (I didn't know it was a race) but I think my whole session was around 3 hours, give-or-take. A little more time after the job to tweak/tune MP3 tags will be needed as CDDB didn't have all my music. I put movies on the tube and watched a couple of favorite movies out of the corner of my eye as I shuffled disks, and was done before I knew it.
Stony
First:
:-D
1) Buy as many external USB2.0 5.25" enclosures that you possibly afford. They run anywhere from $20-$40. The main thing you're getting out of this is POWER ADAPTERS.
2) Buy an equal number of IDE CDROM drives. If you paid more than $20 for any of them, you paid too much.
I wouldn't spend more than $50 with tax and shipping for each pair of CD-ROM + enclosure. You can do it for $40 if you buy refurbed/OEM/surplus stuff.
If you managed to get more than 12 drives, then also buy a cheap, bus-powered 4-way USB 2.0 hub for every 4 drives. This should be $15 or less a piece, shipped. Make sure it comes with a short A-B cable. (some of the cheap one's don't)
Add up the total number of USB-2.0 connections you have to make with the host computer. If you have 14 drives, that's 3 + 2 = 5 (3 from the USB hubs that hold 4 each, and 2 left over). You'll need that many connections on your host computer.
Purchase an appropriate number of USB-2.0 expansion cards with at least 3 ports each. You may have some onboard, but you shouldn't plug all your drives into it because the southbridge becomes a bottleneck when you have a lot of USB endpoints behind it.
Try to put one hub on the onboard USB-2.0, and then 1 per expansion card. Once you put a hub on each expansion card, loop around at put another hub on the onboard USB, then visit all the expansion cards again. Finally, do the same procedure with the non-hub attached CDROMs.
This should balance your connections among the USB controllers in your system in such a way to minimize PCI and USB bus contention.
So let's say I bought 24 external CDROMs.
I would buy 6 USB2 4-way hubs, and 2 PCI USB-2.0 controllers (in addition to the one in my motherboard)
I would plug all 24 drives into the hubs, and then 2 hubs into each PCI card, and the remaining 2 into my onboard USB2.
Stack up all the external CDROMs into a couple of nice rows, and turn on your system.
Boom! You should detect 24 CDROM drives. You should be able to rip in parallel.
Note: You may have trouble ripping from a lot of CDROM drives simultaneously. If so, break your work into chunks that operate a few drives at a time, and go full tilt ripping and encoding. When one set is done, move onto the next set of drives. At least you don't have to run around changing CDs every 5 minutes.
Try different combinations of numbers of drives until you find your max throughput.
Note: Windows might not like having 20+ individual drives plugged in. At least, the shell might not give drive letters to all of them. You'll have to get creative with the volume manager and accessing them in other ways. In linux/BSD, it's a matter of starting a lot of ripping processes in parallel, appropriately niced.
Note: You might need a lot of powerstrips. Try the "Squid". It's $15 a pop but you'll use it for more than just this.
Example costs (all with 3 day shipping):
* 24 Samsung CDROM drives from CSO: $ 200
* 24 external 5.25" enclosures from NewEgg $ 700
* 6 USB2.0 hubs from NewEgg $ 90
* 2 USB2.0 controller cards from NewEgg $ 25
* 5 "Squids" from any etailer: $ 75
Total cost for 24 CDs AT ONCE: ~$1100
Now that's not bad at all. A lot less power draw and more managable than 8 PCs on your dining room table.
Plus you can probably get away with returning those CD-ROM enclosures. Better yet, you could probably net a profit reselling the assembled external CD-ROMs on ebay.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
As long as you have something that ejects the disc automatically and starts ripping automatically when you insert, you can get high and play a computer game while you rip.
Years ago, I ripped my collection of ~250 audio CDs. I used cdparanoia as software, and a little script I wrote, which made a directory on the server based on the ID of the CD (so the directories are unique), and asked me for a title. Everything as automated as possible. After ripping, the CD would automatically eject.
;-)
Then, I gathered each and every PC in my home that still run, booted it into linux (even the windoze boxes have a minimum of linux on them just in case win f***ks up again), installed the script, and kept changing CDs for about half a day on a whole bank of machines.
Hunting for a teen that I could trust with my collection would have taken longer, I guess
My dad just bought a new computer and ripped his CD collection (300?).
No teenagers.
While he was surfing his favorite websites, he put in discs. If he walked past the computer room on his way to the garage, he'd put in another disc.
It took about a week.
Simple.
Fast.
Problem solved.
Teenagers need a highly disposable income, so in the end, a compromise between yourself and machine is the best option!
I recommended looking for a cheap 2nd hand CD/CDR tower they've been around for years - 7 x SCSI CD readers (maybe even CD-R/RW drives depending on what you find)... in a tower you plug into your PC with a SCSI interface.. grab some CD ripping software that works from a shell/command line (eg cdrdao/lame).. script it up and rip 7 CD's at once... may not do the whole 300 in one go but you do 7 at once, and it's relatively fast and cheap for one of these boxes nowadays as it's obsolete technology.
At the end of the day after your CD's are on your new ipod you can use it as a doorstop or put it on ebay for someone else to rip another 300 CD's. If I didn't describe this piece of equipment properly search for 'cd tower scsi' on ebay to get an idea. I don't know if there may be newer versions of this contraption based on sata, and it all depends on your budget.
Check your local classifieds, I picked mine up for $50 if there are no decent online deals. Heck mine is being used here as a doorstop...
I use Grip myself too to rip my CD collection (done about 800 so far), but the big problems with this are:
1. Some CDs I have aren't in CDDB, so you have to stop the rip, type the track names, artist and album name in manually and restart the rip again, deleting any "NoArtist/NoTitle" files created by the "empty rip".
2. Some CDs (particularly CD singles) are recognised as entirely different CDs - I suspect this is where the CD ID isn't in CDDB, so it falls back to using track lengths to match a CD. This especially painful when you end up with a Japanese CD single that creates 8-bit filenames...
3. A sadly common problem is where the CD is in CDDB, but the CD title and track titles are misspelled or missing, involving a lot of file renaming later on if you don't spot it before Grip gets to the track(s) involved.
Hence, even "automated" solutions involving big jukeboxes or robot arms will need manual intervention. As other responses have said, pay one or two people to do it (having 2 or 3 PCs available would help speed things up w.r.t. waiting the 5 mins for the rip to finish).
I've been researching this for the last several weeks because I'm thinking about offering CD ripping as an additional service. I've found that the makers of the DVD/CD robotic duplicators are just now getting the hint that these devices can be re-tasked to rip disks and make them some more sales, so they are coming out with solutions.
For low-volume ripping, there is a device called the Baxter that goes for about $800 from various resellers. It will hold 25 disks at a time in its hopper and comes with the excellent Riptastic software bundled. Go in with a friend to get one of these and it makes the cost cheaper. Sell it on eBay afterwards and make most of your money back.
The biggest problem with small-capacity units is that they run out of disks too soon -- you can't load enough to let them run overnight.
The larger capacity (250 to 600 disks at a time) robotic units come with PCs built into them (they were designed for duplicating and the software is only beginning to catch up with them). They run from $3300 up to $5500 depending on capacity and number of CD drives used. Even with the higher cost, it can make sense if you get together a bunch of buddies to chip in. Say you charge your friends $0.50/disk simply to cover the cost of the machine (you're not doing it as a business). Pooling the money of 6-8 friends and then selling it on eBay afterwards might cover the cost.
The vendors I spoke to said that they get questions about these boxes every day. The biggest problem is making the Riptastic software (or other similar software) work with multiple simultaneously ripping drives. So we should see some announcements on this in the next several months.
Any of the robotic devices used for ripping also have the advantage of being duplicators of course. They also help make excellent DVD backup devices, since you can start the backup and walk away, letting the robot flop the disks for you.
Disclaimer: I don't represent any of these vendors -- I'm just doing the research necessary to purchase some to offer a ripping service. You could of course ask me to rip them for you... 8-).
-- Gary Goldberg KA3ZYW 301/249-6501 AIM:OgGreeb Digital Marketing Inc., Bowie, MD
No need to be a slave to your computer. It's maybe a 30-second process each time the CD needs to be changed out. When I have a bunch to process (usually after a birthday or one of my clearance-rack sprees), I just grab a good book or movie and settle down with it. Pop a CD in, click Start, read, remove CD, and loop. I also find it forces me to get some reading done that I might otherwise replace with computer games.
It's not exactly fire and forget, but it has always worked well for me.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
I know we have a robot-arm CD duplicator here at work that clocked in at about $200 that holds about 40 discs at a time. Admittedly, you'd have to get into the drivers to figure out how to tell it to just load the CD, run the ripping, then move it to the next stack...
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
http://www.mfdigital.com/baxter.html/ The Baxter CD robot sold by MFdigital can do what you need, 25 disks at a time. Its a cd/dvd copyier, audio disk ripper, and backup / restore. It costs about $800. I use one at work. its nice in that it can backup 115 gig to cheap dvds in about 10 hours.
Sounds like flac is the best lossless archive standard, then (or simultaneously) to mp3 for compact portability. iTunes won't rip to flac, nor will cdparanoia from what I can see? What will, and will get the tags as well as iTunes et al? Do any support flac/mp3 creation in one pass? I need a Mac or Windows app, although others may care about Linux solutions.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
I hate being blatantly commercial, but this is what we do ....automated CD conversion systems. www.ripfactory.com . Happy to take any questions not remotely commercial!
If u payed for the rights to play them. U should just be able to download from the net cuz. ..ur letting them get caught
WAV does not store ID3 tags.
RIFF files such as .wav files and .avi files certainly can store the information of ID3 tags and more. If your ripper or encoder doesn't support RIFF tags in .wav files, bug the developer.