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Best Method for Automated CD Ripping?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the goes-better-with-a-robot-arm dept.

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?"

1 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. Hard part is not ripping in bulk by jbridges · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    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.