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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?"
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 $200, you are just shooting yourself in the foot.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
Have you looked at hiring a cd ripping service like MusicShifter? A lot of these places will rip you collection for cheap because they have massive digital libraries of pre-ripped music. Once they receive your cds instead of actually having to rip all 300 of them there is a good chance that 250 or so are already stored in their library resulting in a relatively cheap and fast service ($.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.)
There are some hardware options that aren't totally insane pricewise:
MF Baxter
http://www.mfdigital.com/baxter.html
StarMatix PowerFile
http://search.ebay.com/powerfile
Trying reading the 278 comments when this was last discussed in December 2005:4 9
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/16/01122
Really, that was a good discussion, and this is basically a dupe of that.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
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.