Slashdot Asks: SATA DVD Drives That Don't Suck for CD Ripping?

I recently retired my ancient AthlonMP rig for something a bit more modern, and in the upgrade got a new DVD±RW drive. Since I have the new rig and a lot more disk space, the time has come to re-rip my ~450 disc CD collection into FLAC (I trust active storage more than optical discs that may or may not last another twenty years). The optical drive I had in my old rig was one recommended by Hydrogen Audio or somewhere similar for ripping CDs, and can grab an hour long album in about five minutes. My new drive, unfortunately, takes about fifteen to do the same. With the number of discs I have to churn through and the near-instaneous encoding, it's somewhat annoying. After searching the Internet high and low for advice I came up empty handed, and so I ask Slashdot: are there any SATA DVD burners that don't suck at ripping CDs? Read on for more details if you wish.

To work around the problem, I've temporarily yanked an old Promise IDE card I had in an ancient K6-2 rig (timothy found parts of it in a dumpster even) and am using the old drive, but it's approaching a decade and was pretty heavily used. What with having lots of moving parts and a laser or three, I don't see it lasting another decade, and I'd like to have a drive usable with a bus that hasn't been deprecated for almost as long. I'd also like to avoid anything that can read/write Bluray, because the hardware implemented DRM is pretty heinous.

For those interested in the gory details of the hardware I ran cdparanoia -A on both drives: ide drive, sata drive. As you can see, the old drive is way faster, and it looks like the primary difference is that it also has a cache that works with non-linear access, but that behaves "correctly." If you own a drive you want to recommend and can analyze it with cdparanoia, I'm interested in seeing the output.

A note on software suggestions: it has to be FSF-definition Free Software, and GNU/Linux is the only operating system in my house. That basically leaves... cdparanoia. I'm a bit uptight when it comes to tagging (mostly because: once I've done this, will I ever have the stamina to re-tag? Nope), but I'm not trying to start a pirate CD factory and don't really care about getting 100% frame-accuarate rips, just error-free ones.

Comments

USB CD rom

[Anonymous Coward]

Buy a collection of USB CD roms, so you can rip many discs at once. Then you aren't pulling apart your computer to add these drives, and they have a lifetime beyond your current computer.

Mass ripping

[girlintraining]

The problem isn't the drive speed, but the amount of manual labor involved in placing hundreds of drives, sorting out the ones that have failed to be retried, and then restocking them. There are multiple optical disk loaders out there, but they aren't intended for transient use and usually require a painful data entry step at the beginning before the drive can locate them.

I have a similar problem, but for a collection of over a thousand mixed-media items. What I've settled on is building a three-spindle set and using a robotic arm with a vaccum sucker to life each item off the spindle and set it into the drive. The spindles are incoming, complete, and failed. The arm is controlled by a simple microcontroller and a couple of sensors to track position and success of each pickup, and connected by USB to custom software. The software alarms if there's a failure, and stepper motors for precise location. The arm "free-falls" from the top of the platter (on a gas piston to reduce contact shock) and a pressure sensor to detect when contact with the next item has been made. It also controls the drive eject/load and the ripping software is triggered using auto-it scripts. Any failure is detected the same way, by watching window titles, and then signalling pickup of the optical media after. There is also a webcam placed directly over the optical drive insert with a bright LED, and a picture is taken of the 'top' of each inserted media at high quality (in case the title is only printed on the inner track). The picture is placed in the same directory as the ripped ISO, and each directory labelled sequentially.

All of this makes post-processing a lot easier; The system can be loaded once a day (before I go to work), and when I get home, it will have ripped about 13 bluray discs. It only takes me a few minutes to rename each ISO to match the disk title from the image, after which it's placed in the pending folder which the ripper autoloads periodically.

But this setup requires knowledge of basic programming and some basic understanding of how robotic tasks are performed; And a significant understanding of electronics and assembly. Any of the homebrew microprocessor kits out there can perform the interface tasks as long as they have GPIO pins. Arduino, for example, has pre-built shields for controlling stepper motors to further simplify this process. The hardest part for me was building the actual robot arm; For that, I looked to how 3D printers are assembled as they've largely solved the problem of using stepper motors and precise placement within a 3D space without significant feedback.

Just make sure your robot's "sucker" can reliably release the optical media and not drag it; it only takes a little bit of moisture or stickiness to lift the optical media slightly and misposition it in the tray, and once the LOAD command is sent, your drive will eat the disc, permanently damaging it. It's also difficult to detect this in software -- the only indication of fault will be an unreadable disk and drive being unresponsive to load/eject commands. Make sure your apparatus fails safe, and I suggest testing all possible failure modes with throw-away media before using on production material.

Re:Advice from a DAE veteran

[PipianJ]

1. The problem with EAC is that it's not open-source, and while it'll run on Linux with Wine, it requires you to use a GUI, which may not be an option on headless boxes. I won't deny that cdparanoia isn't as good as XLD, EAC, or dBPoweramp, but for a Linux box, it's still about as good as you can get, and although it doesn't support C2, cdparanoia III 10.2 does finally do well with most disc caches today. I mentioned in another reply here that I've used cdparanoia pretty reliably, although there are still issues (you need to keep a close eye on the quality gauge, as its repair mechanisms can actually deterministically mess up a CD rip!) But with a high-quality CD drive (Like the Plextors you mention) that gives low error rates by default and some double-checking of cdparanoia errors (i.e. assume that if cdparanoia reports that a track has errors that it didn't correct them), cdparanoia will work about as well as any other option. Yeah, you can't recover from errors as well as EAC or dBPoweramp can, but if you've got a pretty clean CD collection, you won't be too bad off. Combine cdparanoia with some of the command-line AccurateRip tools out there (as you mention), and you can probably be pretty sure your rips are good.

2. The only downside with AccurateRip is that it's not actually compatible with the GPL (use of the database imposes additional restrictions that aren't GPL compatible). The CUETools Database is GPL compatible (and even can repair some errors using some parity data!), but as of right now, no command-line tools play with it on Linux, and it's probably always going to be a little worse than AccurateRip due to fewer tools supporting it. I've been meaning to add support to rubyripper, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

3. The Plextor PX-716UF is the external USB version of the 716SA, and may be better suited to setups where you absolutely don't want an IDE bus in your machine.

Re:HP DVD Drives

[AmiMoJo]

Actually I have downloaded torrents of CDs I own. It tends to be faster than ripping and someone else has already gone to the trouble of doing all the metadata, downloading album art and most importantly checked the quality of the rip.

The faster you rip the most likely you will get errors. Mostly they are inaudible because the CD format is designed to cope with a few bit errors, but for nerds like me it matters :-) There is an app for doing this (http://www.accuraterip.com/) but it does take a lot longer than a normal high speed rip.