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Slashdot Asks: SATA DVD Drives That Don't Suck for CD Ripping?
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.
I work in the entertainment industry, and we have to rip about 100 albums a month at work for online promotions of various sorts. The HP DVD drives work pretty well.
Why can't I mod "-1 Idiot"?
You might find the following list very useful. It was made by the author of Accuraterip:
http://forum.dbpoweramp.com/showthread.php?25782-CD-DVD-Drive-Accuracy-List-2012
Rip the CDs at a rate of say 10 a day, and you'll be done in 45 days. I did this years ago, and my CDs sit untouched while I make use of the FLAC and files made from the FLACs. If you buy new CDs, the longer time required is likely not a big deal as you aren't doing a huge batch.
Most new drives come with a control for the sound level, which will intentionally keep them running slower so that they don't sound like they're going to take off.
http://hektor.umcs.lublin.pl/~mikosmul/computing/tips/cd-rom-speed.html
Buy more than one ya git! Rip em in parallel not serial.
From what I remember, (I haven't been following hydrogenaudio for at least 5 years) Exact Audio Copy was the ripper of choice. Paranoia would do things that were shown to be not necessary, and with accuraterip, you don't have to be paranoid about anything. Have you tested the ripping times for each program?
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.
Plextors are generally regarded as the fastest/most accurate although they really don't make them anymore (they do but they are just rebranded Lite-Ons).
Heres a pretty good chart comparing drive accuracy: http://forum.dbpoweramp.com/showthread.php?25782-CD-DVD-Drive-Accuracy-List-2012
What ever you get, get two or more. Having multiple decent speed drives will be much faster than just having one really fast drive. Also, pay a neighbor kid or some kid related to you to rip your cds. Show them how to do it and setup some sort of batch ripping script so all them have to do is just swap discs for you. Child labor is much better.
Unless he buys a PATA-Controller, he most likely won't have the connectors. My own new motherboard only has SATA connectors.
I take it that you did not read the question. It was regarding quantity to transfer immediately, not performing one-off copies.
With the drive that the poster already has, it will take 112h30m of continuous time in front of his computer to simply swap the discs. By comparison, the faster drive mentioned would result in a completion time of 37h30m.
Thirty four characters live here.
Online, as in actively spinning media inside of my computer, that I have RAIDed and backed up. I've disambiguated the text.
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
1. Stop using cdparanoia - it isn't very good, at all. It tests poorly, we're sad to say. The software you actually want to use is Exact Audio Copy. You want to use Secure Mode with NO C2, accurate stream, disable cache. Yes, we said DISABLE cache. Trust us on this. We checked. Very very extensively. Yes, we know it runs slowly: that is because it actually does need to physically read every sector at the very least twice - that's the POINT. Sadly EAC isn't open-source (and despite many years passing, there still is no open-source software that does a Secure Mode), and runs under Windows (although it will function in a virtual machine if the drive is passed through well, such as VMware).
2. Use AccurateRip in that if you can. Matching the read offset is strongly-recommended-to-required - ideally, find one of the few drives that can overread into lead-in AND lead-out. You won't hear it on many discs, until you come across That One Disc that has the track transitions exactly just so and thoroughly audible if they're off (despite the Red Book standard having a truly ridiculous amount of defined leeway either way).
3. Hardware time.
a) Best case scenario: The Plextor Premium, which does have a (rare) SATA version as well as the IDE version. That is the best CD drive ever made, and it is the highest quality DAE drive ever made, by far. That, and the above software (especially if you set the drive to "first session mode", or use AnyDVD), will rip clean through any "Copy Controlled" discs you may have in your collection too, by virtue of sheer quality. Be warned: that drive is no longer made, and REALLY sought-after. It will cost hundreds of dollars to find one new, and any used ones will be totally clapped-out by a lifetime of ripping and burning discs in professional CD-R duplication towers, or poorly refurbished.
b) Can't get that? The Plextor PX-716SA will do the best job of any DVD drive. If you can find one easily, grab it.
c) OK, plan C: something else. You'll need to check up on DAE quality. Check the offset tables on AccurateRip, which might give you a few clues. Lite-ON are way, way more reasonably priced, and some models work well at this; check them. So do a few LG drives. If you get lucky, you may have some good hardware already. Be warned, however, that you may NEED AnyDVD to rip any "Copy Controlled" discs that you may have correctly if you don't use one of the few drives that are out there that can do the job.
4. Destination: Rip it to FLAC --best. Really, you're making an archival copy, and you are probably talking about terabytes of storage to play with - why WOULDN'T you use a lossless codec that is suitable for archival, well-known, free and open source, contains an internal MD5 checksum, supported by damn near every toolchain, supports all the metadata you need, and is absolutely guaranteed to not leave you with any possible transcoding issues if you ever want to transcode to a lossy codec for portable or streaming usage at any bitrate in any codec you want in the future?
5. No online storage is even close to trustworthy enough for archival purposes. By all means, if you want, for convenience: but buy a couple of hard drives and put it on there too, and put them away. OK, they might not work after a long time on the shelf - that is a risk. But it is still A safety-net that is less likely to fail than an online storage company which bears a multitude of risks (many of them legal ones, if they are storing people's music files for them in any useful manner).
Look up flac and then please explain why wav.
Why would you care how long a drive takes to rip a CD/DVD? Do you sit and watch and wait for each one to be ripped? Are you using some strange OS that only lets you do one thing at a time? I did the same thing a few years ago. I just had a big stack next to my primary computers, and just swapped them out while I was working on them. How long each one took wasn't relevant.
Now I don't know what you do at your computer, but no matter if it's watching a movie or playing a game or studying or coding or whatever, interrupting myself all the time is rather annoying and detrimental to my enjoyment/performance. Been there, done that and I for sure cared how fast I could get it over with. These days I have double hard drives, it's as good a backups as the discs were since they were on-site anyway or I could get an external HDD for the same security as off-site discs. I only restored from them once, you know what the worst part was? Discs that had slight reading problems, they'd eventually finish but it could take up to an hour to read one disc. If you want to spend a week of your life swapping discs in case of a disk crash, optical media is a great backup. Otherwise I'd only take backup to another disk or online.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You said you're ripping to FLAC this time, i.e. lossless. Once you're done ripping, will you ever have to re-rip from these discs en-masse again? Probably not, so the longevity of your magic drive is actually not an issue.
If you're happy with the performance of the optical drive from your old rig, why don't you just install that drive in your new rig and continue using it?
Save youself the hassle and download from online "sources". I don't think it's even illegal in most places, if you own the CD.
Just throwing some other approaches out there - I'm sure people will point to SATA drives that rip plenty fast (myce.com is sure to have some recommendations, for what it's worth).
Alternative A: Why just 1 drive? Get multiple. They're cheap (sub-$15 for an external CD drive that'll happily do DVD as well. And burn them. Sell them on when you're done.)
Alternative B: Better yet, since you have so many discs, get a (semi-)automatic CD changer system. Sit back, let it rip a bunch at a time. Sell system on when done.
Alternative C: Why even bother with it yourself at all? Go find a CD ripping service. I have no experience with these guys - http://musicshifter.com/ - but at less than $1/CD and the option to have them rip lossless (yes, including FLAC) and send them a drive to put it on, perhaps it's worth it to let them deal with it and use your time and effort elsewhere. I know it's not much effort (I just digitized every single Stargate DVD between working on things, just swapping out the DVDs - each taking about half an hour), but the option is out there anyway.
Alternative D: Piracy! Well, it's not really piracy since you already have the CDs. There's some sites out there that will happily let you submit your CD's code (either the simple code used by e.g. Windows 95's media player or a more complex one) and spit out links for getting digitized versions. I'll let you do the Googling there.
Alternative E: Buy them. Certainly a lot (understatement, seriously) more expensive than the other options, but on the up side you should get perfect metadata, album art, etc. included.
and over load the slow usb bus
firewire and e-sata are better then that.
How about a USB enclosure for PATA drives. Granted $25 seems a lot to pay for an enclosure for a $40 dvd drive, but the real benefit is he gets to use his old drive that he knows works.
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.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Why would you care how long a drive takes to rip a CD/DVD? Do you sit and watch and wait for each one to be ripped? Are you using some strange OS that only lets you do one thing at a time? I did the same thing a few years ago. I just had a big stack next to my primary computers, and just swapped them out while I was working on them. How long each one took wasn't relevant.
Now I don't know what you do at your computer, but no matter if it's watching a movie or playing a game or studying or coding or whatever, interrupting myself all the time is rather annoying and detrimental to my enjoyment/performance. Been there, done that and I for sure cared how fast I could get it over with. These days I have double hard drives, it's as good a backups as the discs were since they were on-site anyway or I could get an external HDD for the same security as off-site discs. I only restored from them once, you know what the worst part was? Discs that had slight reading problems, they'd eventually finish but it could take up to an hour to read one disc. If you want to spend a week of your life swapping discs in case of a disk crash, optical media is a great backup. Otherwise I'd only take backup to another disk or online.
It's the same number of disks, the same number of interruptions. The difference is the faster drive will interrupt you more often for a given period of time, so if you want less interruptions per session you would go with the slower drive. If I'm watching a movie I'd rather be interrupted only six times instead of 18.
I know you said SATA, but I still use my SCSI Plextor drives under Linux for ripping. They're fast and accurate.
A pair of them in a low power purpose built machine, with a local copy of the CDDB, will do a disc every 30 seconds or so.
They're even cheap on ebay.
RIP it good!
Who uses cd's anymore...
How about people who enjoy better quality music and/or those with better hearing?
They said the same thing about CD's and albums/tape back in the day and despite any arguments to the contrary, there is a great difference between digital and analog music. Just because you can't hear it (I can't either by the way, but I know it's real) doesn’t make it unperceivable to people with better hearing. Most of todays "pop" crap is designed with low quality digital files in mind and people who don't have an ear for music.
--- Keep the choice with the user..
The OP states he only has linux in the house. I did this exact same thing a few years back, using abcde which is an interface to cdparanoia and cddb.
I set up an automounter script that automatically ran abcde when a CD disc is inserted. It reads the TOC in a couple of seconds and asks you to confirm the CDDB entries, which in most cases is just pressing enter twice. When it's finished it can even eject the disc for you. I'd literally just pop to the computer room every 10 minutes or so and just swap the disc and let it carry on. Probably about 10 seconds per disc.
what? the grandparent has a point.. pressed cds theoretically could last centuries if reasonably cared for. It's CD-Rs that decay...and even quality CD-Rs can outlive most humans if well cared for. I can see the convenience of having them on a hd but the pressed disc is still going to last longer than a complicated 'active' device that depends on the existence of complex protocols and interfaces to function. It's not just the media, it's the support electronics as well. In contrast, a cd reader is very simple and well understood. We will still be reading cds 100 years from now in some form or other, just not like we do today nor with as much ubiquity (historians perhaps, or music collectors).
Keep your cds in a box somewhere as a catastrophic recovery, and have one duplicate of your ripped files offline somewhere.
That's if the digital 'locker' doesn't decide to change its policies and then wipe your files, or your internet connection goes down, or you run out of bandwidth for the month... It's still better to have a local copy and pressed cds are about the most reliable backup option there is. They'll outlive any human for sure if well taken care of. hard drives require IO ports that are constantly changing and take the media with them when they die. when the cdrom reader dies, just throw it away and get another. your data is still safe.
I know it's a bit late now, but instead of voiding the warranty on your new shiny, you could've just gotten an IDE to USB adapter. A raw CDRom drive may not be the prettiest thing sitting on the desk, but once you get all your CDs ripped, you won't be needing it again until you buy a new CD, if even then. 15 min. to rip a CD isn't much when you only have one. You can rip that out while catching up on the days /. and email.
--- Keep the choice with the user..
It's quite relevant.. if one drive takes 3x the time the other does, that means the whole job takes 3x longer. If he has 20 cds, you're right, who cares. If he has 300 or 3000, that's a big deal.
I do a lot of movement onto and off of compact flash media and such. I recently got a USB 3.0 card reader and woo-doggy is it faster.
Similarly I would expect that paying the tiny extra sum for 3.0 drives would let you stack a couple CD/DVD read/write devices onto your system a lot more efficently.
You really can bump your head into the 2.0 data limits pretty easily at times.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
The OP didn't mention why the need to re-rip and why he's going with FLAC (other than the obvious FLAC benefits and a concern over media longevity), but if he has the CDs and is concerned about the time to rip, go lossy! And if so I'll add one more alternative that will save even more time:
Alternative F: Purchase one year of iTunes Match ($25 US) and you probably won't need to rip most of your CDs at all. Depending on what you have now the downloaded iTunes versions may be of better quality. I'm making the assumption he doesn't already have them in FLAC format because if so why re-rip?
Nonsense! Encode at 128k to save a ton of space on your drive, then convert the files to FLAC whenever you need higher fidelity. Win-win!
Years ago when I had to rip all of my CDs to MP3s, I had about 500 to go through. I was a Linux user, so take this with a grain of salt if you're not one, but I simply went to the local university surplus yard, picked up 12 2x SCSI CDs for about $5 each, and connected them to some spare SCSI adapters and powered them with junk PC power supplies and 4-pin Y-cables. I'm sure you could cook up something similar these days with SATA or even USB and cheap eBay bare-board SATA->USB adapters. You could probably piece together at least a 4-6 drive solution for less than $100.
Then, I wrote a shell script that leveraged some basic shell tools. I don't remember what they were (I haven't done this for years), but one was cddb-something (queried online CD databases) and of course cdparanoia and lame and I think one called id3tag.
I scripted things up with the following logic, run on all drives simultaneously:
While (forever):
Poll drive for inserted CD.
If one is in, query cddb, save names in shell variables.
Rip using cdparanoia and default filenames, encode with lame.
Rename all files using track names in shell variables and folder using album and artist in shell variables.
Use id3tag to tag MP3 files according to file and folder names.
Eject disc.
End while.
Ran this on all 12 drives simultaneously in a terminal. Whenever a tray popped out, I took out the CD that had just been ripped and tossed it in the "done, recycle plastic medium" pile, and then stuck in the next CD in the queue and closed the tray.
With all drives cranking, it took no more than a couple days' intermittent CD-inserting (in the midst of doing whatever else I was working on--browsing the web, writing, studying, etc.) to move through the queue. And then I was done.
When I was done, I stuck all of the basically valueless drives in the garage, and I think years later they ended up at the dump.
If I'd had to nurse along a single drive, I don't think I'd be done to this day. Too big a PITA. 12 slow drives with an automated script > 1 fast drive by hand.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Using a CD-ripper is so 1990s. What you want to do is buy a good quality scanner and scan your CDs using high-resolution mode -- should take about 20 seconds per disk. Then use any of the usual conversion programs to convert the scanned images into whatever audio format you prefer.
In my case, I sit in front of the machine while ripping. I've got a lot of weird metal albums that aren't in Musicbrainz at all, have somewhat inaccurate information, or aren't titlecased properly (mostly poor titlecasing / ignoring the case used on the album where the case is actually significant). With sub five minute rips it's a quick process of pop the disk in, make sure the tag data is looking OK, and then pop the next disc in (well, at least once I finish beating abcde into submission and make the ripping part parallelizable like every other task is). And then comes the weird stuff, like multi-part songs that I want to tag this time around e.g. Gettysburg where each track should be marked PART="Gettysburg (1863)" (seemingly useless now, but with the data stored it'd be not-too-difficult to make something like xbmc pick the entire "movement" instead of just one part).
Since I'm going to be spending some time each week on this for months...
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
Keep your cds in a box somewhere as a catastrophic recovery, and have one duplicate of your ripped files offline somewhere.
So glad you told him this. Too bad that he had already thrown half of his CDs into the furnace before he heard your advice.
Breakfast served all day!
Never had a single problem with this drive. Available here: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827135204
Seek/read timing:
[53:27.17]: 18ms seek, 0.30ms/sec read [45.0x]
[50:00.32]: 17ms seek, 0.30ms/sec read [45.0x]
[40:00.32]: 20ms seek, 0.33ms/sec read [40.0x]
[30:00.32]: 16ms seek, 0.37ms/sec read [36.0x]
[20:00.32]: 21ms seek, 0.41ms/sec read [32.7x]
[10:00.32]: 25ms seek, 0.48ms/sec read [27.7x]
[00:00.32]: 50ms seek, 0.63ms/sec read [21.2x]
what? the grandparent has a point.. pressed cds theoretically could last centuries if reasonably cared for.
Anything on my hard drive is far more likely to outlive anything on pressed CD. It has nothing to do with the lifespan of the media, but the lifespan of the data. When a pressed CD dies, that's the end of its data. Some of the data on my hard drive, on the other hand, has been with me across half a dozen hard drives. It's more than convenience, it's the security that comes from a medium that is convenient to backup regularly. Anything not on my hard drive is far more likely to be lost to me, regardless of how durable the medium it's on. Nothing on my hard drive can be lost short of a fairly cataclysmic event that would simultaneous destroy all copies in existence, and frankly I'd probably be dead then too, so what would I care?
Keep your cds in a box somewhere as a catastrophic recovery, and have one duplicate of your ripped files offline somewhere.
No point keeping the CDs once the data is ripped. Even if the copies on my HD-stored music library are lost, pulling them from one of my backups is going to be far quicker than reripping the CDs. They're not even a good backup medium, really, despite the durability...
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
People who don't just want to listen to badly encoded 'web mastered' (yeah that's what some idiots call it now) mpeg files on their beats by dre headphones. screeching caused by file corruption is fucking irritating and when you rip 500 cds, you don't want to have to check each track by ear.
flac is lossless, like zip files are lossless. The original data is recovered on decode.
" (I trust online storage more than optical discs that may or may not last another twenty years)" Seriously? those discs will be around far longer than those online storage companies.
Irrelevant. The data I currently store will outlive the media it's stored on, and probably the companies that made or hosted it. The discs will be around only as long as the disc lives. The data will be around forever, assuming I'm not stupid enough to leave it on the disc. Well managed data outlives the media it's on, and is more likely to do so based not on the durability of the media but on its convenience to copy.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
I should note that by "forever" I of course mean for the rest of my life, which has the same meaning as "until the end of time" for practical purposes.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
I have a cheap, bog standard LG brand SATA drive that seems to do OK. I don't rip audio CDs very often, but last time I did (I just do "cdparanoia -B") it didn't seem to take long.
Here's my output of "cdparanoia -A" (I did this three times with similar result)
This is on Linux 3.6.5 on x86_64.
grogan@getstuffed:~$ cdparanoia -A
cdparanoia III release 10.2 (September 11, 2008)
Using cdda library version: 10.2 /dev/cdrom for cdrom... /dev/cdrom for SCSI/MMC interface /dev/sr0
Using paranoia library version: 10.2
Checking
Testing
SG_IO device:
CDROM model sensed sensed: HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GH24LS50 YP01
Checking for SCSI emulation...
Drive is ATAPI (using SG_IO host adaptor emulation)
Checking for MMC style command set...
Drive is MMC style
DMA scatter/gather table entries: 1
table entry size: 524288 bytes
maximum theoretical transfer: 222 sectors
Setting default read size to 27 sectors (63504 bytes).
Verifying CDDA command set...
Expected command set reads OK.
Attempting to set cdrom to full speed...
drive returned OK.
=================== Checking drive cache/timing behavior ===================
Seek/read timing:
[74:21.35]: 62ms seek, 0.32ms/sec read [41.8x]
[70:00.32]: 56ms seek, 0.32ms/sec read [41.5x]
[60:00.32]: 57ms seek, 0.35ms/sec read [37.9x]
[50:00.32]: 61ms seek, 0.37ms/sec read [35.7x]
[40:00.32]: 58ms seek, 0.41ms/sec read [32.8x]
[30:00.32]: 61ms seek, 0.45ms/sec read [29.7x]
[20:00.32]: 62ms seek, 0.51ms/sec read [26.2x]
[10:00.32]: 73ms seek, 0.58ms/sec read [22.9x]
[00:00.32]: 71ms seek, 0.74ms/sec read [18.1x]
Analyzing cache behavior...
Approximate random access cache size: 16 sector(s)
Drive cache tests as contiguous
Drive readahead past read cursor: 234 sector(s)
Cache tail cursor tied to read cursor
Cache tail granularity: 1 sector(s)
Cache read speed: 0.14ms/sector [94x]
Access speed after backseek: 0.71ms/sector [18x]
Backseek flushes the cache as expected
Drive tests OK with Paranoia.
i wrote a similar thing for mencoder when i ripped all of my DVDs. I was a bit lazier though. It trusts the disk name in the TOC and handled collisions by adding a time stamp.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
What kind of moron would store their digital data in only one location? Of course that's not what I was suggesting. Store X amount of copies locally and X amount in online/remote places. Adjust X based on your level of concern. No single backup, no matter how reliable, is more reliable than multiple copies. It's not really about digital vs physical, but given that digital makes it so easy to make those multiple copies, it seems a no-brainer to me. Keep those physical CDs if you like for whatever reasons, but it's not the best way to preserve your music library for the rest of your life. Once it's digital, the data is abstracted from the storage medium and easily transferred and duplicated as much as you like, and you are no longer prey to any of the issues associated with all physical media (including hard drives): failure, obsolescence, theft, destruction, loss, etc.
Think again.
There's been a trend on Slashdot to shoot down questions like this without due consideration of what the submitter is asking, or just posting some obvious answers and consider the issue resolved. It was really nice to see this thread put forth a lot of information from the community. I didn't realize that there were 1) issues with SATA drives having issues on things like this 2) that there were people who cared about this kind of thing enough to have done the homework and the research behind it. It's called to my attention that there's a sub-genre of people for whom this matters, a lot. I've ripped scores of CDs in the last decade, but never paid enough mind to have it as more than a rarely-used utility. Thanks for the information, and you go, geeks =)!
What I don't get is, he can do it now with an old drive.
But when he's done with this large number of cds he has, he'll have his collection in digital form.
Why does he worry about not having this old drive in a couple of years ?
By that time if he gets an new CD he only has one or very few CDs to do, so the time it takes to do is (almost) irrelevant, right ?
So let's stop talking about the time here.
The DRM issue is a real issue. How do you do that in a couple of years, when your old drive has died. Will you still be able to rip it so you can have a backup copy ?
New things are always on the horizon
Exactly, under Linux it's brain dead easy to do. So even if a Drive took 2 hours it does not matter.
In fact there is even a plugin for XBMC that does exactly this, if he has a XBMC box for his home entertainment system. That way it is in a obvious place near the stereo.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I've been using abcde for a decade (I'm the only who added the local cddb cache support, as a wee lad!), and the cddb editing stage is the problem here. It'd be nice to rip in the background while editing cddb, but unfortunately way too much of the script relies on the cddb info being ready before ripping starts. I'm guessing from comments that it's intentional that you have to edit before ripping, so that you can watch the ripping process. I guess that makes sense for people not using --never-skip.
Looking at the source again, it looks like it'd be less frustrating (hacking on a 10k line shell script and all) to set up abcde to batch rip and only rip into the work dir, and then "resume" with a different config and edit the cddb then. Of course, to add support for extra tags and grabbing the ISRC from tracks I've already rewritten cddb-tool in Scheme... the maintainer is going to love me when I submit all of my patches.
The only problem I have with batch ripping and resuming to tag/encode later is ... if I do too many of them at once(enough to make it worthwhile to either parallelize or wander by the computer every ten minutes), it would probably end up taking longer as I have to hunt through N cd cases to verify the info, especially in the case of multiple disc collections. Decisions, decisions.
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
Theoretically. Theoretically?
I have lived in the tropics for the last 15 years, and that cost me half of my CDs. They were - I dunno - eaten up? In any case, there were tracks in the silver like some animal scurrying and eating through the layer. I can't be sure, and didn't try a microscope either. I only noticed the loss, ripped all of them and considered the originals as write-offs.
I'm using a SATA connected Hitachi GH15F and cdparanoia. This drive, as far as I can tell, is, or was, an extemely common OEM item.
It works absolutely fine with cdparanoia and, if correct offset is set, gives identical results to EAC in Windows (you need cdparanoia 10.2 or newer; older versions had real deficiencies). I checked this with multiple comparisons where I ripped various CDs, some in poor condition, both with cdparanoia in Debian and with EAC in XP and then md5 hashed the raw pcm output: non-different. I also did rips on different drives on different PCs and achieved bit identical results on those drives which passed cdparanoia -A. Obviously this wasn't a huge dataset and doesn't prove anything but it was good enough for me to stop caring any further.
Here is the output of cdparanoia -A:
CDROM model sensed sensed: HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GH15F EG00
Checking for SCSI emulation...
Drive is ATAPI (using SG_IO host adaptor emulation)
Checking for MMC style command set...
Drive is MMC style
DMA scatter/gather table entries: 167
table entry size: 524288 bytes
maximum theoretical transfer: 37074 sectors
Setting default read size to 27 sectors (63504 bytes).
Verifying CDDA command set...
Expected command set reads OK.
Attempting to set cdrom to full speed...
drive returned OK.
=================== Checking drive cache/timing behavior ===================
Seek/read timing:
[47:10.36]: 55ms seek, 0.36ms/sec read [37.4x]
[40:00.33]: 61ms seek, 0.39ms/sec read [34.6x]
[30:00.33]: 51ms seek, 0.42ms/sec read [31.9x]
[20:00.33]: 51ms seek, 0.48ms/sec read [27.7x]
[10:00.33]: 63ms seek, 0.58ms/sec read [23.1x]
[00:00.33]: 66ms seek, 0.74ms/sec read [18.0x]
Analyzing cache behavior...
Approximate random access cache size: 16 sector(s)
Drive cache tests as contiguous
Drive readahead past read cursor: 234 sector(s)
Cache tail cursor tied to read cursor
Cache tail granularity: 1 sector(s)
Cache read speed: 0.16ms/sector [85x]
Access speed after backseek: 0.71ms/sector [18x]
Backseek flushes the cache as expected
Drive tests OK with Paranoia.
As you can see it isn't going to be quite as fast as your old IDE drive but it isn't exactly slow either.
You can safely ignore fetishists who feel EAC is magically unique and that cdparanoia can't do secure ripping. It can, as long as the drive passes the cdparanoia -A test. If you feel the need to compare your rips with rips made by properly configured EAC or dbpoweramp or similar then you need to set the offset correctly.
Almost all the cdparanoia GUI's ignore the offset and don't allow the user to set it, so their rips will have a different checksum than an offset corrected rip by other tools. This doesn't have any bearing on the quality of the rip, only on the ability to compare it. It hasn't done much for cdparanoia's reputation but if you use it with a fully configurable command line front end such as ripit or abcde, or just by itself, you can get 100% secure rips equally good as those produced by magic tools with proprietary voodoo and vociferous fanboys.
ripit is a perl script front end to cdparanoia, it will:
"do the following without user intervention:
getting the audio
http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/Reviews/Home.aspx
http://www.myce.com/review/
I have an ihas 324, performs well with EAC. See reviews at above sites.
That's why, when the drives (or surrounding technology) get old, but before they die, you copy them to more modern media. Just for fun, I might try reading data off one of my old ST-506 drives, but I stopped depending on them for data integrity almost 25 years ago. At some point I'll do the same with data on my current SATA drives.
Rip it all and then use something like beats to figure out the audio fingerprinting and correctly tag things for you.
Join the Free Software Foundation
I have no intention of ditching the actual discs (they often have fancy artwork and whatnot, and I paid for them)... they live in a pair of closed acid free binders in slots made of whatever plastic doesn't eats CDs (probably should have gotten a third one, since I'm not sure where to find stuff like that any more... or if it even matters). But I have a RAID1 in my computer and can make backups of it. There's also the pesky issue where a lot of discs in my collection are from smaller bands (got them at shows and whatnot) and are actualyl CD-Rs. I'm concerned that a few won't even rip, but I tried my oldest one (yeesh, 13 years old) and it still ripped at least. Will it five years from now? Who knows, none of the CD-Rs I have are long-term archival discs so perhaps not.
Another chunk of the collection came from used music stores, and I have no idea how they were treated prior to acquisition... a few are definitely from the mid-80s and early-90s. Who knows if any were from the bad factories that produced discs prone to delamination and whatnot.
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
I keep an old burner in a USB drive enclosure. It handles the power and connecter issue plus it goes on the shelf if I don't need it. It has also worked well when I needed an optical drive on a netbook or tablet.
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
You said you were re-ripping, right? So why didn't your submit your corrected title and track information back to the databases? Seems like if you'd been a team player everything would be there ready for you to use.
Second, why don't you just write a script that grabs the track and duration and other identifying information from a newly inserted CD and then use that to locate the same piece of media from your previous rip and just move the meta-data from there?
Third, if you actually were in a hurry you'd be using every optical drive you could lay your hands on and be ripping four or five discs at a time.
I have five LG brand USB drives which I found were much faster than IDE for BURNING. They may also be much faster for ripping. I use a little shell script which keeps them busy. All I do is swap disks once the job is started, I don't touch the keyboard or mouse.
That's the problem with WORM media.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Someone -- mod this up.
Can you give me a link to 'beats' that you mention here? Couldn't find
it, though the Wiki article on fingerprinting has my interest.
I've done a lot of work on streamlining my own ripping process (I've got well over 900 CDs to be ripped and tagged) and in the process, I got involved in helping out with developing rubyripper, a wrapper for cdparanoia. In the process, I've learned a lot about doing accurate rips and figuring out the various intricacies of the CD format. One of the things I observed was the relatively slow speed of ripping on my LG Blu-ray drive: it behaved exactly like you described: It would take 15 minutes to rip something (effectively ripping at 2x, 4x at BEST).
Now these drives do have something called "RipLock" to limit the ripping speed of DVDs and Blu-Rays, but this feature ostensibly doesn't affect CD ripping. What I eventually learned, however, is that the LG/Hitachi (HL-ST-DT) drives which make up the majority of DVD drives out on the market today actually do not have a firmware which plays well with the way that cdparanoia does its ripping and error checking. It turns out that HL-ST-DT drives actually read at a slower speed until they have read enough sequential sectors (about 30 seconds of audio), at which point they will actually speed up to full speed and stay at that speed.
Thus, my solution to the slow-ripping problem was to actually use cdda2wav in non-paranoia mode (so as to read sequential sectors) to read the first 30 seconds of the CD audio so as to warm up the drive speed. Once this is done, I can then run cdparanoia as before, and actually can rip at a reasonable rate.
Of course this isn't to say that the HL-ST-DT drives are very good. They've got a pretty big sample offset (+667) and actually have a pretty bad successful rip rate (closer to 90% instead of 97 or 98%). The best investment I've made so far is to buy a Plextor PX-716UF, which I use to rerip CDs that don't rip right on the HL-ST-DT drive. By doing this, I've probably managed to eliminate 4 out of every 5 "bad" rips; the only remaining "bad" rips are from obviously physically damaged discs (cracks, pitting, etc.), which I consider a pretty good hit rate. Of course the only downside of these drives is that they don't play well with the DVD-side of dual-discs.
Yep, you heard me right: old Plextor drives STILL can't be beat in rip quality with practically any drive out today. (But make sure you get an old one, not one of the newer ones that's just a rebranded Hitachi that claims to be a Plextor. Basically, any Plextor with a rip offset of +30 is good, but you might also want to refer to the Plextors on this list)
I did submit corrected data to freedb for maybe a third of them... but that lost things like the real genre of albums (and musicbrainz doesn't even pretend that anyone can agree on the genre of a piece of music). I still have my local cddb cache at least. Then there are the earlier rips in the collection where I didn't care as much, the typos, etc. I'm also changing how I store/tag multi discs albums; previously I did the usual "$TITLE (Disc $N)", but it seems the Right Way (tm) is to use the DISCNUMBER tag in one folder. And then I have a bunch of mixups between copyright years and release years in my current data.
Basically, my current data is just dodgy enough that I can't reuse it without manually checking anyway.
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
Backups are great. Unfortunately, it is very easy to backup bit rotted data. A pressed CD that is well taken care of is one of the longest lasting storage media available today and unless you're performing checksums on all of your backups, it is simply a matter of time before you will lose something.
I have been using my BD-RW drive, a LG HL-DT-ST drive without any problems for ripping my CDs to FLAC. I have also used it to successfully write BDs.
-Aaron
cdparanoia -A
cdparanoia III release 10.2 (September 11, 2008)
Using cdda library version: 10.2 /dev/cdrom for cdrom... /dev/cdrom for SCSI/MMC interface /dev/sr0
Using paranoia library version: 10.2
Checking
Testing
SG_IO device:
CDROM model sensed sensed: HL-DT-ST BD-RE BH08LS20 1.00
Checking for SCSI emulation...
Drive is ATAPI (using SG_IO host adaptor emulation)
Checking for MMC style command set...
Drive is MMC style
DMA scatter/gather table entries: 1
table entry size: 524288 bytes
maximum theoretical transfer: 222 sectors
Setting default read size to 27 sectors (63504 bytes).
Verifying CDDA command set...
Expected command set reads OK.
Attempting to set cdrom to full speed...
drive returned OK.
=================== Checking drive cache/timing behavior ===================
Seek/read timing:
[29:45.68]: 75ms seek, 1.92ms/sec read [7.0x]
[20:00.00]: 87ms seek, 2.17ms/sec read [6.1x]
[10:00.00]: 86ms seek, 2.59ms/sec read [5.1x]
[00:00.00]: 126ms seek, 3.36ms/sec read [4.0x]
Analyzing cache behavior...
Approximate random access cache size: 32 sector(s)
Drive cache tests as contiguous
Drive readahead past read cursor: 218 sector(s)
Cache tail cursor tied to read cursor
Cache tail granularity: 1 sector(s)
Cache read speed: 0.09ms/sector [154x]
Access speed after backseek: 3.57ms/sector [3x]
Backseek flushes the cache as expected
Drive tests OK with Paranoia.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
(I switched to MacOS in 2009 and my old Linux home folder now only exists in .tar.gz files on my backup raid).
Now that I think about it, I had two "scripts," one that dumped the files as .wavs using cdparanoia and renamed them and all of that (the one that ran while loops for each drive) and a separate "script" that ran in a separate terminal and was just something like:
while true; do find /path/to/rips -name '*.wav' | while read music; do lame --r3mix "$music"; done; sleep 1; done
Or something to that effect (it's been a long time since I had to recall how lame handles command-line arguments).
Then I think I actually ran one pass at the very end of the entire ripping process, again just a command-line, not actually saved as a script, with the id3 tagger that just traversed the whole tree and tagged each track as disc name "folder" and track name "file."
It wasn't fancy. It was just to get the job done. Honestly the scripting was like three minutes; getting all of the drives in place and compiling in the extra kernel code for both controllers and creating the nodes in /dev and searching freshmeat for the tools I wanted were the bigger pains; that prep work took an afternoon, but I was determined to do it all in one weekend and be done with it.
The "main" script was less than a screenful of inelegant stuff handed off to bash.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I had the same problem. Windows doesn't play along nicely with multiple SATA drives sometimes. Especially if you have RAID in the mix or different types of hardware (IDE and SATA and so on). It kept having cache and access and speed issues. Eventually it started dropping the DVD drive or reporting that it was merely a CD drive. I was pulling my hair out.
Then I got an external Firewire case. Problems dropped to ZERO. I tried USB but it was too slow and it conflicted like crazy. But evidently firewire uses its own bus and controller that's separate from the rest of the idiocy (being based upon SCSI technology). I can plug it in and out and it always works. My burner is a bog-standard $30 ASUS burner. My software is happy as a clam with it. I've burned Apple, Windows, and Linux CDs as well as made bit-for-bit copies of the latter (which isn't even a recognized format by Windows). Coasters are a result of bad media if it happens.
MP3 to FLAC Converter. :)
LRN 2 SWM
Perhaps you should give Vortexbox a look. I took a customer's throw away computer ( a dell dimenison 4300) and tested vortexbox so I could rip my family's various cd collections into 1 big collection to back and store for safe keeping. A little tweaking of the configuration had me ripping in no time. With 7min being the average for audio cds. It is very nice and had I not just been using to rip cds for storage, I would have used the server aspects Vortexbox. Just keep swapping the cds out until you have run through them all :D
I tested 1 movie, and it worked fine as well. I was very impressed. Give it a shot.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
Since we're talking about a manual process of inserting disks and clicking buttons, the different between five minutes and fifteen minutes can be rendered insignificant if you plug in enough drives. Since we're talking about a SATA system here, any reasonably high-end PC can easily support 6 to 10 SATA ports -- with enough channels to handle CDs certainly.
In your case, I'd focus my efforts not on finding a good ripper, but in configuring ten mediocre rippers. Your over-all speed with easily multiply.
RPC1! I think that's the site where I found all of the info that led to my getting the DRU-810a actually.
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
Maybe this wouldn't work for the OP, but my first solution would be to use an IDE CD-ROM drive in an external USB enclosure if SATA CD drives are the cause of the problem. The external USB enclosures should be cheap and relatively easy to find.
As far as CD ripping, before it was faster to simply download an already ripped copy of an album vs rip it yourself, I know Plextor and Kenwood had some of the hot drives. Specifically Kenwood had a drive line called True X with claimed speeds of up to 72x I believe, and everyone that ripped music wanted one of them. If you could find one that still works, that would probably be a pretty safe bet as I don't think much of anything related to reading CDs has changed in the past 20 years.
If an external enclosure won't work, I'm sure you could probably find a SATA to IDE adapter. As I understand, the problem is with the caching mechanism in SATA drives and not with SATA itself, so this should work.
No, it's far more likely that an audio CD will lose data. A modern HD, SSD, tape or even data CD has FAR more error correction and detection than audio CDs. Audio CDs have very limited error correction that is meant to smooth out errors in a non-audible way, not to give perfect data. Any "bitrot" is far more likely to have come from the original CD then the media used to store the ripped data.
Actually CDs do degrade. I've been buying them since they first came out and I can look at some of my CDs - stored in their cases inside a temp reasonable crate inside my home - and see the oxidation beginning. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot
CDs can also be very fragile depending upon the process that made them. Older CDs that have a very thing LABEL side are the worst. Drop one of those puppies and then shine it up the the light to see the pinpricks or light coming through the damaged areas. The label side is the most fragile side of a CD and some of them take very little effort to screw up.
Given a choice I prefer to keep my CDs around but also digitize them at very high bitrates. If nothing I can always source rips from someone else and use the physical media to prove ownership if it comes to it. I prefer my media online, not on fragile CDs.
As for ripping, I've still been using Lite On hardware without too much issue. I do find that BD drives SUCK for ripping but normal DVD writers work just fine. Lite On even used to have their hardware optimized for ripping but I believe they have begun to sell out and am all ears if there's another company out there making decent drives. Honestly I'd be surprised if there was with the kinds of crap most companies seem to make...
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Yeah, except he, like me and others, has a collection of CDs that's over 400+. On top of that if you trust any completely automated process to choose metadata and artwork then you're as stupid as you are arrogant. He likely doesn't want this process to stretch out for ages and he wants to be able to feed his machine CDs at a fairly rapid pace with fast enough ripping that he's not twiddling thumbs in between waiting on it. I do this now with two drives in my system (one of which sucks for ripping) for friends with small collections. In the past when I ripped my collection I used two additional machines for a total of 6 drives just to speed things along. All I had to do was swap CDs like a monkey and check the album art and songs against the various album jackets. My office was a mess for maybe a week - not the 6 months you're silly process would take to rip a large volume of CDs like this.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
If you have access to a Windows box check out MP3Tag from http://www.mp3tag.de/en/
It's by far the best tool I've found for fixing up metadata. Want to rename a folder full of music based on tags? No problem! Album art? Lots of sources to get it and many more added in his forums. This tool is awesome, sorry I don't think there's a version for Linux...
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
He's worried that his old drive, which has already seen a great deal of use, isn't going to survive long enough to finish. He might also be wanting to do this with more than one drive at once - I always do - which means he needs more drives...
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Nope, that's backwards. From Amazon's description:
Connects a SATA hard drive to a computer with a PATA/ATA/IDE/EIDE interface.
What you want is the opposite. I have some great old PATA DVD drives that won't work when I get a new motherboard (SATA only). There are ways, but the ones I've seen are basically PATA adapters for PCI or PCIe slots, not nearly as cheap.
> Nothing on my hard drive can be lost short of a fairly cataclysmic event that would simultaneous destroy
> all copies in existence, and frankly I'd probably be dead then too, so what would I care?
Don't be so sure.
I came TERRIFYINGLY close to losing 20+ years' worth of files permanently last year when my SSD, my Velociraptor-300, AND my 2TB Seagate hard drive all kicked the bucket within a 3-month window of time. At the time, I had the SSD backing itself up to the Velociraptor daily, was backing up the Velociraptor (including the SSD backup) to the 2TB drive weekly, and had the Seagate drive itself backed up to a 3TB external drive once a month or so (the Seagate drive was normally stored at my best friend's house ~15 miles away).
The problem was, as the drives failed and I replaced them, I ended up with multiple copies of recently-modified data, and ended up having a HELL of a time figuring out which was the new and which was the old copy. It took SO LONG to straighten out the resultant mess, that drive #3 ended up failing before I'd finished fully restoring everything from drive #2. And worse, because it took an eternity to do a full backup of the 2TB drive to the external drive (and 4-16 times eternity to restore it), I lost about a month's worth of stuff, and was in cold-sweat panic when I ran out to the store to buy yet another external drive to back up my last surviving copy of the data in case THAT drive failed, too.
Yeah, 2011 was a really, really bad year for my data. In addition to the two external drives, I now also have a complete backup of their contents on ~50 BD-R discs sitting at my parents' house. It took me about a week to burn, and a loss bad enough for me to ever NEED those discs would be devastating... but at least I can sleep at night now knowing that I still have one backup of last resort to fall back on if necessary.
After the crisis, I did a lot of soul-searching and research to find the most robust way to back up my data. What I learned (besides the fact that hard drive reliability has totally gone down the shithole over the past 5 years) was eye-opening.
I'd argue that the SAFEST media for long-term archival backup of files is probably non-LTH BD-R media. It's phase-change magneto-optical, unlike the organic dyes that were the norm for CD-R/RW and DVD+|-/R/RW.
For the record, "LTH" BD-R media uses organic dyes, just like older media, and anecdotal evidence suggests that data written to them has a half-life of approximately 6 months before they start getting correctable errors, and an estimated 18-30 months before they start getting their first uncorrectable errors.
In contrast, most of the phase-change magneto-optical media made by Matsushita and Sony ~15-20 years ago is still readable today (assuming you can find a working drive), and there's no real reason to think BD-R will be any worse (fundamentally, it's the same process now as it was back then... just smaller particles and tighter laser & magnetic fields). In case you're wondering what's magic about them, it's because MO drives use the laser to briefly liquefy the substrate so metallic particles within it can move, and use magnetism to align those particles while it's liquid. Once they re-solidify a moment later, your data is basically "cast in stone" and has no real expiration date.
Incidentally, Millenniata M-disc is basically a DVD-R that's built like a MO BD-R disc. It's one of those cool products that never existed in the format's golden era, but later became possible as a side effect of some newer technology. Kind of like some new gigabit ethernet cards & switches that can also be induced to do 100base-T4 (100mbps ethernet over 4 pairs of cat-3 cable). It was never widely supported back when 100baseT was the norm because it cost too much to add as a feature few cared about, but the technology behind it ended up being used to make gigabit ethernet. Once you have the hardware to do gigabit ethernet, adding retroactive support for 100baseT4 is basically an a
> Stop using cdparanoia - it isn't very good, at all. It tests poorly, we're sad to say.
Really! As the author, I'd love to hear hard specifics. or maybe a bug report.
> You want to use Secure Mode with NO C2, accurate stream, disable cache.
You can't disable the cache on a SATA/PATA ATAPI drive. The whole point of cdparanoia's extensive cache analysis is to figure out a way to defeat the cache because it can't be turned off. There is no FUA bit for optical drives in ATA or MMC.
The 'accurate stream' bit is similarly useless (every manufacturer interprets it differently) and C2 information is similarly untrustworthy.
Plextors are not recommended for error free or fast ripping. They try to implement their own paranoia-like retry algorithm in firmware and do a rather bad job about it. They also lie about error correcting information (you do not get raw data, you get what the drive thinks it has successfully reconstructed). Plextors often look OK on pristine disks, but if you hit a bit error (like on just about any burned disk), you don't know what it's going to do. Plextors are, overall, among the more troublesome drives _unless_ you're using a ripper that does no retry checking (ie, NOT cdparanoia and NOT EAC). If you use iTunes, you want a Plextor. Otherwise, avoid them.
What the hell are CDs? and why would you rip them?
Yes, but a well preserved audio CD will not all of a sudden fail to play. The same can't necessarily be said for the rotting bits. :D
50 years from now, I'd take my chances with the pressed audio CD, not with the last of the hard disks in the chain of a long series of backups.
Exactly!
Ripping CDs is kind of a pain, mostly because of metadata. I have my owns tastes that aren't the same as the collective compromises that are freedb/musicbrainz (I'm glad they exist, since they save me a LOT of time, but consensus decision making processes...), and so I have to review the data for each cd anyway (I mean, I have my own notion of what the genres are for the albums so I at least have to enter those). Then you have the weird imports (I paid so much for the damned Mithotyn Japanese import with the extra track that was cut from release for a reason and only existed in one run, damnit!) and cds that I got here and there from bands no one has heard of (I'm not a hipster, but before bandcamp sometimes you grabbed a disc for $5 from some opening band at a merch stand, and in the early aughts you had to get metal cds shipped from Europe by sea because they took about a year more to be released in the ol' USA)... and then the whole "the collection spans over a decade of new and used acquisitions, some taken care of and some not and some perhaps pressed around the time I was born" bit with cdparanoia in never skip mode, and it ends up being a process you want to babysit.
Really, I just want to have as few intense ripping sessions as possible where I churn through a couple dozen discs until it's done. Spreading it out and doing it idly only leads to carelessness toward the end, disorder in the physical disc collection (I kept the cases + discs separate and really well organized, probably the only reason I'm able to churn through this effectively at all), etc.
I know I could tweak the tags afterward, but realistically that's not going to happen, or would take way longer. Right now I have an empty directory and a pair of binders full of discs grouped by artist (externally unsorted, internally by year, with the cases on racks matching the internal ordering), so what better time to hack together a few shells scripts, grab a good drive, and just do it right all at once? I want to have to revisit this ten or twenty years from now, not six months from now.
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
That's because Microsoft is Estimated to Spend $1.5 Billion on Windows 8 Marketing. $1.5 billion will buy a lot of praise from say-for-pay pundits, astroturfers and shills. There will also be a small percentage of the mainstream public that will get pulled along.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
No need to be in the tropics for that. Had the same happen to some cd's (not cd-roms !) too and that's in Belgium.
It looked like some kind of mould had eaten its way through the 'shiny layer'. Discs were completely unreadable by the time I noticed. I'll admit they had been stuffed away in a damp, badly-ventilated corner of the cellar but still I was shocked by the effect. Out of about a 100 discs in that box I lost 3 of them. Remarkably, all 3 of them had been 'cheap' compilation CDs -although totally unrelated and bought on totally different times-. I assume there are different ways to make CDs and these were part of the 'lower end' production line.
Anyway, giving away my age I remember when CDs came out and they promised how the medium would be 'indestructible'; they actually showed cigarettes being put out on them and then still getting perfect sound out of it. I guess someone figured out that replacing the original material by some cheaper polycarbonate would mean more profit... IMHO this is most annoying with cd-roms of games for the kids. I've gone so far that they are not allowed to touch them any more because some 'unlucky' scratch will make the thing unreadable and thanks to some stupid copy-protection those games won't play without them in the drive. Maddening =(
And as I'm ranting anyway : those laptop-DVD_RWs are no help either. Often I can perfectly read the disc on my old PIII600 desktop with CDROM drive, but the DVD-drive will simply start whizzing and nothing more...
PS: if anyone has a tip on how to make some kind of .iso (and mount it as needed) from these (old) cd-roms, I'm all ears. Apart from the fact that these discs are fragile they're also ridiculously slow. I have 40Gb free disk space on that laptop but pretty much every setup only puts like 100Mb on the HDD and fetches all the data from the cd-rom causing stutter etc...
If there is one thing to be learned on slashdot, it has to be sarcasm.
I recently ripped my ~650 CDs to FLAC.
It took a few weeks as I was doing it in the evening and on weekends when I was spending time on my computer anyway.
I used MP3tag and TagScanner (MP3tag can't handle disc numbers, and gets confusing when displaying a big number of files) to make sure the metadata are consistend across all the files.
Yes, I had to spend some time to make sure that's the case, but now that part of my music collection is as I want it to.
If only it was as easy to digitize all my vinyl records...
Um... surely how much you care depends on how many you're going to do...? 450 CDs at an hour each would take months!
Has iTunes dropped DRM all together? I know last time I used them, it was kind of hit or miss if the music you were getting was DRM-free or not. I know in the past, I would sometimes have to burn the files I got off of iTunes to an audio CD, then rerip. Kinda defeats the purpose. However, I know that MANY (not all) of the songs I bought when I had an iPhone I was able to put on my Android (when I saw the light). I am sure there is probably some software out there that will convert all my iTunes tracks to MP3s, but I just haven't got around to looking.
Amazon Cloud has a similar service, although I don't think they have nearly as big of a library as itunes. Out of the 3,000 MP3s I put on my Amazon Cloud account, I think about 400 songs were upgraded.
i think both services, though, still limit to 256kbps, and Amazon is MP3 (while this works for compatability, its still an old losssy audio format). While this should be fine for most people, and more than fine enough if you are listening through earbuds, true audiophiles will probably still have issues with the fact that these are not lossless
I would rip to SSD's and then copy to HD's + 2 backup HD's.
But then I'm a novice in the area.
Mundus Vult Decipi
Yup. Handbrake. Grab it and learn it. easily scripted to do the same thing.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
99% of people out there do that alerady. Do you really think that most people that rip CD's go overboard like you?
I suggest you actually look at how accurate the CDDB is, as I have not had an exception to it in over 10 years. Same as most people that own an iDevice and uses itunes.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I ripped + encoded + tagged my entire collection with some shell scripts, just using cdda2wav to get the data. It was all auto pilot after some initial testing. IE every time the disk tray ejected I just dropped the next disk off the stack in. Sometimes I was in front of the computer doing other things, other times the display was off I was just walking past it.
I have since been listing to my collection for years on a variety of devices and never once heard an audible error I can reasonably attribute to the initial ripping/encoding. I used shorten at the time ( like I said years ago ), but have since converted to flac.
Knowing what I know about the technology I am certain the rips were not error free, most errors should have been fixed, but the unrecoverable errors must therefore be preserved. My point is it really does not impact my ability to enjoy the material though. Even if someone did have golden ears, would a few bad frames spread across several moments for audio really distract? Seems hard to believe.
I think the article poster should consider he might be solving the wrong problem. Rather than trying to get perfect rips done fast, maybe he should try to get very good rips done fast.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Who uses cd's anymore...
How about people who enjoy better quality music and/or those with better hearing?
They said the same thing about CD's and albums/tape back in the day and despite any arguments to the contrary, there is a great difference between digital and analog music. Just because you can't hear it (I can't either by the way, but I know it's real) doesn’t make it unperceivable to people with better hearing. Most of todays "pop" crap is designed with low quality digital files in mind and people who don't have an ear for music.
No... at some point, a digital system will outperform an analog system because the analog system is bandwidth-limited by its hardware, and incapable of lossless (and noiseless) generations. If the problem is clipping, throw more sample bits at it (24 is fine) and calibrate for a -12dB "clip level" and you won't lose anything. If it's sample rate, 192k is easily available off the shelf. Performance will be limited by the analog components in the signal path much more than the digital ones. None of this will help if the final product is dynamically compressed to one volume level before release -- it's going to sound like shit regardless of what medium is used to ship it.
The truth is that it is crappy mastering and crappy encoding that causes artifacts. Lossy encoding is used to make it practical to move the audio files around over an Internet connection and to keep a reasonable amount on small portable devices. Bandwidth still hasn't exploded enough for lossless with deep and high sample rates, but storage has if you're willing to load up your device for every trip, just like you'd choose what cassettes to carry. It's just that now the cassettes have no moving parts and are the size of your fingernail.
Once you get the electronic reproduction sufficiently accurate, it's time to turn a critical ear to the other end of the chain -- namely your headphones and/or speakers. These need not be new, an undamaged pair of 1970's Tannoy Dual Concentrics will still outperform most anything new the majority of us can afford. (I have a pair of SRM12Bs, and sitting between them is like wearing headphones -- except no weight on your head and you can feel the bass.)
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
And are living with screwed up metadata too if that's the case. I start with CDDB and make corrections from there! I love it when disk one is labeled differently than Disk 2, or some other screwed up thing. Correcting metadata for one CD isn't hard, correcting it for 400+ after some asshat like you makes a mess sucks!
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Since I discovered Streamtuner, ripping became a total waste of time. I don't even care about losing my ripped CD collection anymore.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
More helpful than your comment, at least :)
It's Ask Slashdot - for better or for worse, that means you're going to see diverse replies. Some more helpful, some not so much. Some on-topic, some the usual racist flamebait.
If you were expecting just drive model brands, types, numbers and diagnostic output - well, there's plenty of those answers as well. Feel free to read only those in the future :)
P.S. I'm pretty sure one of the alternatives I mentioned comes down to your suggestion ;)
stick the old drive in the slot and do the ripping... then stick the new drive back in the slot when finished...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
1% of my pressed, carefully stored CD collection has succumbed to 'bit rot' over 20 years; CDs that played perfectly when new at some point developed pin-point holes in the reflective layer (visible when held up to the light) in critical areas such that the discs are no longer even recognized as CDs either by standalone or PC based CD players/drives.
I'd rather rely on a rotating set of 3 external hard drives as backup (retired and replaced periodically) than bet on the 'good' 99% of my CDs still being readable in another 10 or 20 years.
Many people use EAC (Exact Audio Copy) for ripping without realizing that it has known speed issues for ripping. Try using a BD drive to rip with it. Your rips will take about an hour for one audio CD. The slow ripping speed is a known issue that has yet to be fixed. EAC is free, so you get what you pay for. I don't rip audio CDs much, but when I do I now use the free CDex which has much better times.
A very similar thing happened to me. I had a file server that had all my data on it, with hardware RAID, and with two different backup programs copying the data to external HDDs.
Cue a power failure long enough to have the UPS shut down the machine. The RAID array lost its metadata and couldn't be recovered. One of the external drives came up, and was howling... what once was data is now sitting as powder in the inside of the case. Another just failed. The last external HDD did have a backup of everything...
but the backup program had 20,000 errors upon restoring.
So, I reached for a spindle of 100 DVDs that I used for a backup... managed to get critical data back that way, data the backup program failed at.
Moral of story: Yes, DVDs get bit rot, but no media is perfect. The best thing to do is have not just a RAID array, but an array that backs up the RAID as well, so files deleted via malware or other corruption can be put back in place.
One thing I noticed is how CDs became thinner. When the Red Book CD spec came out, it stated between 1.1 and 1.5 millimeters. However, as manufacturing became cheaper and more precise, CD makers started making them as close to 1.1 millimeters as possible. It doesn't sound like a lot, but the added material half the thickness of a dime can greatly increase shelf archival life.
So, just under 10 years ago, before HD got standardized and DVDs were still the best you could get for personal video content I got a Netflix account. I abused that sucker pretty hard, and when they eventually throttled me I quit, and in doing so ended up with a binder of decrypted DVDs. Now those DVDs, while decrypted, are also of a lower quality than many of the originals since most of the original DVDs were dual layer and I was burning them to a single layer DVD-R.
That being said I had been moving around the HTPC concept for a while, used a WD TV Live system, but now I have a full fledged HTPC that I am putting my movie library on. Overall I have been very pleased with the results save for the fact of Blu-Ray integration. Given that my HTPC is hooked up to a huge 1080p TV via HDMI one would think that a Windows 7 machine should be able to easily move to the next level of tech...but no. We are in a war right now with content manufactors, hardware manufacturers, the software, and of course the DRM that is quite frankly a mess.
And I'm going to say right now I have no moral qualms about abusing whatever media I want to consume. You can call me a pirate (factually correct only in a digital context), call me a thief (factually wrong), call me whatever. Fuck you and the DRM you rode in on. The day the content manufacturers allow Fair Use and reasonable copyright lengths I will cede the high moral ground I stand on. Until then, bite me.
So back to the point. I am in the process of ripping that library to the HTPC, via Handbrake, and are using an old Sony (lols) DVD-ROM. It is actually rather good at doing its job and once I am done I plan on putting a real drive in there such that the box will be able to burn stuff as well. But for now why would I want to use up the mechanicals, and from taking apart many many many CD/DVD drives (and I have no great hope that Blu-Ray drives will be of any better quality unless I spend a grand+ for them), the gears are going to be plastic. The belts are going to be high quality rubber at best. I'm gonna burn up this old drive ripping my stuff then put in the burner when it is done.
And another aside, omg Yamaha, I had a Yamaha front loading (no tray) drive at one point. Clearly at one point a group of their engineers set out to make some kick ass CD-ROM drives and they did so with a gusto. Best drive I have had to date.
Moving parts suck. I will never forget what Google said about hard drives, they suck. When you look at them across a huge sample size...wow. But I always temper myself by thinking about ME's when I talk about rate of failure. When I run into a ME and start talking about HD failure rates they give me a rather patronizing look as if that valve they just bought for $1231232967.99 should not fail within 30s of being put under pressure. Brings me back to reality.
And finally as such we have to then look to what drives/parts are going to be best to handle a job that the OP wants? Further what is the CBA of what drives will do such a job? Is it best to get an industrial level drive that has metal gears, belts that have nylon in them, and so on? Or is it better to get 5x consumer grade drives? I've already done enough damage with this post and this thread is likely going to head off the front page so I'll leave those questions to another day.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
(Argh, I just lost a 20-paragraph post because I chose to change my post style to plain old text so it would format nicely. Thanks slashdot...)
I'll be brief this time. Disclaimer: I'm the author of morituri, a CD ripper for Linux with support for AccurateRip, modelled after Exact Audio Copy but command line.
I was in the same situation as you a few years ago. I had originally ripped my collection to Ogg/Vorbis, and thought that this time I wanted everything 100% lossless so I would never have to rip again, but just transcode from the rips. The main issue I wanted to solve, besides going lossless, is to make sure I had no bad tracks with skips in my collection. (You detect those skips over the years listening to the songs, not as you do the rip, and you're never sure if there are glitches in the tracks or not, and it drove me crazy).
But when I researched what it meant to get it right this time, my mind got blown at everything that could go wrong. Here's a condensed version of the results of my research.
The biggest eye opener to me was that the fact that each drive model reads samples with a different offset. That offset is always the same for that model, but different across models. I have no idea why it is so (does anyone know), and we're lucky that it's constant for a model, otherwise I wouldn't even be able to solve my main concern - the detection of skips and bad rips. Nowadays people use AccurateRip, a database of checksums for ripped tracks that people upload. If your rip matches several other people's rips, you can be reasonably sure that you have a correct rip.
Since at the time there wasn't a single Linux-based ripper doing this, I created morituri.
There are several other issues that make ripping a fragile activity. I recommend you get a drive that is able to rip Hidden Track One Audio (The audio in Track 01 but between Index 00 and 01). Maybe you don't care, but I have a few gems in my collection with good stuff there (two Soulwax albums and Luke Haines's Das Capital spring to mind). Some drives are simply not able to get at this data. Most software doesn't get it either. EAC can be told to do so, but it's a manual and fragile process. morituri's goal is to create a perfect image so that you can burn a bit-exact copy; so it rips the HTOA tracks always.
I suggest you rethink whether you really want to go quick and dirty. You're going to rip the cd's once and then listen to the result many times. Are you sure you don't want to get it right on the first try this time ? Is your time spent changing the discs not valuable enough to not have to repeat it ?
morituri is probably slower than less accurate rippers, as the focus is accuracy. I would argue that the time spent ripping and encoding really is not the biggest issue. The real trouble is having to change disks, which is going to take time no matter how much time it takes for your computer to do its thing.
I made a quick calculation of how much time I would be spending to put in my 1600 CD's, and decided to spend that time on creating a LEGO CD changer instead (I had checked the price of disc changers, and the cheapest I could find was around $800, with no real guarantee of whether I'd be able to control it from Linux).
Friends visiting shared their scorn and admiration in equal doses, but the robot was able to do around 20 CD's reliably in one go, so I would just load them up in the morning before work. 3 months later my 1600 CD collection was digitized.
morituri interfaces with MusicBrainz to get the metadata, and you can retag albums later on based on a different release id or when the data is updated on MB. There's also options to do an encode of lossless rips; I regularly run a simple shell command to transcode the flacs to mp3s, and it only transcodes what wasn't done before.
Give it a try, let me know what you think.
While I hate the screwed up metadata too, I found that correcting it one time after importing a bunch of CDs simply wasn't that hard. I figured out how to efficiently navigate my way through the screens, and which fields to go fix. Most tracks didn't need any clean up at all, and it took less than a minute per disc to fix those that did. Once I established a repeatable pattern, I knocked off the whole collection with about two hours of work.
That was a lot easier than trying to fix them in EAC on a disc-by-disc basis. Trying to do it while ripping slowed down the import process, and EAC doesn't have the best interface for all that stuff.
It's just one of those things where you just have to sit down and do it. And I certainly don't blame the crowd for the varying quality of the crowdsourced data, either. It just comes with the package.
John
Why is it that everyone seems to be ignoring the possibility of using more than one drive!?!? Maybe it's been said, but I haven't seen it.
I did see one poster suggest getting a separate usb -rw drive and internal -r drive, but that's silly.
newegg has an external usb 2.0 cdrom for $15. Buy 6 or so of those, and do 6 disks at a time. Or buy internals (cheapest on newegg seems to be about $18). Or USB 3.0 drives at $30. Or get even more of them, or a mix of internal and external, etc.
Assuming he has a day job and can spend 4hr a day burning, and has 450 cd's:
5min/cd (old drive) * 450 = 37.5hr / 4hr = 10 days ...and buy different models, and some of those are bound to be faster. Probably get it down to 2-3 days. And if you're feeling dirty, return the drives afterwards... you'll have them less than a week, which is well within return periods. You could also get them used.
15min/cd (new drive) * 450 = 112.5hr / 4hr = 29 days
6drives 15min/cd * 450 = 18.75hr / 4hr = 5 days
That said, the question isn't really about how to do this better/faster/cheaper. He really just wants a good drive, and is using this to justify that research and purchase (IMO, of course). If it were really about speed, he could just stick the disk in and hit CDDB and click the button to buy it from amazon (or whereever) which would have good metadata as well (but wouldn't be FLAC).
If it's really about quality + FLAC + metadata + fast, get a bunch of cheap drives, and maybe a USB hub or SATA or IDE card. It's a one time process. Afterwards, 15min/disk using the new drive won't matter for the one off additions.
I wish I had mod points for you.
But honestly, thomasvs, when you come this late to the discussion, AND you have something this interesting to say, I think you are allowed to post it higher in the thread, even if it's not 100% on topic.
I mean, you're politically correct to post it here, but nobody will read it. Isn't that worse than posting SLIGHTLY off-topic higher up in the thread but where it can be an added value to people because they will read it?
Which is Windows-only and makes use of cdparanoia. If you want an open-source solution on Windows, it's an option I suppose, but the OP noted that he was using Linux to do his ripping. In that case, CDex isn't any better than using cdparanoia straight-out.
For what it's worth, I have a large number of 50-disc CD ripping Robots that I need to get rid of. They are USB connected. Internally they consist of a USB hub, a USB serial port controlled robot and a USB bridge connected IDE Teac CD-RW drive that work with Windows XP and dbpoweramp's batch ripper. Plus a command line driver stub I wrote that dbpoweramp calls. I need to get rid of them. Most of them are unused and in their original boxes. The boxes are heavy, so UPS ground shipping is about $30 per box to the lower 48 states (maybe a few bucks less). International shipping is prohibitive and probably not worth it ($100 to $200 per box) due to weight and size. I am giving them away for the cost of shipping. Contact me directly at brendan.hoar@gmail.com if you're interested. You can read more about them in the dbpoweramp forums if you look up "kodak" robots there. Brendan
I don't know if this is useful for how you want to do things, but here's what I do:
I rip/buy/borrow/download music. It goes into a directory that exists for this purpose, with mostly random sorting (due to the variety of sources). I do not trust the metadata from provided by any of these methods, at all.
I fire up my favorite MP3 tagging machine (mediamonkey, which happens to be a Windows beast). One by one, I edit/verify the metadata, throw some artwork in, and then my favorite tagging machine automatically moves them to another temporary (but this time well-sorted) directory structure. (I like artist/year-album/tracks, YMMV.)
After that comes some automated postprocessing (convert to MP3 if flac, run mp3gain to normalize levels in an album-centric way on mp3s), the results of which get moved their final destination.
I don't worry about the text on the back of the CD case, because chances are I can Google it later, faster than I can manage a bunch of physical disks.
Now then, I've also got my own assortment of odd and special CDs that nobody else seems to have and that confuse the hell out of musicbrainz/cddb/freedb, and these get handled differently -- one at a time, as you say you want to do.
Things I do to make it faster or better:
Normal CDs (which is most of them) just get dumped into the miscellaneous directory, period. As I said, I don't trust metadata produced by someone else, but it's trivial to verify a mass-market CD using Google and Amazon and discogs (who has pictures of the front and back, typically, which I also include) and others if it seems particularly iffy.
Special CDs (the rares, limiteds, odd imports, and other stuff that confuses CDDB/freedb/musicbrainz) are physically sorted into a different pile for special handling. You've already got a good method for this, so use it.
The different temp directories are on physically different drives. This makes copying (WITH changes) a breeze compared to doing it on a single drive.
FWIW.
Kid-proof tablet..
FWIW I got in the habit of adding the disc number to the track number (both ID3 and filename). (ie "203 - foo.mp3" would be disk 2 track 3). I've found this method was most tolerant of a wide variety of players (some of which don't handle discnumber all that well).
In terms of file/folder structure I use "album artist/album name/track number - track name.ext"
MP3Tag on Windows (mentioned elsewhere) makes this trivial to do.