Slashdot Mirror
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why would he want it to last a decade?
He wants to rip his collection NOW. If it fails in 3 years it would not matter, especially since he will never let such a huge queue of to-be-ripped discs pile up (making the ripping speed of any replacement less important)
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
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.
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.
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."
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.
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).
I've had good luck with both Lite-On and LG optical disk writers (there's no savings in getting just a reader, and the writers are generally more forgiving).
I just tested, and my Lite-On Blu-Ray writer took 2:10 to rip a 66 minute CD to WAV, while the LG DVD writer took 2:33 for the same disc. I had to do a re-rip of my 500 disc collection a while back, and these times agree with my memory that by using both drives, I didn't really have time to get up to do anything...I just sat there feeding discs to alternating drives.
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 =)!
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
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
This is a completely valid point, optical drives are cheap as dirt. Throw brute force at the problem if it's that big of a deal, then when done you have a bunch of spares for when/if they die or other PC builds.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
That's the problem with WORM media.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
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)
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.
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
> 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
That was true ~15 years ago. Since then, Plextor's firmware gets along very badly with the rippers that try to be frame accurate, because Plextor tries to implement a much lighter-weight more error prone version of the same algo on the drive. The drive still doesn't do a realiable job, and it seriously mucks up the ripper.
> 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.
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
(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.