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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"?
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.
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).
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.
That Accuraterip list is horribly outdated for new purchases.
Almost none of the models that do well in their stats are for sale anymore.
Most are IDE as well.
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
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.
> 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.