DIY Ripserver

February 1, 2009 1:50 PM

DIY Ripserver

Having seen the ripserver appliance, I am interested in making a similar CD-ripping toaster myself. Is there a linux distro that does this and only this, i.e. connects to your LAN, rips a CD, adds all the id tags after looking it up, and dumps out the mp3s to the resolution you require to it's hard drive?

posted by spyke23 to computers & internet (7 comments total)

I've tried doing this for a college radio station for a while with no luck.

The closest I've gotten is using Apple's iTunes with its "Rip, encode, eject" option selected. It was very nice (except for when the CDDB lookup failed) and was relatively quick.
posted by yellowbkpk at 2:21 PM on February 1

I've never tried this, but it doesn't seem like it would be a big deal to add a hook into automount to trigger a workflow that rips, tags, and organizes. The "connect to your LAN" part is just a filesharing thing that can be a part of the OS itself (CIFS/Samba, NFS). Just share out the rip directory.
posted by rhizome at 2:24 PM on February 1

I'm not sure I understand what you're looking for. iTunes does this all of this.
posted by christhelongtimelurker at 2:35 PM on February 1

I believe you're looking for VortexBox.
posted by namewithoutwords at 2:51 PM on February 1 [1 favorite]

hi christhelongtimelurker, i am looking for a headless box that does this, with no other function but this.
posted by spyke23 at 3:05 PM on February 1

namewithoutwords, that looks like it might be the job, will investigate. thanks.
posted by spyke23 at 3:06 PM on February 1

It seems like most any old computer would do what you want and be able to run headless once you had it set up. I remember awhile back seeing a site where a guy had actually made a ripping "robot." It grabbed a CD off a stack, dropped it in the open tray of the drive, drive closes, rips and encodes CD, then the arm grabbed the CD put it in another pile, and went for the next disc.

Obviously that's pretty elaborate, if geekily cool, but there's no reason you can't just set up a computer to do what you want. Is there a specific reason you need a dedicated headless box solely made for ripping CDs?
posted by 6550 at 8:45 AM on February 2