How can I quickly rip 1000 CDs?

July 11, 2005 10:53 AM

How can I quickly rip 1000 CDs?

More specifically, how do would I emulate the approach taken by companies who offer this service? What sort of equipment do they use?

I have a lot of CDs and I'm bored of the space they take up. I really haven't got the time or inclination to build my own CD changer. And I hate to pay someone else to do what I can do myself. So I'm guessing that what is required is some sort of large-capacity CD changer plus a device to manage the CD changer, and a huge amount of hard-drive space, probably on some networked PCs. Is that right? And is that it, beyond a few network cables to hook it all up? Maybe I've found everything I need to use, I'm just nervous about actually buying it all if it won't do the job.

Has anyone on MeFi ever done something like this?

There is a thread that touches on this subject, but doesn't quite go into the detail I'm after.

For the curious out there, this will be for space-saving purposes and entirely for my own use of my personal CD collection. The emphasis is on speed and quality, rather than geek-chic ;-) My plan would probably be to buy the kit, rip the CDs quickly, then sell the kit on Ebay to recoup expenditure. I'm interested in the technical detail here, so comments on the lunacy of my approach will be quietly and politely ignored, thankyouverymuch :-)

Apologies for length and detail of the question.

posted by ajp to technology (16 comments total)

It sounds like you're asking two different questions:

1: How do I rip 1000 CDs
2: How do I setup 1000 CDs to be controlled and ripped centrally via some kind of super-ripper.

I can't help you with #2, but I can help you with #1. I, too, have too many CDs, and am upset with the space they take up. According to my MP3s folder, I have ripped almost 1500 of my CDs.

What I did to rip these CDs was fairly simple: I put together a machine with two CD drives in it, running two copies of EAC. Whenever I was using the computer, I had a stack of unripped CDs next to me. I'd put one in the ripping machine, start ripping. I'd put another in the ripping machine, and start ripping. When the ripping machine went 'beep', that meant a CD was done ripping. The average CD took 4-8 minutes to rip.

This means that in in an hour, I could expect to rip at least 20 CDs. Because I do a lot of work from home, some days I'm on the computer from eight to twelve hours, which means that even if I wasn't paying that much attention to the beeps, or wasn't at the PC all the time, I was ripping at least a hundred CDs a day. I did this whenever I was using my PC for about two weeks, and at the end of the two weeks, I had ripped the 1500 or so CDs I now have on my hard drive.
posted by Jairus at 11:34 AM on July 11, 2005

Economically it'd be a lot less money and time to pay the company to do it. Especially at $1 a CD (which you could probably bargain with at 100 CDs). The cost of the changer and controller would be way plus $1000 alone. Then you'd have to do the work yourself of not only ripping but selling the equipment back. Sorry it's not really your question though. Look into buying a NAT storage device for managing all that music. You'd want hard drive redudancy and such so you odn't have to rip again.
posted by geoff. at 11:36 AM on July 11, 2005

I'd also suggest you take another look at the manual route. If you use some like the iTunes option that automatically rips and ejects each CD you put in your computer, you can work through a stack of CDs with almost no effort. Use a laptop and keep it with you while you're watching TV etc.
posted by cillit bang at 11:42 AM on July 11, 2005

Well, a typical CD at decent MP3 quality (160/192 for most people) is going to take up 50-100Mb of drive space, so that's a ~75Gb drivespace requirement -- which isn't that large or expensive nowadays. As long as you have a relatively new PC you shouldn't have a problem installing one as a second drive. Note that an MP3 drive is one of the applications for which performance is usually not an issue, so you can go cheap.

CD changers generally don't go hand-in-hand with CD burners, though I suppose they exist. I don't see how this really saves you much time or hassle, though, since you still have to individually seat and remove each CD at least once.

Most ripping software is geared toward one-at-a-time ripping with some manual intervention. You can walk away for the 5ish minutes that it's running, of course, or do it in the background. In certain environments (e.g. Mac) you might be able to automate some of this. But you're still going to have so spend some time reviewing the rips and installing them into your music software of choice. A major hang-up here is proper tagging of the MP3s; "proper" is a matter of opinion, but at minimum you need artist and track name, and while services like CDinfo or MusicBrainz can help, they're not perfect. There's probably more time in this step than any other -- at least, that's what I've found.

Finally, you'll find that it wasn't worth it to actually rip that live Doobie Brothers album your sister gave you when she went off to college. In other words, you may not actually be satisfied with the effort/results ratio for every CD of 1000. At the same time, you'll listen to some stuff more than you ever did before, simply because it's available without walking across the room. What I'm saying is that industrializing this process before you begin is probably not going to be worth your time. For one thing, 1000 CDs of music is 70000 minutes, or 48 days of non-stop music. At more reasonable listening rates, it's probably closer to an entire year.

So realistically, you've got six months at least to work on this, and that's assuming you aren't repeating albums. There really isn't any time pressure.

Start with a stack of 10 favorites. Rip. Classify. Enjoy. That's 11 hours of music! Get another stack when you're ready.
posted by dhartung at 11:45 AM on July 11, 2005

I apologise for a slight derail (although it is a technical question): how long (years, or more informatively, cds-through-machine, does the average OEM slot-loading CD drive last?
posted by OmieWise at 11:49 AM on July 11, 2005

1. Buy a Powerfile. The Powerfile C200 holds 200 CDs or DVDs and can usually be found on EBay for less than 1000$.

2. Find software to automate the process. I haven't used this software but The Rip Monkey is the software for OS X. I've seen some ugly python stuff someone hacked together for Windows also.
posted by joelr at 12:16 PM on July 11, 2005

For all the post-ripping chores, my tagging and renaming app of choice is The Godfather.
posted by rabble at 12:53 PM on July 11, 2005

I would recommend a lossless codec (flac, or ape). The overhead is about 3 to 1 compared to 192kbps mp3, but the cost of a 250GB drive should be less than 2x the cost of an 80GB drive. You should definitely make a RAID 1 array, you wouldn't want to do all that work and have it go to waste.

As for the mechanics... Who knows... You can get a command line encoder for almost any codec. If you can find a command line extractor then you are all set (after a little scripting and a lot of swapping discs).

While looking to see if EAC can be worked from the command line I found this post:

If i remember correctly..........
To be quick, in EAC if you press the [F9] key (EAC options menu), you can automatically rip your cds to given folder allocations.

i.e. Set Directories under Directory tab
i.e. Under Filename tab, in the "Naming scheme" textbox just enter whatever options you want for the folder. These options allow you to automatically construct folders/Directory path on the selected directory which you chose in the Directory Tab.

e.g. Say You are ripping an Eric Clapton CD. If you use %D\%Y - %C\%N - %T (i.e. (CD Artist) \ (Year) - (CD Title) \ (Track Number) - (Track Title)) then your id tags from the file/db will automatically generate the following folders\directory path....

(CD Artist)Eric Clapton\(Yr)2000 - (CD Title)Me and Mr.Johnson\(Track Number) 01 - (Track Title)......xxx.

So maybe you don't even need to do any scripting...
posted by Chuckles at 1:33 PM on July 11, 2005

I'd second the "is it really worth it to rip ALL of those CDs" argument, and vote for concentrating on the < 100 you probably 1) remember and 2) will want to listen to.br>
...unless you're a DJ. :)

As for riping programs, most automatic stuff still leaves an obvious issue -- skips & pops due to surface defects. Any program that can't correct for minor/medium data issues isn't worthwhile.

To ressurect a somewhat flaky audio (and even data!) CD, try the following:
1) "image" the disk. Windows users will want to try Alcohol 120% for this task. Get software that knows how to re-scan bad areas several (or more) times to get as much data as possible. CDs contain CRC code that helps this software (and better drives) reconstruct missing data!
2) Rip the newly-minted image, or burn the image to a CD-R and rip that.

As for automating a CD-picker/exchanger, I'd challenge the Erector Set (sexual jokes notwithstanding) and Lego Weenies out there to design something akin to a record jukebox picker/placer. Heh.
posted by catkins at 1:49 PM on July 11, 2005

Another great post-rip tag helper (possibly a little more mature than the Godfather): Tag&Rename.
posted by phearlez at 1:58 PM on July 11, 2005

My approach (using EAC) is to try not to have to use a tag helper program afterwards. EAC itself does an excellent job of tagging/naming the files already. The key is to make sure that the FreeDB data on the CD is correct (often it is not) before you rip.

Also, use LAME in command-line mode, with --alt-preset standard settings. EAC has a compression queue that allows it to rip the CD uncompressed and simply queue up the command-line encoder to work at its own pace. This works well for getting the CD in and out of your drive more quickly.
posted by neckro23 at 2:37 PM on July 11, 2005

Thanks for all the great comments. I guess I should clarify a few things:

Yes, I really want to rip all 1000 CDs. A subset is not an option - honestly. And yes, I want to do it as quickly and accurately as possible. This means the manual route isn't an option. I know it seems reasonable, but it simply isn't a viable alternative for my current hardware and lifestyle. Economics are less of an issue, since I'm prepared to gamble that I could sell the hardware after use for less of a loss than paying someone to rip them all for me - it would cost $1000 (or in the region of £700, I'm from the UK) to rip them all... I just doubt that I'll lose that much on selling "once used" kit. But really, that's not a concern, I don't want to dwell on it.

The software and disk-space/RAID comments are very useful. The surface defects point is worrisome, I suppose I best look for hardware or software to check for this.

The question is part driven by curiosity, part by need. I really need to do this, and I'm sure the professionals who do it have overcome these hurdles. How have they done it??
posted by ajp at 4:55 PM on July 11, 2005

Well, for the curiosity side...

I worked for an online music company a few years back that ripped tens or hundreds of thousands of CDs. They did it by building a bunch of extra-big tower computers with eight(?) CD drives each. Someone (typically an intern or temp) would load the machine and verify the CDs had been properly identified by CDDB or similar. The machine would then rip 'em all while the operator walked over to the next machine and loaded the drives. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Those machines ripped the music to a networked drive. Encoding was done as a separate step. Processors have gotten a lot faster since then, though, so ripping and encoding on the same machine may make sense.

One other thing the professionals may be doing is keeping all of the data they've ripped around. No sense re-ripping a CD that you already have a FLAC file for... They didn't do this much at the company I worked for, though. Re-ripping the CD was a lot faster than finding the right backup tape. But on-line storage is a lot cheaper now.
posted by aneel at 5:23 PM on July 11, 2005

Seconding some of what was said above...I ripped my ~1350 CD collection using iTunes in about 2 weeks (256k VBR mp3 format).

Just set it to automatically download the CD info and rip when a disc is inserted and then eject the disc when it's finished ripping. Anytime you walk by and see the tray sticking out, grab another disc off the stack and stick it in the drive.

At that bitrate, they take up about 130 gig of space.

Then get 3 external 250 Gig hard drives for redundant copies. 2 locally and one offsite in case anything happens.

You could then just go to Cheapo (or whatever is in your area) and unload all of them. You'll get back a lot more than the external drives cost you to purchase. Plus, you won't have to lug around all those CD's everytime you move. Eventually, lots of others will figure this out too so the used market on CD's will drop even lower than it is now.
posted by freshgroundpepper at 11:03 PM on July 11, 2005

catkins, EAC is exactly the software you want to make sure there are no data errors in your rip. That is why they call it Exact Audio Copy after all :) (perhaps there is better software for this now, back when I was interested in this scene EAC was the one)

aneel, keeping the data around is an interesting idea, but they would have to be very careful about different masterings of the same album... I guess I probably wouldn't send them my MFSL version of The Wall (if I had one). If I did, I would be very pissed if it wasn't the version in my rip!
posted by Chuckles at 3:35 AM on July 12, 2005

Chuckles: You could read something like the CDDB signature of the disc, check it against your database, and only rip if there's no match. People used to use simple signatures based on the track lengths, which led to lots of ambiguous identifications. I believe that they're doing something more sophisticated now, and that you'd be pretty sure that it was the same disc if the signatures matched. If you were paranoid, you could rip a small amount of the disc and compare it to the stored file.

It would probably be more work to have someone manually look up each CD in the batch based on the title and artist than to have them drop it in a drive and let software handle it.
posted by aneel at 7:00 PM on July 12, 2005