Programs that can rip from multiple CD-ROM drives at once?

January 26, 2004 1:58 PM

What are good Windows programs that can rip CDs into MP3 on multiple CD-ROM drives in a computer simultaneously?
posted by Argyle to computers & internet (5 comments total)

cdex will happily do that. you just have to open it up twice and select a different drive on each. i do it all the time.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 2:26 PM on January 26, 2004

That works great, although if you have only one CPU it's no faster -- slower, in fact -- than doing them one at a time. If you've got more than one, you're all set. But if you're using a single-processor system, the best thing might be to do the ripping (to WAV) in parallel, and then encoding everything to MP3 or Ogg in a separate batch.
posted by majick at 4:22 PM on January 26, 2004

You can use different instances of EAC to rip to .wav simultaneously, and then batch process into mp3 -- but majick is right, unless your system is somehow not topping out at 100% CPU use during encoding, you're not really going to speed anything up by doing two at the same time.
posted by Jairus at 7:40 PM on January 26, 2004

That being the case, what is the best way to rip multiple CDs at the same time at full speed? Let's say I wanted to rip 5 CDs simultaneously to MP3... what hardware or software would I need? Would I need five computers or is there another way around it?
posted by skylar at 2:23 AM on January 27, 2004

skylar: You'd want five (or more) CPUs. Your basic Windows workstations won't take advantage of more than two, so you'll also want a server OS installed or to give up Windows. Regardless, you're looking at a configuration costing multiple tens of thousands of dollars.

Or, yes, just use 5 computers.

The point is that encoding the audio to MP3 or Ogg requires all your CPU power to go "full speed." If you ask a uniprocessor system to encode two at once, each one will take twice as long, because it's only getting half your CPU power, so it's only going at "half speed." It has nothing to do with how many CD drives you have or any special software; the limiting factor in audio encoding is CPU power.
posted by majick at 10:30 AM on January 27, 2004