Help ripping ~30,000 CDs, Was “Help digitizing […]” ;) Options

[trail]

Hey! I'm a newbie around these forums, but hopefully I'll be around quite a bit. I really like the community here, and hope I can contribute in the future. But enough introduction, here's the interesting stuff:

I work for a college radio station, and we've decided to undertake the rather ambitious project of digitizing the CDs we've acquired over the years. This is a pretty monumental undertaking, so I'm looking to make this as painless and quick as possible. We have a very rough approximation of about 30,000 CDs that we're looking to convert to digital files, and it's my job to work out many of the more technical aspects of the project.

The problem with being a college radio station is that we're on a pretty limited budget. We can't afford any sort of robot or anything like that to help the process along, nor can we afford any sort of service, so we're stuck doing it ourselves. Thankfully, we have a bunch of people willing to put the time and effort in. We also aren't terribly picky about getting every rip totally 100% perfect. But I've done a fair bit of research, and here's the kind of plan I had in mind:

Ideally, we have one pretty decent quad-core desktop that we're planning to outfit with four CD drives. We have software that allows us to rip multiple discs at once to V0 MP3s which are stored on a small RAID 1 array inside the computer. I've done some informal ripping tests, and have narrowed down the two pieces of software that seem to work best to fre:ac and dBpoweramp. I have also tried EAC and simply ripping with MediaMonkey, but freac and dBpoweramp seemed the most efficient and easy to use. Now, if I decide to use one of these pieces of software (if anyone has any suggestions, I'm 100% open to them!) how can I configure them to make them as painless as possible? Would using multiple drives be an option? I found very little information about software that provided ripping from multiple drives simultaneously, so I'm assuming this is not a common feature. If not, would using different computers be our best bet? If anyone has any other suggestions about ripping multiple discs at the same time or other ways to improve efficiency then that would probably make my life much easier.

thanks for your time!

[pdq]

For backup I would suggest AudioSAFE. If you never need to use it then it is completely free. You only get charged if you need to access your backed-up data.

In fact, you might consider backing up the lossless files to AudioSAFE, before you convert them to mp3 and delete the original. If you never want the lossless version then it has cost you nothing to save them, but if your budget at a later time permits then you don't have to rerip.

[garym]

For backup I would suggest AudioSAFE. If you never need to use it then it is completely free. You only get charged if you need to access your backed-up data.

In fact, you might consider backing up the lossless files to AudioSAFE, before you convert them to mp3 and delete the original. If you never want the lossless version then it has cost you nothing to save them, but if your budget at a later time permits then you don't have to rerip.

excellent ideas!

[Jan S.]

For backup I would suggest AudioSAFE. If you never need to use it then it is completely free. You only get charged if you need to access your backed-up data.

In fact, you might consider backing up the lossless files to AudioSAFE, before you convert them to mp3 and delete the original. If you never want the lossless version then it has cost you nothing to save them, but if your budget at a later time permits then you don't have to rerip.

excellent ideas!

If the files are deleted locally they will be dropped from AudioSAFE after some time. So you have to keep the files locally you want to backup on audioSAFE.

[Nessuno]

If the files are deleted locally they will be dropped from AudioSAFE after some time. So you have to keep the files locally you want to backup on audioSAFE.

Actually? That's quite a strange behavior for a backup system. Sounds more like an... asyncronous and delocalized RAID 1!

Well, all in all it depends on how long is "some time"...

This post has been edited by Nessuno: Apr 3 2012, 17:54