Hi all,

I am glad that I have found this nice forum here

I have a question regarding the ripping of multiple CD's at the same time.

The company I am working for has 1000's of audio discs that need to be ripped and I am the lucky guy that has to find a good and fast solution for that . I know that there are companies that can do that but I need a good in house solution for that...

If I have a less or more powerful PC (like 2,5 Ghz) and I want to rip like 5 CD's at the same time (can buy more CD drives then)?

Is that possible? Would the time for each CD be still okay (8 mins or so)?

Do I need a faster CPU?

Or is that not possible at all?

If so, are there other possiblities that can accomplish that?



I'd really appreciate some comment that could help me.



Thanks alot in advance,
kalahari

All this is speculation on my part. I took a look at CPU activity while extracting with EAC. It wasn't especially high, so I should think that aspect would support multiple drives running at once.

Most drives, optical and magnetic, are IDE. That doesn't share too well. A SCSI controller, and SCSI drives, are expensive options. Ultimately the PCI bandwidth is a limiting factor but probably not for your application.

Two drives work on one IDE channel but they have to trade off for access. I don't know how intensely the extraction process fills up the channel but it may be desirable, for optimum speed, to have the extracting optical drive and the recording hard drive as masters on separate channels. This is often necessary when writing CDs to avoid problems, but less so on faster modern computers.

Motherboards come with two or four channels of IDE so that will support two or four drives as masters respectively (counting both optical and hard drives). You can add some additional channels with PCI card controllers, but you will need multiple hard drives to attach to them.

Some programs do not support multiple instances running at once. If your extraction program of choice does not, you would have to compromise and utilize a number of different programs to have them all going at once.

Another thing you could do is to stuff the drives in external enclosures (that connect to USB 2.0 or FireWire) and use as many ports you have available.

I've tried ripping simultaenously with two SCSI CD-ROMs and two drives connected to USB and the system didn't complain (it was an Athlon XP 2000+ w/ 512 MB RAM). You could probably go with more drives.

I want to point out that my considerations are towards the exreme on the hard drive side. Hard drives are much faster than optical drives, so it is probably the case that one hard drive will support two or several optical drives working at the same time. I just wanted to express the possibility that one hard drive might not be enough if speed is your major concern.

if I were you, I'd round up as many pcs as you could (since you're working for a company there are probably a few older ones lying around, or you could just borrow from other departments), install EAC+ whatever encoder, and then rip them concurrently. Keep on feeding them cds, and when everything is finished merge them all via a networked drive.

Hi all,

thanks alot for the help

So to sum up, it is possible to do it just with regular PCs (performance-wise etc).
So I could take a PC with like 5 CD drives and would open 5 instances of a ripping prog and could then rip 5 CDs at the same time, but I might need a second harddrive to speed it up?


Kind regards,
kal

Actually, depending on which codec and settings you use, I don't think that your example 2.5 ghz computer would be able to encode 5 streams at once.

What you won't need is a second hard drive. For any conceivable lossy / lossless encoder the CPU will be slower than the hd. The only possibility to overwhelm a hard drive would be to rip straight to wav, and you'd need 10 or more cd drives going at once to do it.
20x DAE = 3 mb/s
HD write speed = 30 mb/s minimum

Hi, thanks again for the help.





I think I will directly rip to mp3.




I don't understand that. 10 or more cd drives? Then even more CPU performance would be required, wouldnt it?

Please explain that again so I can get it


Kind regards,
kal

I saw something on engadget the other week that would automatically feed a spindle of CDs in and out of a drive.... $800 or something. Get yourself a budget for that, buy one or two, and set it to go.

So in that case your limiting factor will be the speed of the cpu.


If you were to rip straight to wav, very little cpu time would be needed because there would be no encoding. Just extraction of data from cd and writes to hard drive. Since you've decided to use mp3, you don't need to worry about bandwidth concerns with only one hard drive. A single hd will have plenty of write bandwidth to keep up with as many concurrent rips as you can possibly do.