I have recently been appointed director of my college radio station’s project to digitize all of our 7,000+ CDs.

After briefly looking through various pages describing different lossless formats, I am still uncertain which format would be the most optimal for both ripping/encoding CDs onto and playback on a RAID (Random Array of Independent Disks) system run on Mac OSX while ensuring sound quality and compatibility with recording programs (for example, lossless codecs most compatible with editing and DAW programs, such as Pro Tools and Wavelab?)

Also, what would be the fastest lossless format program for both ripping CDs (1 CD ripped per minute using a super-fast drive, if this is possible) and playback with a large music library of over 100,000 songs? It needs to be capable of rapidly accessing songs upon cue, because for us as a radio station, immediate playback is vital. It would also need to have extensive tagging capabilities so that we can keep track of our massive collection.

Please let me know your suggestions for such a program and codec. I am considering having separate programs for ripping/encoding and playback, if there isn’t a “workhorse” program that can do it all with stability and speed.

Thanks,
Mitch

Ooh, Mac OSX. I think the majority of the information contained on this site is related to PC (Windows/x86 Linux).

You're probably going to have to wait for a reply from a knowledgable Mac user to get some good information. From what I've seen on HA.org, most Mac users use CDParanoia or Toast (maybe?), well and obviously iTunes. Obviously I am not a Mac user and as far as recommending a program I can't be of much help.

Ripping CD's can be tricky though, in order to get a very fast rip you need to use a ripping program with burst mode enabled. While there isn't a lot wrong with this, you can run into problems with scratched CDs. You could end up with pops and clicks in your files, which I don't think would bode well for radio play.

As far as lossless codecs go, I don't think there is a great deal of support for Mac OSX. I know there are native binaries that you could encode with, but I think the amount of programs that include playback plugins is limited. I'm not familiar with Protools or Wavelab so I couldn't tell you whether or not they support the lossless codecs or not.

Actually the only program that I know of that supports all of what you are asking would be iTunes. Although its tagging capabilities aren't top notch, it does have a built in lossless codec in ALAC. But once again you would run into the problem of support with other programs.

I'm not an expert but I don't think there is a real solution out there. I may be wrong, and waiting for a second opinion is never a bad thing.

If you would choose FLAC as a format you'll be pretty safe. As it is an open and free format there are plugins for a lot of editors and numerous (more advanced) players and rippers support it, yes, on OS X too.

For ripping on OS X you could have a look at MAX. It is being heavily developed at the moment so expect it to be updated every few weeks. I must agree with Zoom on the ripping speed though, it is generally considered unwise to rip at extremely high speeds. You don't want to discover hics and pops in your music when you play them on the air.
There is no need to rip and encode on a Mac by the way. You could just as well do the encoding on a Windows/Linux/BSD/any other OS. Maybe you could borrow someones dual-Xeon for a week or two. As long as it's FLAC a Mac will play them in the end.

For playback FLAC is supported by VLC and Cog among others. I doubt these programs will be sufficient for radio use though. I can imagine you'll need very powerfull library functions which I believe neither of them has. You might have a look at the Traktor DJ Studio 3. I've never used it myself but it plays FLAC and runs on OS X.

While in college, I set up a much smaller station with digital playback. We were PC-based, so things were much easier: EAC for ripping, and two instances of Winamp running with two soundcards for two seperate feeds from the same computer. (I went with Winamp because A. everyone used it before, and B. it was free.)

None of this really helps out your problem at all, but I'll add this: I have a friend who worked at one of the biggest public radio stations in Minnesota (WCAL), and all of their stuff was flac. I think it's probably a standard in many radio stations.

The R is for Rredundant, RAID isn't all that random

I think FLAC is probably the best option since its so compatable. ALAC might be an ok choice too, but I don't know how good support on the Mac really is outside of Apple's inhouse software.

You can certainly forget that... the fastest drives out there do approx. 50x (that is something like 80 minutes divided by 50) and that's with data discs. Audio discs have terribly primitive formatting so you won't even reach half that speed...

... and then still, that's top-speed, not average speed...

...and then you're not counting loading/unloading, and (optional but important as mentioned above) rereading for verification.

So: set up multiple readers at multiple workstations. Then at least you can (while ripping) verify the previous rip (i.e. check the logs or so) and prepare the next rip (check the tagging data etc). Multiple workstations so that at least you're not alone while drowning in 7k discs I don't think it's hard to get a few friends to carry in their machines to that end?

And I would use a script-based setup for ripping/encoding. Easiest way to ensure that things are working homogeneously across machines. Will take at most a few hours to cook up.

The Flac codec seems a strong option for this purpose. Good software support, light on playback (which you will be continuously doing), portable (if you ever grow out of your Mac).

Hi,

I've got a Kenwood true-x 72 speed cdrom drive that will read/rip audio cds at that speed. It uses 7 lasers to read that quickly, and it works. 20/30 secs per disk. You'll want to make sure that the disks themselves are in good shape as it is picky about that. The drive was discontinued a while back.

What I'd probably do is get a bunch of old machines, laptops, whatever, and split up the task between all of them. It doesn't matter if they are pcs/macs whatever, just get the files on a hard drive, then to the main network. I'd load the disks in series, one right after another on each machine. I imagine with 8-10 machines, you could get 400-500 disks ripped in a short day easy, with 3-5 minutes per disk. Use EAC, then compress the wav files at night.

In my opinion, MPC is a good file format. It is very high quality and for radio where quality is lost through the airwaves, lossless is probably overkill, except for live recordings, jazz, classical, etc. Remember people don't listen to radio because it's lossless.

I don't know how much (if any) budget you have available, but you may want to consider a device like this Sony media center/changer.

The beauty of this thing is that you can load it up with 200 CDs, tell it to rip all of them, and walk away. 35 loads and you're done.

The catch is that it is a Windows XP Media Center-based device so your ripping formats are limited. I definitely would go with a lossless codec given that you only want to do this once! You could just use Windows Media Player to rip directly to Windows Media Lossless. I'm just not sure about availability of software to play WM Lossless back in a Mac environment. Or, after ripping to WM Lossless, you could use software to transcode to another lossless format like FLAC, APE or Apple Lossless.

Sounds like a cool project. Good luck.

Hey everyone,

Thank you for all the help so far.

First off, we are actually thinking about moving this into Linux on a second computer, so nothing is "Mac OSX only" now, just give me the best solutions for both...

Apesbrain, thanks for the suggestion. I just dont think we want to be locked into a WMA format. Great product though! JL47, thanks for the Kenwood recommendation, but I am beginning to think that we'd want to rip at a slower rate anyway (1 CD every 2-3 minutes), especially for lossless.

Since I've been reading your posts and thinking about various things, I've come up with the folling possible solutions:

1) We could have our DJs come in for a massive "CD-ripping fest", in which 10 DJs would come into the station and we would have a "campout" with their respective laptops, giving each laptop the proper program and codec setup to rip CDs to the format we want (which we still haven't decided yet, but we're leaning toward ogg-FLAC? Any better suggestions? We really want to have a lossless archive, for our own purposes, because all our CDs will deteriorate in codition over time). To calculate the time it would take for this. i listed our collection as 6000 albums to make things more tailored toward the 60-min/hour thing. I came up with this:

With 10 people ripping at about 5 min per album (we can't give them a faster CD-ROM for their own computers, so it wouldn't be something fast like 2 minutes), each person would have to spend 50 hours ripping CDs. That's too much time.

2) We could buy a tower and get aboout 5 used, yet fast CD-ROM drives like that Kenwood, and rip CDs simultaneously onto a dual processor computer. This would only be possible if there are encoding programs that can handle multiple CD data streams at once, or if we rip on two different programs in the same format...any info on possibilities with this? Anyway, with each "stack and rip" process taking about 6 minutes for 4 CD-ROM drives on one computer, and each DJ coming in and ripping about 16 CDs per show (that's with 4 "stack and rip" events per show, enough to not interrupt the show's flow and divert the DJ's attention too much), and 20 shows or so a week where the DJs remember to do this, it would take 19 weeks for the CD's to get ripped.

If we combine this with one of those "ripping fests" in solution one, we could get this done before school is out in May! How does this sound?



Moving onward, any opinions on whether ogg-FLAC would be a good choice? I want a codec that will be around for a while and will have decent compatibility with DJing/editing/mixing programs in the future, which is why I'm leaning toward native FLAC, but this ogg-FLAC seems more appealing, though I don't know exactly what it's benefits will be in a practical sense. I read the short FAQ on it at the FLAC site, and that didn't give me any idea as to how it would be better than Native FLAC in our archiving and broadcasting situation, as well as mixing use in the future.

Also, what about splitting the collection into 192kbps MP3, in addition to the ogg-Flac (or whatever lossless we choose). I was thinking it would be useful to have this backup. It would only make our collection 25% bigger, going from 1.6 Terabytes of FLAC Compression Rate 5 audio files to a grand total of 2.1 Terabytes with this supplementary MP3 collection.

I'm still lost when it comes to choosing a player with powerful library capabilities, but how about Foobar2000? VLC and Cog, which Maurits recommended, looked pretty bare in its library functionality, while DJ Traktor Studio 3 was too "clunky" of an interface for our DJs. Maurits, is that true about VLC and Cog not having great library functions, or did I miss that feature on their websites? Foobar2000 is the only program I've seen so far that supports ogg-flac and seems to have a good library function without being "clunky" (like Native Instruments' DJ Traktor 3). But I don't know about it being able to handle 70,000 songs at once without overloading a library

And for a ripping program, Max 0.5.3, which Maurits recommended, looks like the front-running candidate. My main concern is, can Max rip 4 CDs simultaneously with the same codec, provided we have dual processors and enough memory? I know that Max can rip from 1 CD into 2 different formats (example: MP3 and FLAC) simultaneously, but could it do rip CDs at once into the same format? If so, awesome, and please give me some pointers or a link to show me how I would do it! If not possible, would i need to run different programs ripping on the same codec, to rip simultaneously? If one of these other programs was iTunes, does Itunes use LAME as the default encoder for MP3s?

Are there better programs for Linux only that people have not recommended because the topic was MacOSX-centered?

If you're at all in the Philly area, I'd love some help or advice on this project from someone who knows more about such codecs and audio-archiving than I.

Sincerely,
Mitch

Can you explain what makes you use lossless?

7000 CD's

x

let's say about 350 Mb (1 CD in FLAC)

=

2'450 Gb !!!!!!!!

Where will you store it? And what the use of lossless on radio???

For example 7000 CD's x 60 Mb (1 CD in Ogg Vorbis -q4.0 -- I doubt anyone will hear the difference between lossy and lossless versions) = 420 Gb.
I think you will find out the difference of Gb's much better than difference in sound quality.

Unfortunately I don’t think you want to have to rely on Max as your ripping program for a project like this. I’ve been using it a fair amount (it’s running right now), and it’s slow and crash prone.
The developer is talking of starting to write a secure ripper for it, but I think that will be a while before we can hope for that.
You can find out a bit more on the forums here:

http://sbooth.org/Max/

Max is something you could use for the LAME encoding.
If you want to do it in iTunes, you need to use this:

http://blacktree.com/apps/iTunes-LAME/

Good Luck.

I installed Cog on my mother's MacOS X. The program is very slow to load the 2500 tracks everytime it is launched, but the biggest problem is that the playback sometimes freezes.

In order to rip simultaneously several CD, in IDE, you should set every CD drive / Hard drive couple on a different IDE channel in order to avoid lagging. I don't know about SATA or SCSI.

Some CD can have problems, and drive can also have problems facing such a work, which can result in click and pops, or worse : skipping. You should go with a straightforward secure mode ripping.

The fastest secure mode would be quite complicated : using AccurateRip. If the CD is OK, encode it, else, rerip and check the CRC. If it is OK, encode, else, give it to someone in charge of ripping scratched CDs.

An easier way would be to use EAC in "test and copy" burst mode + encoding, and check the CRC column. When it is not OK, delete the encoded files, and give the CD to someone in charge of ripping scratched CD.
This is the most sensible way to go, though it nearly doubles the time spent, since each CD will be read at least two times.

You may want to check your drives with Feurio before starting with them. It thouroghly tests their audio extraction ability.

Actually, at the compression rate of 5 of FLAC (or so my friend tells me), it will only be about 250MB per album, not 350. So there!!! Jk, it would be about 1.6Terabytes.

As an audiophile, I probably would be able to tell the difference when played through a decent pair of monitors. And sure, our listenerswouldnt be able to hear it well in their cars or through their computer speakers, but if we ever want to use this for some public event or promotions event (for example, we put on several concerts each year and could use this for "in-between sets" music), we'll want something lossless. Also, many of our DJs are audiophiles as well, so we kind of want good files for our own enjoyment.

Does anyone on here have a test compilation made of something like latin jazz, where there is a great variety of textures, so that I can really hear the difference of different flacs, oggs, and mp3s and various bit rates? If anyone could point me to a website or anyplace that would have such a giant test CD, it would certainly save me a lot of time on choosing a format.

So that's why we want to use lossless. We are planning on setting up a RAID 5 system to house all these files.

Moving onto Max, maybe I'll hold off it for a little while. I'll check periodically to see if the developer comes up with anything new...Any other suggestions on a ripping program then? Does Toast Titanium 7 rip to FLAC? Any players that can rip multiple CDs at once, or at least queue several CD-ROMs for ripping (I'm lowering my standards here, I know..)?

Any comments on Foobar or other players with good libraries? What about VLC? I looked again at its site and it seems to have better library functions than I thought....but I don't know how reliable, extensive, or fast it really is...

Thanks!

yeah, right



LINK

for a listenning test from someone with GOLDEN ears, check here

last, being an audiophile does not implies one has golden ears ... i consider myself one, sort of, and i can't abx a single file on the listening test.

Dude, I don't know if you already have, but I recommend searching for and reading the most recent listening test threads available here on HA, also, familiarize yourself with the Terms Of Service.

Hi there!

First of all, let me say that if I were you (and I had enough budget) I'll outsource the CD ripping to a professional service. The first I got with a Google search is MusicShifter. I don't know how good they are, take your information. They, e.g., will charge you 0.79 cents per CD ripping to a lossless format filling up hard drives that you send them toghether with your CDs. You can then make your own conversion to a lossy format (which is a nice idea, IMHO): just processing time.

Think twice about the "ripping fests". How well the ripped CDs will be tagged? How many errors? Possible troubles with RIAA because some student "forget" to erase the ripped images from its laptop? About laptops: from my personal exerience they usually are no good at ripping and the drives are too delicate to such an heavy duty job. Many of them will be just torn apart at the "end of the fest".

If you continue with your idea of a DIY project for the ripping, most of us here at HA think that Exact Audio Copy (EAC for short) is the best program to this job, particullary when used with Plextor drives (and, IMO the -usefua and "use C2 error information" options enabled, that will put less strain on the hardware).

I'm pretty sure to have read somewhere that EAC's author, Andre Wiethoff, has licensed its technology to some company who developped a professional ripping solution just targeted to the broadcasting industry. I can't remember where I've read that and the name of the company, but off the top of my head I think that even BBC used that. You can get in touch with Andre Wiethoff and ask him. Try on the EAC forum, here.

I agree with your choice of using a lossless format even if a lossy format (e.g. AAC at 64Kb/s or MP3 at about 128 Kb/s) will be enough for "broadcast quality". This is because in the future technology can change (will change) and other lossy formats could be used. If you want to leave a legacy of your CDs, leave it lossless. Beside that I THINK that broadcasting means also processing (compressing, equalizing, emphasizing) your music before it gets to the transmitter and I'm not sure if the (tiny) artifacts introduced by a lossy format can interfere with this processing giving an overall bad quality.

Personally I'll use WavPack instead of FLAC, but maybe this is just a matter of personal preference. Anyway WavPack is more efficient in terms of CPU needed at compressing time and gives a bit more compression than FLAC. Anyway you can always transcode from a lossless format to another without... loosing anything.

Somebody suggested to use MPC. Don't. It's a very good format but it is not standardized, nor it is actively supported by a vast community. For lossy stay with MP3, AAC in a MP4 container or OGG/Vorbis if you really wish. I'd prefer MP3 or AAC because they are standards.

For archiving I suggest you to use the Cuesheet+Image format, either with external or embedded cuesheet. This will give you the nearest to perfection copy of your CDs. For everyday broadcasting/mixing this will probably not be the best solution, thus.

Can't give advices for a player/library which is good in a broadcasting environment. I think it should be based on some kind of "real" database to give you the possibility to store ancillary information at your wish.

Cheers!

Sergio

Its trivial to make MP3s from the FLACs later, so I wouldn't worry about that now. It'll just slow down the process.

Regarding ripping, maybe one of these would be a good idea:

http://search.ebay.com/powerfile

Its a 200 disk changer that goes for ~ 200 on ebay. That would only take 35 passes to do the whole thing. So you could just load in the disks each night as you go home, and collect the files the next day.

On the Mac at least theres software that integrates it into iTunes, so you can fire it off and it can encode Apple Lossless or WAV. Obviously neither is ideal, but they could be easily batch encoded to FLAC or anything else later without requiring anyone to be there swapping out disks. If you look around, there might even software that can use FLAC directly (i have no idea, but it seems reasonable to think theres a way to pipe the output to flac).

Yeah, don't worry about the formats too much: transcoding is easy later on. This is the reason why you should go lossless - not because you hear differences, but because it allows you to easily jump to a new format when that seems appropriate.

You can e.g. stick with native Flac right now, and if for some reason you need ogg-Flac later, just run a script (doesn't even need reencoding for this particular example). You can encode to mp3 too (but why not ogg if you're not using hardware players?), and set up an internet radio stream on campus.

All this can be thought through later. Right now your thing is ripping and tagging.

I think the Firewire 200 CD-changer box MikeG. brought up is an excellent idea. I wonder if the drives that sit in there are replaceable? That would help if the original drives turn out to give you trouble at DAE. Also, remember you can sell the box off afterwards, so this isn't any real investment.

If you find just one guy who's comfortable at a command line, there's plenty of software to do your thing on any platform. The generally accepted test&copy procedure that Pio2001 is suggesting can be done with any ripping software plus a 'cmp' (compare) command afterwards. If your script dumps the failed cmp's to a log file, you can do those discs by hand.

The one thing I don't quite see automated is the checking of id-tags. Tags retrieved off the internet are not likely to suit your requirements completely. Expect work...

About data size: most of my flacced albums are over 300Mb easily. Typical compression achieves 60-65% for my discs. So I think you need more disk space. And then we haven't even started about backups, which are very important because you don't want to do this ripping project again!

edit: one more thing - find an automated disc cleaning appliance...

That made me smile too. :-D Actually you forgot the I: RAID stands for
Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks

I'd like to know what wrong what other interpretations are out there. ;-)



2,450GB is not that much. Nowadays you can easily find cheap network storage devices that will handle this and much more. For example, I use quite a lot of 3U servers with 16x500GB RAIDed drives. Do the maths: that's approx 8 raw TB per server! Once I add a fair bit of redundancy and file system overhead, it drops to something like slightly more than 6 TB usable. Cost is about £6000. Granted it is too much for most home users, but for a company/university, it is very cheap storage.

Paying someone else to do it sounds good (the services seem cheaper in the USA btw), though of course you'll need the right tools to rip new CDs yourself as you go on in the future.

Tying yourself to any single playout system is madness.

Whatever course you choose, do a small scale test first. Rip the A-playlist stuff and work with what you've chosen to use for a week or a month to check that it's OK. You don't want to do the whole job twice!

Ripping to FLAC is fairly safe because converting to any other format (wav and mp3 are the only likely ones) can be a fully automated process. I think you're underestimating the file size, but that's another reason for a pilot test.

Some commercial radio stations in the UK sometimes use poor quality 128kbps mp3 as source. It sounds as bad as you'd expect.

You can use lossy in all the events you've suggested. Where it becomes unpredictable is when you add post processing (DRC etc), re-encoding for the web or digital radio broadcast etc. However, high quality lossy isn't going to throw up anything nasty very often. Certainly it'll be a lot less offensive than the average DRC processing of most stations.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
David.

Mitch, I would suggest against a "ripping party" as well. Not all drives are made the same and not all people involved would be as concerned about the quality of the rips. There is no point in encoding to a lossless file (FLAC) if you are not going to put perfect data in the file. I suggest Plextor drives, over read into lead in and out, offsets set accurately, Exact Audio Copy in either secure mode or Test&Copy, with AccurateRip enabled, and encoding to FLAC. See the PM I sent you and you can also see the link in my sig for more detail on setting up EAC.

May this is a bit off topic, but why in the world would you feel the need to encode over 7,000 complete CDs for a college radio station.

As a music/program director for 13 years I can't really understand this. You could never have need for all of this material stored in this way. Your CD's ARE your archive. You could offer some direction to your people by developing a viable sized playlist of five star material suited to your stations format.

If you have a universe of heavier rotation music, then that is what you would encode. I know you are not a commercial station, so a playlist of 700 to 1500 cuts is out of the question, however, a more viable solution would be to create something more easy to manage than some 72,000 cuts. If someone needs additional specialy product for thier show, let them encode just what they need. You are a radio station, not the Library of Congress - you will NEVER play most of what you encoding on-air.

BTW, I recommend Fla, or whatever lossless format is compatible with you equipment. If your station has compression and limiters in the broadcast chain, you would not wish to use another compression format, like mp3. Just ask one of your engineers what they think? Mp2 was a standard for NPR for a while, but I believe everybody is moving toward lossless for music now.

Cheers

Just use iTunes and Apple Lossless. It's fast, accurate (providing the CD's are in relatively good condition), multi threaded, optimized for PPC and x86 and you can play back ALAC files on most platforms as the bitstream was reverse engineered ages ago and decoders have been written. Why make things more complicated than they have to be? Also iTunes can rip from several drives at once if you have them.

If it were me, I'd be using some of the small form factor machines with two optical drives, preferably Plextor Premiums if you can find them.

One Shuttle SFF machine with 2x Plextor Premium and two seperate instances of EAC running in burst mode, test and copy and AccurateRip. Setup a profile for each of the drives and rip away. I did this on my last rip saga and it worked wonderfully. The ripping was fast enough between two drives that I never had to sit around and wait. I'd stick in one disk, get the freedb info, double check that against allmusic.com, then rip away. While drive #1 is going for it, I'd do the same with #2.

BTW, I know where to get 4 brand new Plex Premiums if anybody is interested. No funny business...regular retail.

"ages ago" being 10 months, or re-reverse-engineered 2 months ago, depending on how you measure.

Oh really, yeah that sounds about right. It wasn't too difficult IIRC.

Ok, so that powerfile looks like a great tool! The only thing I'm concerned about is that the ones you buy off ebay are likely to have a dead battery, according to the PowerFIle rep I talked to on the phone. But then again, if there's a picture of it turning on and the previous owner says it works and reads CDs and DVDs, then there shouldn't be a problem, right? Probably wrong, just because I don't know if this thing could handle doing another 4,500 CDs when it's expected battery life is only 5 years and the product came out in 2000.

Powerfile charges $1500 to get the battery replaced, but I'm sure you can just desolder and solder and new one back in, if you know where the battery is located. Also, there are warranty programs for the Powerfile out there, set up by these two companies that were just talked about as having made Ripping software specifically tailored to the Powerfile units. Check these sites out:

Mammoth Power Ripper: http://www.mammothi.com/

The Rip Monkey: http://www.theripmonkey.com/screenshots.shtml

The only problems are that with Rip Monkey, it only interfaces with iTunes (and thus could only directly do Apple Lossless for a lossless format), although it says on the website that:

"iTunes also supports additional importers via a plug-in system, so other file formats may be implemented by third party vendors. "

So what would these plug-ins/program attachments and their vendors names be? If I don't have such a plug-in, I would have to re-batch-encode the entire collection to FLAC from Apple Lossless, rather than getting it done with such a plug in at the time of ripping. Yeah, I know that's not so bad, but it would be a lot easier with that additional plug-in...
Both are absurdly expensive though ($999???), so I plan on getting them in other ways if possible..

And regarding Mammoth, the problem is that their stuff is only for Windows XP, which we don't plan on using...although they do ogg as well (still no flac though) using its own encoding/ripping program rather than that of something like itunes...so Mammoth is pretty much not an option, though Rip Monkey is still a viable one.

Another possibility with the Powerfile is that the drives might not be overly accurate. Now, I know nothing about this stuff, but the unit doesn't look like it has a premium drive in it like these Plextors (could anyone briefly PM me and tell me what makes these Plextors so much better than all other drives, or at least send me a link to a forum thread that discusses this?)

But that's only if I don't decide to go the Professional Ripping Service route. Going pro seems better and better every time i look at the amount of work this will take, and the Pro services had "Data Grooming" so that when you have 10 different CDs with the same artist/composer you won't get 5 or so different artist titles, you'll only get one.

Example of data grooming: getting only "Bach" rather than "J.S. Bach" "Bach, J.S.", "Johann Sebastian Bach", etc.

I've been seeing some really good prices from these companies, and I'll know that they can reduce their cost about 60 percent for such a large amount of CDs, expecially since they dont have to waste 150 DVD-Rs and they can put the files on a SATA RAID that I mail them instead...

And I only recently learned that the "I" stands for "inexpensive." Sorry about that, I'm a total noob!

We want to have these archived for playlist formats, especially for when a large number of DJs might not be able to do their shows and we need to set up a giant playlist or "fake show". It would also be for our DJs' pure listening enjoyment.

CDs compressed in FLAC usually end up between 250-300MB, Lets just keep that range and not fret over such a trivial matter of size. We'll be buying over 2.5TB of drives anyway, for expansion's sake.

Thanks everyone for the responses so far!

-Mitch

This is just shameless.

At least? You could at least search.

Also,

I've been looking at the features that some pro CD-Ripping Services offer, and only some do ogg-wrapped FLACs while others only do native FLAC, but probably most would be willing to "extend" their capabilities or conduct a "pilot program" for ogg-FLAC.

So that's another thing to consider: What are the benefits of an ogg-wrapped FLAC in comparsion to a native FLAC.

Also, what is the difference between "bit-perfect" ripping vs. EAC.

Some pro ripping companies use those metadata "grooming" datafix programs I talked about in the last email, while here's something I read while considering the company Riptopia:

"Riptopia is the only company partnered with Gracenote and
Muze, and currently has the largest collection of clean metadata with over
55,000,000 unique songs in 80 languages and cover art for over 300,000
albums. (Cottage industry CD ripping services use amateur free internet
databases that must be filtered with dataperfect or datafix programs). Riptopia is the only data processing company that can identify and
tag them with almost 100% accuracy. (Did you know there are 450 different
versions of Norah Jones' Come Away With Me ?)."

I know Riptopia is trying to advertise itself erll, so can anyone give me an honest opinion (from practical experience) of how much better these Gracenote and Muze programs are compared to FreeDB?

Another thing someone told me to consider is whether the drive format would be HFS+ (Mac), NTFS (Windows), or FAT32 or something else...? I have no idea which would be best, so if people could recommend a format that's best for audio archiving and would at least show up on both Mac and Windows (The only format I know of that does this is FAT32, are there others) in case we need to use windows in the future.

This doesnt encompass everything i wanted to mention, but I'm running short on time at this hour...

Thanks!

patsoe, what is shameless, the price they are charging for the software or my desire to get it by other means...?

Also, sorry about not searching for such a thread. I'm just short on time. Trying to pull of a 4.0GPA while balancing all this isn't too easy, especially with being a signed musician with a band and several recording projects on the side.

-mitch

Bit-perfect ripping is a pleonasm. To rip means to make a bit-perfect copy.
EAC can do secure ripping. It means that you get a warning when you are trying to rip a scratched CD. Otherwise, everything seems fine, but you get a file that skips when you listen to it.

If you are so pressed for time that you cannot observe the common forum courtesy of searching before asking, then it seems you have yourself spread a bit too thin, and perhaps should not have added this extra-curricular radio station project to your burden in the first place.

Regards,
Madrigal

Maybe MitchM just likes the attention

The guys who wrote that software think their time's worth a 1000 dollars, and they have every right to think so. I think that for these purposes, there are plenty of easy/free solutions - see most earlier posts. With so many people suggesting interesting things to you, why would you need to steal something?

As to the other thing that irritated me: Madrigal wrote it down (in a way that I do not sufficiently master English for).

Anyway, I'm in a better mood today

I don't have any experience with gracenote, but they do have an impressive resume at http://www.gracenote.com/partners/ - on the other hand, I did a search in their database for "robbie williams swing" and found multiple entries, some of which seem to be rubbish (there's one with label "Capitol" and there's another with "Capital" which contains further typing errors too). Doesn't convince me much....

If you're still going to do this thing (see posts #32 and #22), I would think that it's better to separate your storage from the radio workstation. With such a big file system; you're better off putting it on something like a simple Debian machine, and mount it through NFS. Then you're free to pick any robust file system you like, can optimize it for large files perhaps, and don't have to worry about portability. An extra plus is that it is slightly more safe from user error (even the pro's at storagereview once by accident deleted all their content when they wanted to do a backup!).

Mitch,

I digitized a ~400 disc collection a couple years back, to WMA (gasp!) using WMP and some custom scripts.

I'm about to do it again to FLAC, using tools posted regarding here for PC. I'm currently testing some custom scripts that use EAC, FLAC, FLAC tools, AccurateRip, MySQL, and WMP (primarily for metadata).

Anyway, the real info I had for you: I used (and will again) a 200-disc Escient PowerFile DVD/CD changer that I picked up some 6 years back. It has Mac support too. I see others have mentioned it here, and it served me well.

I've found that even though the hardware rips a little slower, it saves me a BUNDLE of time loading up 200 discs and walking away, coming back only to correct problems. Hopefully EAC won't ruin my hardware if I leave it running unattended, I guess I'll post about that.


Shannon

Can you post a report in a new thread with how it worked out? If you wouldn't mind sharing methodology, scripts, etc. that would be great.

I have 400-500 cds and am weighing paying that musicshifter place to do it, or going through some extreme pain of my own. The hardware idea appeals to me a lot

I'm curious as well how this worked out, as I have ~6000CDs to do here.

-brendan