[JMURRAY16]

Hello all -

I have a collection of about 3500 CD's I am looking to rip to FLAC - I am considering building a PC with 4+ drives to help.

Any suggestions on components that could keep the cost down and still perform well?

Thanks for any and all help.

 

[PleasantSounds]

Can you really handle 4 drives? 
From my experience a typical rip takes 4 to 5 minutes. If you want to include artwork and tagging (which not always can be found on the net), at least two of your drives will be sitting idle most of the time.
If my old system is anything to go by, then try getting CD/DVD drives only. The BluRay I have was a much worse performer - both in terms of speed and ability to read some of the CDs.

 

[obobskivich]

Agreed on 4+ drives being potentially a pain - two is a good place to start, and it's surprising how quickly you can bang through a relatively large number of CDs with two drives (no, you will not do 3500+ CDs in an afternoon, a weekend, or even a few weekends - this is a big project that will take a considerable amount of time to do right). Given the scale of what you're doing, however, I would encourage you to consider some sort of RAID configuration - it'd be a total bummer to lose hundreds of hours of work to a drive failure.

As far as drive-type, I've had no problems with CD, DVD, or HD-DVD drives; never tried a Blu-ray drive. Fast (>50x) CD drives are still probably going to be the speed champs, but not as dramatically as they once were. I've never tried one of those ridiculous 72x Kenwood drives (which are relatively hard to find when they appear), but that might be worth looking into if your goal is speed.

 

[Roseval]

For drives, try this one: https://forum.dbpoweramp.com/showthread.php?34019-CD-DVD-Drive-Accuracy-List-2014

 

[JMURRAY16]

Thanks - some great points. I have used two drives in the past and process was good - maybe I will just try three and see how the process goes.
Definitely understand this will be a project - just trying to make it as effective and efficient as possible!
RAID setup of some sort is definitely in the plans.
Any other feedback would be greatly appreciated.

 

[bgentry]

I've learned a few things while ripping my collection. I'm pretty sure I could have gone faster with 3 drives... *maybe* 4. Like they other guys said, 5 to 7 minutes is typical for a clean CD rip. What I really learned though was to slow down and not try to bang through as fast as possible.

The big deal is to validate your metadata. Take a look at the back cover of the CD. Look at the song names and make sure they haven't been mangled in some way. For multi-artist CDs do they have the Artists and Song names reversed? This happens. The release year seems to be wrong on maybe 10% of the CDs I ripped. Maybe less... maybe 5%. But it's definitely a problem.

Even album titles are "wrong" from time to time. Mostly because someone put extra information in the title. Like putting the release and CD catalog number in the Album title. Multi disc albums require some scrutiny too. I find that people tend to change the Album title for each disc, including "disk 1", "disc 2", etc in the title. It doesn't belong there.

Album release info might be worth capturing. Is that copy of Dark Side Of The Moon that you just ripped from the Columbia label? Or is it the Harvest version? No? Maybe it's the Mobile Fidelity version then. There are something like 14 different versions of Dark Side Of The Moon. That's just one example of many. You'll never know what you have unless you capture the information at rip time. I suggest a custom field to hold this information. Possibly including the catalog number or discogs number if this kind of thing is important to you.

Fixing all of this stuff before you rip, or just after you rip, in the tagging program of your choice, will save you time later. Assuming you want high quality precise metadata. If you don't care that The Smashing Pumpkins Melancholy And The Infinite Sadness gets divided into two albums instead of showing up as one (it's a two disc album), then this might not be a big deal for you. But with 3500 CDs to do... I'd think you'd want the metadata to be as correct and precise as possible.

Brian.

 

[TheEnthusiast]

I recommend two CD/DVD drives for ripping. Not so much for speed, but for validating the results of an iffy rip. They should be different make/model as well. As far as hdd's, you definitely want a redundant raid setup. What software are you gonna use for ripping your collection? I use dbpoweramp to good effect. If you try it, be sure to google "dBpoweramp CD Ripper Setup Guide" so you can calibrate the software to your hardware.
 
Good luck.

 

[JMURRAY16]

Great points - I am planning to use dbpoweramp - so thanks for that suggestion.