[BeyerMonster]

Anyone using 2+ drives to rip CDs at the same time on a Windows machine? If so, what ripper are you using?
 
Ideally, I'd like to just use 3-4 drives and just have it do the following automatically when I insert a disc:

1. Auto-detect gaps
2. Match CD via MusicBrainz
3. Generate CUE sheet
4. Rip all audio tracks to WAV
5. Perform compression/tagging automatically
6. Eject CD

 
This way, I wouldn't even have to look at a monitor. Just keep feeding it discs whenever I happen to pass by the machine.
 
Right now, with EAC, I have to do this via multiple instances of EAC:

1. hope that it matches something via CDDB
2. Click No twice for Cover Images/Lyrics (Haven't figure out how to disable this)
3. Hit F4 to detect gaps
4. Create noncomplaint CUE Sheet
5. SHIFT-F6 to copy tracks
6. Click OK when it's done
7. Eject CD (does this automatically)

 
I then do a batch pass at the end to move things into MusicBrainz and then use Foorbar for a DR scan, and a ReplayGain scan.
 
Somewhat labor intensive for a few hundred CDs.
 
A few months back I started the process of ripping my entire CD collection after buying a handful of drives to plug into my HTPC, figuring that my time was worth more than the incremental cost of a few extra DVD-RW drives. While the machine clearly has enough resources (CPU, RAM, I/O bandwidth, etc) to handle multiple discs at once, I've noticed that EAC seems to sporadically barf (1 out of 10 discs?) during the FLAC compression stage. In particular it's almost as if the algorithm used to generate temporary filenames has a bug that causes it to use the same filename for files being extracted from 2 different EAC instances and it gets confused. Unfortunately, either my version of Flac doesn't return a proper error code or EAC doesn't actually respect the returned flag. So in addition to not generating a good FLAC file, it ends up deleting the WAV file when this happens, so I have to go back and re-extract it again. The alternative would be to leave the .WAV files around to avoid re-extraction, but then I'd still have to re-run the compression. Either way, I would prefer that everything was a 1-pass operation.
 
Miscellaneous constraints:

1. I'm only looking at freeware, so please don't suggest dBpoweramp.
2. Ideally I'd like to move away from AccurateRip and use MusicBrainz since it's non-commercial.

 

[A_Man_Eating_Duck]

Have you tried Cue ripper from the cuetools package (it has musicbrainz support)?

Why rip all tracks to WAV first and then compress and tag when you can save time and rip directly to FLAC and either let the ripper tag or use an external tagger.

Also to get around the file name clash make sure each EAC instance is ripping in to a separate folder.

 

[BeyerMonster]

Have you tried Cue ripper from the cuetools package (it has musicbrainz support)?

 
Not yet, that's what's on my list, but I was hoping someone else had tried it already.
 
Quote:

Why rip all tracks to WAV first and then compress and tag when you can save time and rip directly to FLAC and either let the ripper tag or use an external tagger.

Also to get around the file name clash make sure each EAC instance is ripping in to a separate folder.

 

That's just how pretty much any ripper works. Even if you tell it to use a particular kind of compression, it rips a WAV first, then kicks off compression on the output WAV file.
 
The name problem seems to occur even if I'm ripping things to two completely separate folders. My general process is to use whatever comes back in CDDB and multi-disc albums usually have "Disc 1" or "Disc 2" in the title. Still happens even if they are 2 completely separate folders. I don't think this is just a filesystem problem. I think it's an EAC problem and it will probably just get worse if I start ripping 3-4 at a time.

 

[A_Man_Eating_Duck]

That's just how pretty much any ripper works. Even if you tell it to use a particular kind of compression, it rips a WAV first, then kicks off compression on the output WAV file.

Sorry I was confusing your method with the rip as WAV and then use another tool to do the FLAC encoding.

Using Cueripper will encode directly in to FLAC without the need to create an intermediate WAV file. It's a very good tool but you can get some cryptic errors when it tries and rips some dirty CD's.

 

[BeyerMonster]

 

That's just how pretty much any ripper works. Even if you tell it to use a particular kind of compression, it rips a WAV first, then kicks off compression on the output WAV file.

Sorry I was confusing your method with the rip as WAV and then use another tool to do the FLAC encoding.

Using Cueripper will encode directly in to FLAC without the need to create an intermediate WAV file. It's a very good tool but you can get some cryptic errors when it tries and rips some dirty CD's.

Thanks for the recommendation. I tried it today (sample size of 1), and it worked fine. The fact that there is a setting in the options for running multiple instances is encouraging that it's actually meant to run that way.
 
I found the output message somewhat confusing, but it basically said things look correct:

(392/399) Accurately ripped, or (2/399) differs in 321 samples @00:54:08,