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Multi-drive Ripping / Burning Support? 105

jasonisnuts writes "I currently have a DVD-ROM (internal), a CD-RW (FW), and a DVD-RW (FW), and I also have a massive assortment of music CDs that I want to rip and catalog. Are there any free, shareware, or commercial utilities for Mac OS X that support ripping CDs from multiple devices at the same time and offer full CDDB/GraceNote support? And does this same utility or another offer burning to multiple sources in multiple formats? This will all be done on a Sawtooth 500MHz (upgrading soon)."
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Multi-drive Ripping / Burning Support?

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  • I'm not sure about the multiple drives at the same time, but iTunes is really good when it comes to cataloguing material. (also, wtf is sawtooth?)
    • Re:iTunes perhaps? (Score:5, Informative)

      by dgrgich ( 179442 ) * <drew@NOsPaM.grgich.org> on Tuesday January 20, 2004 @06:59PM (#8037218)
      Sawtooth is a codename for a particular motherboard that Apple used for certain PowerMacs. There were different G4 500mhz motherboards that had different capabilties, i.e. bus types, etc.
    • more on Sawtooth... (Score:5, Informative)

      by boomerny ( 670029 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2004 @07:08PM (#8037320)
      Sawtooth was the first 'real' G4 Powermac, the Yikes model came out first but it's motherboard was more like a modified Powermac G3(I think that's where the Yikes moniker originated). Sawtooth G4's can use all sorts of G4 CPU upgrades, the Yikes models can not.
      • the sawtooth macs came out at the same time, steve announced 500's 450's and 400's, the 400's were Yikes, and as you stated, just a g4 put in the blue and white g3 motherboard.

        then of course, it came out that motorola couldnt provide enough 500's, so they had too do a spedd bump (in the sense of slowing down), 450 became the top of the line, 400 in the middle, and 350 put into yikes boards.

        i ordered my 450 the day they were announced and apple tried to charge me more for it, but enough people complained t
    • Re:iTunes perhaps? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 20, 2004 @07:44PM (#8037699)
      You can rip from 2 drives at once with iTunes. You can click "import" for one, but while that is going, you can't click "import" for the other. You can, however, select the songs by clicking on them (or any combination of shift/control clicking) and drag them to your library. That willl get iTunes to rip the songs from the other CD.
      • How about the import & eject feature?

        Can you import and eject from multiple drives simultaneously?

        Does anybody know?
        • Yes you can. Ejecting can be done via finder and you can import as stated above by selecting the disc in itunes and dragging the files into your library.

          You can also burn to multiple drives simultaneously just using the operating system.

          No addition software is required.

        • Re:iTunes perhaps? (Score:3, Informative)

          by sh00z ( 206503 )
          If you're not comfortable with the "automatic import and eject" feature (I know that I wasn't; I had a lot of tracks I wanted to merge before ripping, in order to avoid between-song gaps like in "Sgt. Pepper-With a Little Help from My Friends." Others might want to proofread the tags from CDDB before ripping, etc.), I asked for and got a custom Applescript from Doug Adams [malcolmadams.com].

          The "Rip CD's in a Row" [malcolmadams.com] script is perfect. I've used it on up to six optical drives at a time without an error.

          And yes, I sent him 1

  • Processor and ram (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 20, 2004 @07:01PM (#8037246)
    Well I think it would run fine. iTunes will detect both drives fine and would I'd imagine rip them, however your processor might bug out on you if you did them at the same time, unless you had enough ram like 512MB or above. otherwise I wouldn't generally recommend it. Might add tons of artifacts and poop to the ripped file. Especially if you are only running it all on one bus.
    • if it's a digital rip and a digital encode, why would it add artifacts becaue the encode went slower?
      • Re:Processor and ram (Score:3, Interesting)

        by lullabud ( 679893 )
        I think he's referring to an overall system strain so in the case of there needing to be some resources immidiately available for when cd ripping might need to perform some corrections those resources might not be there. CD ripping is just one of those things where if you don't have enough resources on hand, and you don't have the sluggish jitter-correction option enabled (which would possibly defeat the purpose of ripping with more than one drive), you could end up with some errors in the form of audible
        • CD ripping is just one of those things where if you don't have enough resources on hand, and you don't have the sluggish jitter-correction option enabled (which would possibly defeat the purpose of ripping with more than one drive),

          Unfortunate. I'd also been thinking of getting another optical drive (just a decent CD-ROM I could put in the second bay in my mirrored drive door G4) for ripping lots of CDs at once, and I'd wondered how effective the system might be at ripping more than one disc at a time.

          • But getting back to rips, with error correction enabled, might not the machine slow down as needed when ripping to ensure that sort of thing doesn't happen?

            yes, the machine would slow down. however, if the purpose of using multiple drives was to speed things up then this would be counter-productive as far as the original goal was concerned.

            as far as multi-disc games go, from my experience the game usually looks in the same location for each disk, ie: /dev/disk2s1 would be one cd and /dev/disk3s1 woul
    • Especially if you are only running it all on one bus.

      The OP said that one drive was internal and the other two were firewire. Does this mean he won't suffer from the artifacts and poop that you predict?

      Craig
    • What are you talking about? That's like saying that if you browse the Internet while printing a document, some characters might get lost. Might have happened with cheap IDE cd drives on PCs way back when, but these are Macs. Absolute voodoo. Doesn't happen. Not relevant.
  • you would probably have sucess taking iTunes or other favorite ripping application and duplicating the executeable.

    then just set each instance to a different drive, and voila!

    it may be better to use a less "intelligent" application than iTunes, as there may be locking issues with updating the iTunes database. however, a simpler ripper should work just fine.
    • Shouldn't need multiple instances.
    • by Anonymous Coward
      "executeable"

      Looks like Windows users are lending their support.
    • Multiple instance of iTunes, if even possible, would likely wreak havoc with the iTunes Music Library database file, as there is only one, and its location appears to be fixed for any given user account.

      Running a second instance of iTunes from another user account (10.3.x) might work, but you would end up with track info logged in two separate databases.
      • iTunes will not work in another user account. It happens all the time that my wife logs into her account and launches iTunes only to find that I'm still logged in on my side and iTunes will not launch.

        However, we do share a library, which addresses your first point about the database and the library being fixed. It's a question of permissions and aliases, but once it was done it was nice to have both of us have access to the same library (instead of creating two libraries of the same music).

  • by Meowing ( 241289 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2004 @07:03PM (#8037256) Homepage
    I also have a massive assortment of music CDs that I want to rip and catalog.
    When you say "rip", are you also intending to encode these with MP3 or whatever? If so, you're pretty likely to be CPU bound, so ripping from multiple drives isn't going to buy you much. If the idea is just to queue up multiple drives so you can wander away for longer, never mind.
    • by MarcQuadra ( 129430 ) * on Tuesday January 20, 2004 @11:12PM (#8039519)
      Not on a G4! Any self-respecting encoder on the Mac will be tuned for AltiVec, and the CD-ROM will easily be the bottleneck.

      People really underestimate the signal-processing capabilities of these processors. The machines might take their time at day-to-day application use, but when you need to encode video, apply effects, or generally do very multimedia-intensive stuff the G-series CPUs really take Intel and AMD to the cleaner.
      • by Anonymous Coward
        Wanna see how fast the encoder really is? Copy the AIFF from the CD to the hard drive, then put the AIFF into your iTunes library. Finally, convert the AIFF to AAC or MP3 with iTunes.

        On my dual G5 1.8 at home: about 40X going from AIFF-to-MP3. Going to AAC, I get about 28X.

        (The AAC encoder isn't multithreaded; it runs on only one CPU at a time.)

        Converting from MP3 or AAC to AIFF is the fun part, of course: 150X. :-)
      • it depends on the speeds of the drives and the g4, in this case, the g4 is only 500 mhz, altivec enabled itunes will rip an mp3 192 at about 7.5X, deffinately not as fast as a cd-rom can transfer, unless its a really slow drive.

        split that between three drives and its going to be maybe 1.5X tops?
    • If so, you're pretty likely to be CPU bound, so ripping from multiple drives isn't going to buy you much.
      I disagree. The important variable here is his time, not his CPU speed. If he has a large hard drive then he can rip a bunch of CDs and then let the CPU convert all of them to MP3s (or whatever) while he's away from the computer. By being able to rip two CDs or more at once he's cut in half the time he has to sit at the computer waiting to insert the next CD.
      • You make it sound as if sitting at the computer, waiting to insert CDs, is a bad thing. I say he should download some Simpsons, South Park, Family Guy, or Seinfeld, grab a blanket, and enjoy some quality time with his favorite protagonist.

        That failing, could he design an AppleScript such that only one CD is ripped at a time? He could queue 3 drives and iTunes could simply go down the line. How scriptable is iTunes, anyway?
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by godawful ( 84526 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2004 @07:04PM (#8037263)
    haven't ever tried ripping from multiple drives at once, but it should very well be possible, but on your 500 sawtooth, ripping form three drives at once will be pretty slow. maybe 1.5X tops..

    but as for burning, you can use toast. you take the copy you have and make two other copies (AFAIK this is not illegal) open each one and set it to a specific drive.

    and on this note, i would assume there it is likely feasible to do something similar with an mp3 ripper, iTunes however, will only allow for one copy to be running at a time.
    • It's not illegal, you are correct - Roxio specifically suggests in their website help section that you duplicate the app and run both at the same time to burn two disks at once.

      We do it all the time when producing short runs of DVDs that would be uneconomical to press.
  • by legLess ( 127550 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2004 @07:08PM (#8037311) Journal
    I'm pretty sure abcde [hispalinux.es] will do the job for you. I've not tried it on OS X, but in theory it will work. It's a shell script wrapper for several CD-related programs. I've used it on a Debian box to rip hundreds of disks.
    • by shfted! ( 600189 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2004 @09:16PM (#8038688) Journal

      From the front page of the site:

      MacOSX keeps on failing because the OS mounts the CD before we finish ripping it... or something else. Please, test test test the code, and report your findings. Pretty please. I have not been able to make it work with the reports I have received.

      -- Jesus Climent Fri, 16 Jan 2004 12:06:07 +0000

      • abcde as offered by Fink has a cddafs frontend which will copy the AIFF tracks from the mounted audio CD and use that as input to the ripper process. The version of oggenc offered by Fink can use AIFF/AIFC tracks as input and produce Ogg Vorbis files. try fink [sourceforge.net].
  • by teamhasnoi ( 554944 ) <teamhasnoi AT yahoo DOT com> on Tuesday January 20, 2004 @07:12PM (#8037361) Journal
    Then open them and configure each one for a drive - scratch that, just tested it and it doesn't work.

    If you are running Panther, you could try making two new users, run iTunes in each one and configure each for one of your drives (how, I don't know.. I don't have multiple CD drives - I would assume that the preferences would reflect multiple drives.) and rip away.

    That'd be one for you to try.

    Other than that - I got nuttin'

    • by Anonymous Coward
      you have to open the .prefs for itunes and turn off the locking of the itunes db. then again, if you do this, itunes might explode your computer. or your 'sawtooth' whatever the frig that is.
    • If you're talking about using FUS to run two instances of iTunes, no go . iTunes can only be used on one account at a time, unless you've installed iTiR [hackingthesoul.com] . it's a $1 shareware program .
  • If you're ripping to MP3 and your CD read speed is very fast at all (20x is probably more than fast enough), you're going to be slowed down by your processor and not the drives. However it might be more efficient to have more than one drive so you don't lose time swapping CDs or you can take off while all three complete.
    • While you're probably right, don't forget that digital audio extraction (DAE) speed for a CD drive is often significantly slower than data read speed. I had a creative 16x DVD / 40x CD drive that could only rip CD audio at 8x.
  • by datacide ( 49123 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2004 @07:34PM (#8037577)

    Well, assuming that iTunes meets your other requirements, this AppleScript may prove useful to you:

    I haven't used it; I saw it earlier today when grabbing another script from their site. My experience with other Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes has been quite positive. I ripped (in some cases, re-ripped...stupid LAME bug!) all 1500+ or so of my CDs last year, and I used a few of those scripts to make my life easier. Give it a look-through.

    • Isn't replying to your own post a sign of derangement, or something? Anyway....

      Something else you might want to check into is a feature that is built-into iTunes. Go to Preferences -> General, and change "On CD Insert" to "Import Songs and Eject." This is a technique that I have used (with multiple optical drives, no less) and can vouch for.

  • On a 500 MHz PPC the CPU will be the bottlenech, not the drive(s). So all that RIPping from multiple drives will do is keep the process pipelined a bit better. That is, instead of being able to ignore your computer for twenty minutes as it RIP's one CD, you can ignore if for an hour as it RIP's three CD's.

    I don't have multiple CD drives, but perhaps you could test this -- what does iTunes do if you tell it to automatically RIP and eject CD's and you put CD's in multiple drives? I'd guess (since most Apple software is pretty clever) that it would simply work its way through the inserted CD's, in which case you don't need any software -- just load all three of your drives and let iTunes do its work, and stick in new CD's every so often.
  • (Free) easy solution (Score:2, Informative)

    by claudebbg ( 547985 )
    I confirm the "multiple" apps solution; it's really the simplest way to launch 3 times the same tool with different jobs to do. That's for the ripping
    Concerning the multiple burning, same solution but I would recommend using the Missing Media Burner [mac.com] (I use 0.6.2 and I'm satisfied). It's not the cleanest apps in the Mac world, but it's free and efficient in burn and overburn, which is quite useful when volume is involved.
    Toast is certainly good and is quite a clean app, but it's way too expensive for light
  • Avoid iTunes (Score:4, Interesting)

    by andfarm ( 534655 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2004 @08:12PM (#8037987)
    iTunes's MP3 encoder is quite old and does a bad job of encoding MP3s. LAME is much better; you could use it with some shell scripts to read AIFFs from the mounted CDs (they show up in /Volumes) and encode them with LAME.
    • "iTunes's MP3 encoder is quite old and does a bad job of encoding MP3s."

      1) Old bad

      2) Got any references for your claim?

      The side-by-side tests that I have seen do not back up your assertion.

      A.
      • "1) Old bad"

        Thank you, Slashdot, for throwing away my brackets.

        That should be read as 'Old not equal bad'. Yes, I'll preview next time.

        A.
      • Re:Avoid iTunes (Score:3, Informative)

        by andfarm ( 534655 )
        The original iTunes MP3 encoder was written about five years ago by a one-man team. (It was part of the SoundJam MP3 player.) For its time, it was pretty good, but, especially compared with LAME on --vbr-new, its quality for a given bit rate was significantly lower. Apple hasn't seen fit to make any changes to the encoder since, so I'd suggest that you use AAC (the Quicktime encoder for AAC is very good) or MP3 with LAME.

        Ah, you want to know my authority for saying it sounds worse? Listening tests I conduc

        • "The original iTunes MP3 encoder was written about five years ago by a one-man team."

          True but not relevant. It could still be the best encoder on the planet (I don't think it is, but...)

          "you want to know my authority for saying it sounds worse? Listening tests I conducted myself."

          Ok, a purely subjective observation. That's fine, but one person's opinion isn't going to make me 'Avoid iTunes'.

          What I would like to see is more independant data like this:

          http://www.sonarnerd.net/projects/wavcomp/

          Which st
          • Fine, how about the fact that the guy who wrote it has also told me (in person!) that "the encoder sucks, but we haven't been working on it" (not his exact words)?

            And yes, blade sucks. But we knew that already.

            • I prefer his comments here:

              "The iTunes MP3 encoder was written pretty much from scratch, based on the ISO reference source in distribution 10, as LAME was. I know, I was the principal author (it was originally shipped in SoundJam, for anyone who remembers that far back).

              It has been heavily tweaked over the years and doesn't bear much resemblance to dist 10 anymore...

              -Bill Kincaid
              iTunes"
        • What are you talking about, you silly little man. SoundJam was written be Cassidy and Greene, yes, but they certainly didn't write their own mp3 encoder. As clearly stated in the about box [danamania.com], it's the official licensed thomson/fraunhofer codec which is regarded as one of the only codecs that can still stand up to LAME in quality - they developed mp3, after all.

          Note: yes, I would still prefer LAME too because it's highly configurable, but it's foolish to insinuate that iTunes' encoder is inferior in any way w

    • iTunes is Altivec powered, LAME isn't. That alone makes it better for casual users like myself. Considering the author wants to batch encode a tonne of CDs, time is everything.
  • iTunes is fine. (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I also had this problem. I decided that I didn't want to ever do it again, so I bought two 120GB HDs and ripped them all to wavs using iTunes. I originally had my pc with 4 cd drives and linux, but getting it to work well was more trouble than it was worth, so i moved to windows and iTunes (try clicking the eject button in iTunes on a multi cd drive machine :) ). I then exported to xml or tab delineated file to get all the metadata and wrote some perl to convert them to flacs. before that I converted the wa
  • by djupedal ( 584558 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2004 @09:07PM (#8038587)
    Dragon Burn has allowed me to burn 3 disks at one time G4 dual 1.25GHz 1.) Internal ComboDrive (Phillips 32X CD-R/RW) 2.) Internal SuperDrive (Pioneer 2X DVD-R/RW) 3.) External Firewire enclosure (Samsung 52X CD-RW) All burn at one time, with no issues, except for making it easy to bleed down my blank media inventory.
  • If you have fink installed you can try "fink install abcde" which will hook you up with all the required stuff to run "A Better CD Encoder". I'm not exactly sure how this handles with multiple drives, since i've never done that. you could also check out cdparanoia, which is not available through fink, but is here:

    http://www.xiph.org/paranoia/

    really though, this 3-drive thing may very well depend on your hardware configuration, especially if you're using ATA drives, which i assume you are. ripping fr
  • by Grabble ( 91256 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2004 @09:49PM (#8038961)

    Depending on your interests, and your time-/cash-flow, you may decide to pay somebody to rip your CDs for you.

    This company...

    http://www.ripdigital.com/ ..charges about $1 per CD to rip it for you.

    Never used 'em.

  • http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/ 13048

    This Applescript plugin for iTunes is really nice. It installs LAME and is very easy to use (just select it from the iTunes script menu). However, it will only allow you to rip one CD at a time per processor, so unless he's got a dualie, this won't help the original poster.

  • Granted this was back on OS 9, and I only had two (internal) drives on my Yosemite, but I just set iTunes up to rip on insert, and eject when done. It'd finish a CD, and I'd pop the next one in my stack in and continue doing what I was doing. It was nice because even if I was off in another room, it would still be crunching away on the next CD, so I kept the processor at 100% all evening long. Took me a week or so (over 100 CDs). I think you'd probably spend more time trying to find software that allows
  • When I really started going nuts and encoding all my CDs in several binge-like sessions, I had my internal DVD-ROM and external CD-RW hooked up. I have the "Import and Eject" feature turned on, and I drop in one CD, wait for iTunes to recognize it, and then drop in the other.

    iTunes would encode one, spit it out, and move to the other. Then I'd pop a new disk in the open drive and the process would repeat.

    I haven't done this lately as I've imported most of the CDs I really wanted done already, but I don'
  • Easiest solution (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    iTunes uses the processor(s) quite well while ripping, and on a single 500 you definitely aren't going to hit the limit of the drive speed before hitting the processor limit. That is, ripping simultaneously from two drives won't help your speed at all. Just do this:

    Setup iTunes to automatically connect to the internet, and to import and eject each disk automatically. Then feed disks into all three drives. iTunes will rip from each disk in turn and eject it. You can go on about your business and check back
  • If you can afford to keep your computer running all the time, ie. the noise doesn't keep you up at nights, then the only true bottleneck is the time you spend sitting at the computer.

    When I ripped my CD collection, I used a two-step process. I first ripped the CDs into AIFF. This step is lossless, so there's no quality lost. It does take up some hard drive space, 600-700 megabytes/CD.

    Step two: convert these to MP3/AAC/whatever with iTunes or iTunes LAME. The simplest way to do it (in my opinion) is to use
  • by jasonisnuts ( 743658 ) on Wednesday January 21, 2004 @03:44AM (#8041060)
    I really would like to thank anyone who replied, and especially thank those who gave informative info! This is why /. is like crack frankly. On to business: Between late Monday night and most of Tuesday I was rearranging my room, cleaning, and ripping CDs. Although I know iTunes can be buggy with ripping MP3s, I've personally never had a problem or felt it lackluster, so I stuck with it and only it. So I went against those who recommended Lame and other options. On the advice of those who suggested iTunes I did what worked best and most easily; import and eject. I tried importing one CD, and dragging the contents of a second into the library or by invoking the import command and I could not get that trick to work, which saddened me. Sticking with import and eject I ripped CDs at 192kbps (except 165 classical songs which I ripped at 224 with "use error correction when reading audio CDs") and the disks did go sequentially. This batch weighs in at 54 discs, 593 songs. Of those 165 were ripped at 224, the others at 192. I was shocked that the encoding speed stayed very, very close no matter the CD or the drive, though the Pioneer DVR-106 was just a touch slower! On average I would say encoding on a 500 MHz G4 with 512 Mb RAM (100 MHz bus) to a Western Digital 80Gb 8Mb cache drive on an ACARD ATA 133 card was about 7.4X realtime. It varied between 6.2 and 8.9 depending on the disc, drive, and the area on the disc. The drives were a Pioneer 16X/40X DVD-ROM (internal ATA33), I/O DATA 52X/32X/52X CD-RW in an Oxford 911 enclosure (FW), and a Pioneer DVR-106 in an Oxford 911 enclosure (FW). How did it pan out? It took roughly 11 hours, 16 minutes to get 593 songs from 54 discs. Space required was 3.92 Gb for roughly 49 hours, 10 minutes worth of music. I am definitely satisfied, though I would like 1 Gb of RAM and a 1.5 GHz G4 (waiting for new 7457 cards). I'd like to see the speeds then! Thanks for your input!
  • I will be getting Dragon Burn once the ripping is done and will be doing the buring, as it seems the most likely program to do multiple drive burning on the cheap.
  • Why can't you set up a bash script to rip all three drives one by one to WAV, then encode them as MP3/OGG? You can load up all three trays, come back in n minutes, and they'll all be ripped.

    Have I missed the point here??

    Craig
  • You can rip multiple albums. I have a PC and a Mac and to save time I installed iTunes on the PC and used it to also rip albums.
  • ripit.pl [mmj.dk] combined with fink [sourceforge.net] should give you everything you need to rip to MP3 or OGG using your preferred libraries, and you can run multiple copies with the simple command line of --device to do multiple rips. If the rip is CPU bound (not likely), it just keeps chugging along and catches up eventually, all the while allowing you to keep ripping. Disclaimer: I've only done this on linux, but I see no reason why it wouldn't work with OS X.
  • Mass Ripping: (Score:2, Informative)

    by Bizzarobot ( 442358 )
    I've done this with my whole ~300 CD collection (twice even; once MP3 and then later to AAC):

    Using iTunes:

    1. iTunes, Preferences, General:
    --Set "On CD Insert:" to "Import Songs and Eject"
    --Check on, "Connect to Internet when needed"

    2. iTunes, Preferences, Importing:
    --Choose your Import Settings (MP3, AAC, etc) and bit rate. --Check off, "Play songs while importing"
    --Check on, "Create file names with track number"
    --Check on, "Use error correction when reading Audio CDs" (this will take longer, but if
  • I found a interesting app that allows you to store data on miniDV tapes using a DV camera connected to your mac via firewire. You can store 10GB per hour of tape. Perfect if you want to archive/backup large amounts of data. Might want to check it out.

    Dv Backup
    http://www.coolatoola.com/
  • ...A self respecting slash-dotter doesn't have multiple machines to do do this with? I did my 500+ collection using 2 boxen and 2 laptops all going at the same time.

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