The rapid way to rip a CD collection

CD is one of those audio formats that makes me go slightly misty-eyed. I remember very clearly the arrival of compact discs nearly 30 years ago, and I’ll never forget my sheer mental bogglement at the sight of Sony’s first Discman player, the D50. This gadget required a battery pack that was of a just plain silly size (and weight, once you’d stuffed it with enough AA batteries to keep it going for a few hours).
But even so, the principle of CD was sound in so many meanings of the word.

Today, the market for CDs has taken a battering, from which it will never recover, and most electronics manufacturers have stopped making CD players altogether. At the high end of the UK hi-fi market, Linn stopped making CD players some while ago to concentrate on network streaming devices. Naim still makes CD players, as does Meridian, but it isn’t clear how long either will continue to do so. The writing is on the wall: the future is digital purchase and download.

Many of us still have huge collections of CDs containing music that we really like and keep returning to

However, many of us still have huge collections of CDs containing music that we really like and keep returning to, so our incremental rate of music purchases was already at a fairly low point. So, like many other people, I decided it was time to transfer all my music to a hard disk since it’s so much more convenient: I can transfer it from there to an iPod and use it in my car or on flights, and I can route it around the house.

Before I go any further I ought to remind you that, strictly speaking, ripping your CDs to hard disk is still illegal in the UK. There’s currently no provision that legalises such acts of sheer wickedness.

It’s different in Germany, where you’re allowed to rip your CDs to disk for your own personal use, under a law known as Provision 53. Hence, please be aware that everything I’m about to describe actually took place in Stuttgart.

Physical labour

There are many ways of ripping an audio CD to hard disk, and many formats to choose from. The easiest method is to use a software package such as iTunes and pop the discs into your computer one by one: the software will then rip their contents to the hard disk in the prescribed format, look up all the artist and track metadata online, and even find an image of the cover art for you. A few minutes later, out pops the disc and you put in another one.

This is fine in theory, but the reality is somewhat more awkward. It means you’re either chained to your computer for the whole day, or you keep a stack of discs on the desk and drop a new one in whenever you’re passing. An experiment using my Windows computer in the office at home revealed that the effort of running up and down the stairs each time I needed to put in a new disc resulted in about two discs getting ripped per day. Given that I have around 2,500 discs to process, this really wasn’t a viable solution.

A web search uncovered a number of businesses that offered to perform the whole process for a fee, but given the number of discs involved that wasn’t going to be pocket money. Some of these services also looked decidedly dodgy, and I could easily imagine my beloved CD collection – as well as my cash – disappearing into a white van, never to be seen again. The answer was becoming clearer the more I looked: I was going to have a shopping accident that would severely damage my credit card.

A further internet search revealed that the best software to use for CD ripping is a package called dBpoweramp, a flexible and powerful product that allows you to make a huge number of twiddly adjustments to the music data (and, not coincidentally, a program that forms part of PC Pro’s benchmarks). It understands that different CD/DVD drives work in slightly different ways and can compensate for these differences.

I decided to use the FLAC file format, given that it’s open source and so less likely to be vulnerable to the whims of hormonally challenged lawyers in the future

Better still, it offers a facility whereby your freshly ripped file can be checksummed and the result compared against those of lots of other users who’ve ripped the same song: if you obtain the same checksum then you can be sure your file is just the same as theirs, and logic suggests that this was therefore a good rip and one that can be trusted. If a particular disc is damaged, dBpoweramp can perform the optical equivalent of scouring the disc surface in an attempt to recover as much information as possible. It can automatically hook up to online music metadata databases too, and it supports just about every audio file format under the sun.

I decided to use the FLAC file format, given that it’s open source and so less likely to be vulnerable to the whims of hormonally challenged lawyers in the future (after all, WAV is actually proprietary to Microsoft, while ALAC belongs to Apple). The FLAC format meant I’d be able to create a compressed but bit-perfect master rip of each track and then use the dBpoweramp software to transcode this into any other formats, I might require: for my iTunes and iPod, for example, it would make sense for that to be Apple Lossless.

Robotic ripping

But the real treat comes from dBpoweramp’s support for robotic ripping engines: dBpoweramp’s developer recommends the multiple drive devices from Primera. Soon I came staggering away from the predicted shopping accident and a brand-new Primera Disc Publisher Pro Xi2 was sitting on my Tyrolean-style desk in Stuttgart.

It’s important to understand that Disc Publisher isn’t a ripping engine, but is designed for duplication of CDs and DVDs. It also prints a full-colour label on the disc if you’ve filled it with paper-coated blank discs. However, dBpoweramp can also drive this device in the reverse direction, using it to suck data from its pair of DVD writer drives back to the computer via a single USB2 cable. dBpoweramp’s developer has even written its own driver software for Disc Publisher, so I was fairly confident it would work well.

Getting the software up and running wasn’t particularly difficult, although it felt slightly bitty in some areas: you certainly need to understand how its batch ripper engine is different from its main ripper tool, and how one calls the other. In essence, you load around 50 CDs into one tray holder in the Primera box, then fire up dBpoweramp’s Batch Ripper for Windows and do a calibration of the drives, which then become available for use.

Next, you choose which file formats you want; a few other useful settings are worth tweaking too, including where you want the data to be placed and in what logical folder structures. Finally, you press the big Rip button and stand back in awe as its robotic arm trundles across, picks the top disc off the input pile, and drops it into an available and waiting DVD drive, which then closes. The disc is examined, its metadata downloaded from the internet, and the arm goes off and grabs a second disc for the second drive.

This process is repeated over and over: when the first disc is done the tray opens, the arm picks up the disc and drops it into an output spindle, or if it was bad, on to a reject pile. Then it fetches another disc. This wonderfully choreographed ballet continues until the Primera has ripped all 50 discs, and the data for each disc is happily stored away on the host controlling computer.

A few caveats are in order. It’s worth setting up the system so the output pile is kept in the same order as the input pile. If you happen to be ripping a mixture of CD albums and singles, it’s possible for the drive that’s ripping the singles to get ahead of the drive that’s ripping an album, which isn’t a problem beyond the fact that those discs will end up in the wrong order on the output spindle. This isn’t a big deal, except when you come to put the discs in their cases, it’s easier to have them in the same order as they were input.

When the whole system is running it’s a priceless piece of theatrical nonsense that causes people to stand around mesmerised

Very occasionally, and usually with an out-of-spec CD, the system can become confused and pick up a couple of CDs at once, which causes the equivalent of an M25 pile-up that requires manual intervention to untangle. There may be a little bug there, so the developer is looking into it. My tech support query was answered within 12 minutes, so I have great confidence in the dedication of the developer.

Using this system I can carry a whole box full of CDs into my (German) office every morning, load up 50 of them and let it run all morning. By lunchtime I can unload this first batch, sort out any rejects, and load up another batch for the afternoon. At this rate I’ll have the whole lot done in a month or so, and then this device will have done its job, at which point I’ll probably pass it on to a friend.

The hardware wasn’t cheap, especially when you consider that it’s basically just a pair of DVD burners, a robotic arm and the printing engine from a Lexmark printer, but it’s a low-volume niche product and I know I will find other uses for it in the future.

Nor is the software easy to understand, with a certain amount of UI clunkiness to contend with, but it’s fairly straightforward once you get your head around what’s happening. And when the whole system is running it’s a priceless piece of theatrical nonsense that causes people to stand around mesmerised, watching it perform its disc-juggling and waiting for each disc to get ripped so they can see it grab another during its unload/load cycle. “Was für ein wunderbares Gerät!” (“What a wonderful device!”) they exclaim.

Having transferred everything to hard disk and available to be transcoded into whatever formats I want, I can now decide what sort of devices I want to use around my office and house for playback. Maybe I’ll use the forthcoming new version of Windows Home Server, or else go for a more conventional file-sharing NAS device – that’s a decision still to be made.

Then I might look into whether there’s any DVD-ripping software that can control a robotic device such as the Primera, since it would be useful to rip the content from my DVDs to hard disk too, to make it all available for a video-on-demand solution. In the meantime, check out dBpoweramp for the ripping software and Primera for the robotic hardware, and Gehen Sie glücklich alles!