Brennan B2 and Raspberry Pi

[Bill]

A friend has bought one of these Brennan devices that records all your CD's to a 2TB hard drive. I've been trying to help him with it, first by going to his house and getting it to work at all, then latterly by phone.

It has a Raspberry Pi mounted alongside another pcb. He had connected it to his ethernet network by removing the back and accessing the connector as suggested by the manufacturer. Space is terribly tight, and the back is held on by two different types of screw. Reseating the back panel and guessing which screws went where allowed the plugs to go in fully and it worked.

After a day or two he started saying that it was taking at least 10 minutes to record each CD and that this rate he would be dead before his huge CD collection was fed in. At this stage I remoted to him and PuTTY'd from another machine into the Brennan, primarily to look up the spec of the internal CD drive (it should be capable of 24x).

I am hopeless with Linux and have never used a Pi. hwinfo and lspci don't seem to be supported, but dmesg seemed to work. The result included the following lines. Should I be alarmed?

[ 3.415877] FAT-fs (mmcblk0p3): Volume was not properly unmounted. Some data may be corrupt. Please run fsck. [ 3.432082] smsc95xx 1-1.1:1.0 eth0: link up, 100Mbps, full-duplex, lpa 0x45E1 [ 3.436744] FAT-fs (sda1): Volume was not properly unmounted. Some data may be corrupt. Please run fsck. [ 3.727554] scsi 1:0:0:0: CD-ROM MATSHITA DVDRW UJ8A7AF 1.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0 [ 3.750785] sr0: scsi3-mmc drive: 24x/24x writer cd/rw xa/form2 cdda caddy [ 3.750820] cdrom: Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.20

[The Natural Philosopher]

Not really

[Theo]

Looks fine. Some storage is complaining because you turned it off without a proper shutdown, but it seems to be surviving.

While the CD drive may be capable of 24x, CD audio has no error correction. Therefore if you drive it faster, you may lose audio quality. Also, 24x is the fastest the drive can do - it's probably a constant angular velocity drive, so it'll be 24x on the outside of the CD and much less towards the inside.

CDs are 74-80 mins, so it's doing about 8x on average. 10 mins each sounds about right.

Does the drive whirr for the whole time? If not, it's possible it's also spending time encoding the audio.

Theo

[alan_m]

So to listen to them all it would take at least 6x longer - well past his death.

[T i m]

However, the point of having a 'library' of music like this is so you have easy access to whatever you want to listen to at the time and / or having a very wide range of material on offer if you put it on shuffle.

Or, you make up your own playlist where you would be unlikely to listen to every track on each album.

Cheers, T i m

[charles]

The normal way forward would be to ask Brennan. But 10 minutes a CD is about how long it took me. mind you, I only have about 400 CDs.

[Bill]

In message , Theo writes

The worry about the error message is that it relates to the 2TB drive holding all the audio. So we shouldn't try fsck? It scares me.

I'd forgotten about the slower reading from the inside of CD's. Thanks for the reminder.

The adverts for the device say that it should import a CD in 4 mins. He is backing up to an external HD, so should be OK if he has to return it. The external HD was a journey of its own as it has to be FAT32, which isn't available as a format in the Windows 10 main machine that he has. He didn't want to format in the Brennan as he was feeding CD's in.

It records as raw wav type files, then overnight converts to flac for storage, so there should be no on the fly encoding. I think it has an inbuilt database of metadata for CD's, but I don't think his stuff will be covered. I'm not sure when it goes online to lookup data it doesn't have. That might take time. It has made some glaring metadata errors.

[Bill]

In message , jim writes

There's also the potential cause of death. On the third day he had the device, his wife was complaining to me about all this awful music playing in the lounge.

He lives in a huge old house and previously was confined to his "music room" (previously dining room) with all the walls covered with racks and shelves of tapes, LP's and CD's.

[Andy Burns]

Given that the Pi is "hidden" inside the B2, I presume the user is more or less meant to forget that it's there, and I'd expect it to fsck itself.

If the owner cleanly powers off the box, then you log back on, is the filesystem then clean?

[dennis]

Why is it so expensive? If you have a PC or a RPi you can plug in a CD drive and do what the Brennan does using free software.

I just put all my CDs as FLAC on my NAS drive and the musiccast system can play them without any problems. As can all my android and PCs.

[charles]

Probably convenience. It's portable, so I could take mine anywhere.

[Andrew]

Dump the linux junk, buy a PC and install Exact Audio Copy. Much better.

[Brian Gaff]

I was going to say, I hope its not just using lossy compression. There are lossless compression systems. flac is what I tend to use. However not having heard of this device, I'd hope it had some kind of eggs in one basket fail safe mode for errors on drive and maybe would have two drives inside it anyhow. Not all dvD drives are equal. I've noticed that on some cds some drives slow right down in an attempt to reduce errors. I think they use checksums to spot errors in each frame of data, so if multiple reading is going on it could easily go on for ages and sometimes does.

Also how is it looking up the cd db info to label the cds and tracks etc. many cds seem not to have any cd text or an entry in any of the common cddb databases or worse, multiple entries each slightly different! I think ripping cds is not something I bother to do for all my collection nowadays, although I can no longer read the cases, I have labelled them and getting up off a sofa to get a cd and play it is good for your circulation! Nothing to stop people ripping favourite tracks of course and making up a playlist that way or indeed burning this to another cd if you like. large ripped collections really only make sense if you are running a disco or a radio station or have multiple users who use the same media. Also of course if you really want a totally unlimited collection plenty of subscription on line services can provide that and if you are always adding to a collection the subscription route might be more cost effective. Brian

[Brian Gaff]

Yes but one supposes the reason for the rip is that he does not want to play all of all of them. The one big problem with ripping for me is the glitch at track markers. I have never seen a music server capable of mending the join seamlessly. Indeed, for example if you to play the side 2 of the Carpenters Now and Then cd, it has track markers but is fine on a standard cd player. Do a rip to hd and its gappy at the markers. You can of course remake the cd to get rid of them. What I had to do is rip the whole cd by time and lose the markers on the second half, which make it all one big track. Classical cds are the same of course. Brian

[Chris Bartram]

It is complaining about the (micro) SD card in the Pi. (mmcblk0p3 is, I believe, partition 3 on the (micro) SD card.

It's only whining because it wasn't unnmounted, because someone power-cycled the Pi.

Digital audio ripping is very variable according to disk quality and drive ability, and i've found that reading one dodgy disk can then slow down subsequent rips until after a reboot.

I had no idea that Brennan boxes had a Pi in before now!

[Chris Bartram]

Because it's a packaged solution,a nd not everyone can (or would want to) build it.

That's what the Brennan *is* doing, of course. cdparanoia, abcde maybe. Quite clever really; a few commodity PC parts, a RPi, and a DAC in a nice box. Free software and a few scripts, job done.

Well, yes. A seriously time-expired laptop with a CD could do the ripping and encoding with no trouble.

[Dave Liquorice]

Google "gapless playback".

It's a function of the rip and playback software. The rip shouldn't prefix the audio stream from a track marker with silence and the playback software has to join the audio streams from two seperate files on the fly,

ie The playback software has to have both streams open, one playing, the other cued to the correct point.

If the software has to close the outgoing file and open the incoming there will be a small glitch. If the incoming is prefixed with silence you get a gap. If the playback software looks for the start of actual audio on the incoming, to skip the gap, there will be a glitch.

My test album for this is Darkside of the Moon. The Squeeze Server makes a resonable job, there is a small glitch. Gone Mad Music Player (Android) is almost perfect using the same files. Speak to Me / Breathe and On the Run has a small glitch that is hardly noticeable. On the Run to Time as a little click, that indicates a step change in the streams from the end of one to the begining of the other.

[Bill]

I use EAC here. It takes over 12 minutes to copy a 53 minute CD on this quite heavily loaded 32-bit W7 laptop. I like EAC; the friend tried it but found it complicated.

He is asking Brennan on their forum and getting replies from the designer of the machine. Their basic answer is to connect a good desktop external CD drive via USB, which they say might cost less than returning the unit for repair or replacement. They say replacing the internal drive (as used in old Lenovo T43 laptops) might make little difference. The discussion over the difference between the advertised 4 mins per CD vs actual 10 mins has so far remained polite. He has a cheap Chinese external usb-powered CD drive. He has been unable to get the Brennan to recognise it. It was this that started me using Teamviewer, then puTTY to try to see if the Pi saw it. We still have no answer to that, as we keep getting distracted.

He has now saved 400 CD's to the device, but only scratched the surface of his collection. He likes the audio quality, but also seems to be having problems with the labelling and/or numbering of the loaded CD's and tracks (eg artists are only searchable by Christian names).

[Adrian Caspersz]

Dump the ripping effort and subscribe to a streaming service ...

[charles]

I should add that mine failed to boot last autumn. A nre SD card from Brennan solved the problem.