External CD/DVD drive

[John Rumm]

If he got a powered USB hub, then he could use any USB powered drive.

[Bill]

In message , Theo writes

My worry about recommending this is that he is using this with a hard disk storage device that's part of and hooked into his hi-fi system. I'm used to the shash caused by laptop psu's and would be wary of any Poundland electronics from this pov. And also the slimline drives only seem to be half the speed of the full sized drives. He is in his 80's and is hoping to HD-ise all his huge collection of CD's before he gets old, so speed is crucial. He has about 1TB of flac files stored the last time I looked, and is about half way.

[John Rumm]

If you can find one of the one of the Optiarc DVD/CD writers, then the are very quick handling CDs - also particularly so on audio extraction which lets down many of the drives which are quick reading data CDs.

I have some of the 7240S drives and they will rip an *audio* CD in about

3 mins using EAC.

[Andy Burns]

Send them to Russ, where presumably the 18 year old virgins are given the day off from rubbing silver mains leads on their thighs and asked to lick your CDs clean before upscaling everything to 24bit 96kHz and returning it to you on a gold-plated USB stick?

[Robin]

I suggest he doesn't worry about it, just learns the lesson. It is, broadly speaking, open to consumers and traders to pick the law of any country to govern their contracts. Amazon make very clear that when buying from the Global Store "the sale takes place in the U.S.; therefore, subject to the laws and regulations of the U.S." So he'd need to find a way to bring the sale within one of the exceptions (eg for a contract with a close connection to the UK).

[RJH]

About 6 minutes using iTunes and a portable USB2 Samsung drive on a reasonably quick computer.

Either way, it's going to be a long haul ripping (maybe) 500 CDs. Then there's hoping they're in decent condition and copy over nicely, catalogued and gaplessed correctly. And then there's the backup . . .

If pushed for time and not strapped for cash, or not wanting to do such a mind-numbing exercise, I'd think about posting on a local forum - see if anyone's interested and how much they want. I'd think it'd be 50+ hours.

[Robin]

We are told "He has about 1TB of flac files stored the last time I looked, and is about half way." Assuming a CD compresses to a FLAC of

400 MB on average I make that 2,500 done and the same to follow!

Though it doesn't take many CDs with problems which lead EAC to take an hour or more for the job to stretch.

[Huge]

I am presently re-ripping my CD collection as FLAC, having previously done them as MP3s (which was a mistake - I should have bought more disk in the first place). FLACs are roughly 10 times the size of MP3s. About

1% of my CD collection is proving to be unrippable, despite having previously been OK.

[Richard]

Why bother with all that then:

one of them should keep him feeling young. ;)

[RJH]

Ah, yes, well spotted! Well, that's just going to take months - I estimated a long working week on 500. Not that my estimates are much to go on ;-)

TBH, a friend took all of my 500 CDs (and nice pine storage cases) - she kept them on condition they were ripped to flac for me.

[RJH]

Very good! Not a bad idea for a DIY project . . .

[Bill]

In message , Huge writes

Commenting on the 3 previous messages in this thread :

Yes, the Optiarc 7240s internal drives seem to be about the same speed as the external LG drive that has failed, and would be ideal for him if they were external usb drives. I do notice that the Optiarc slim drives for which cheap usb cases are available are rated at half the speed of the 7240s's.

My tests here, ripping a CD into a laptop, showed that using dbPoweramp took something like 5 to 6 minutes, EAC took longer. The laptop drive, and my external drive are both slimline. My understanding is that dbPoweramp uses a database called Accuraterip to check rip quality, whereas EAC does repeat reads (and may also check with Accuraterip) to get the best quality possible. This may exceed the "quality" of the tracks in the AR database, or not.

My chum has in the tens of thousands of specialist CD's, some being non-commercial CD-RW's of music and events he has been involved with over the years. His aim is to get the best of this findable on this "Brennan" device and easily accessible via his lounge hi-fi system with control via a Surface tablet laptop from a comfy chair. He is nearly there, but has had disaster after disaster. I think he has about 3,000 done to date.

Over the years he has converted from open reel to DAT to CD, so he is used to having to move forward.

[Andy Burns]

Buy a USB->SATA adapter, they often come with a power brick and molex->SATA power adapter ...

e.g. (but not a specific recommendation)

[John Rumm]

I found doable using a couple of machines and 4 drives.. run a couple of instances of EAC on each machine. It keeps you busy enough uncasing, loading, ripping, onloading and recasing disks etc... I did batches of about 90 disks at a time.

It helps if your music collection is something for which you can rely on the catalogue databases to identify and name the tracks etc. Something that can be less successful on some classical recordings.

[John Rumm]

Probably also worth searching round people you know who may have already ripped a common subset of disks you own.

[Andrew]

And the next disaster is when the hard disk fails and hasn't been properly backed up :-(

[Bill]

No!

He has already reloaded at least once from a backup following at least one of the disasters. He backs up to a portable hard drive and also to his main desktop PC. Backups can be incremental or full, and he is aware of how to initiate either.

This may not be ideal, but so far it has worked.

[dennis]

So did the one TSB used.