I am interested in bulding a ripping station that I can put multiple CD drives into, and hopefully rip multiple CDs at the same time. Does anyone know of an encoder that I could run multiple instances of, and associate each instance with a particular drive? Ideally I would have a SATA hard drive (or two) and 4 ide CDRom drives in the system, and I would just drop a disk in each drive and let it go. When a disk is done, it pops it out and I put in a new disk and keep on going. I am mainly interested in 320kb mp3, though the ability to do FLAC would be nice as well. What would be my bottleneck in the system? CPU? hard drive speed? IDE bus? Has anyone tried anything like this before? Thanks for your input.
your bottleneck would definately be CPU. there's two parts for converting a CD to mp3. 1) ripping uncompressed audio to HD, which takes little time and no CPU) and 2) encoding the wav to mp3. this usually maxes out the CPU so it can encode as fast as possible. I suppose you could essentially build a computer with 4 optical drives, and SATA drive, and install four separate instances of EAC. You could then run all four simultaneously, but I honestly don't think you'll get good results. I tried it a while ago, by ripping a CD from one drive with EAC and another CD with CDex, and it took twice as long to rip both as it would one. So essentially you can rip one CD in the time it takes to do four simultaneously. But if you have a really fast like dual P4 mobo and at least 1GB ram you might get good results. Just be sure to use EAC with the LAME plugins. Here's the guide to use it: http://www.afterdawn.com/guides/archive/mydeneaclame.cfm also, encoding at 320k will not result in the best quality. It will end up with unnecessarily large files. As you will read in the above guide, VBR (variable bitrate) is a much better way to go. So ripping at 192 or 256k VBR will result in the best sounding files (as far as mp3s go anyways...) edited 4 typo
Thanks for the reply. What you say about the encode process makes sense. That is definately a lot of crunching going on and the CPU is maxed out during that period. What may work is to rip all the CDs as wav simultaneously, then after the fact, queue them all up to encode to mp3. I'm not sure my device, which is a music server for a home audio system, supports VBR mp3s, but I will check it out. Thanks.
