I am tring to get some info if i could built a coping tower for multiple cd coping and what i would need to do this i am a newbie at computors but have a very mechanical and electrical background.
Unless you want to re-invert the wheel just buy one. Copy devices are made to be more efficient (expensive) than home computer stuff. Your backround will be of little help until you get into the very advanced stuff. You initial ideas may be impractical. I know someone that ripped 600 CDs in less than a month on his spare time using crappy equipment. Are you in such a hurry? You can rip the music much faster than you can play it. Check out DBpowerAmp. They sell professional ripping software and hardware. I can rip 2 at a time but only do one. I am worried about quality and I doubt that I will be any faster. A fast rip uses up most of the computer resorces. I usually play some old computer game that requires little computer reasorces while ripping 1 CD at a time. It takes about 15 minutes on my computer. How many CDs are you trying to rip and what do you intend to do with the music?
This is going to be for my church copying a master to multiple cd's is what i am trying to do so it doesn't take 3 hours to copy 15 cd's.
If that is too slow for you you will need to buy a duplicator or as many computers as you think you need. Just building a tower with even 5 burners will not buy you much if anything. Usually multitasking actually slows things down. You might only see 2/hr with 5 burners. Professional burners take special, expensive disks. Ones you buy at the store do not have enough dye for a fast burn. They are only 16 -32x you will need 64x. The duplicators will reject inferior disks. It is much smarter and cheaper buy 5 computers.
I am sorry to be discouraging but you asked for advice so I gave it to you. Reading and burning CDs is not a trival task. You can't do much on a computer while you are burning or ripping because the job uses most of the computer. Just adding more burners isn't going to help since that is not the bottleneck. It is the bus and/or CPU. I suggest ripping once then burning x times. It takes 15 minutes to rip and only maybe 5 minutes to burn. Just schedule something to do while tending the computer that doesn't tax the computer. Good media will be critical. Post a query on CD-R(W) Media and state you are going to burn x disks and want to do that quickly. What media do you suggest. I would swap out the burner for either a lite-on or a plexor. Plexors are a bit better but cost a lot more. It should be a 32x burner. You will want a fast computer with a fast bus speed. I would query 'build your own PC' forum for recommendations. Maybe with a quad core with an ultra fast buss you might be able to run more than one burner at a time. I do not 'push' the computer while burning. I used to do other tasks while burning. This sometimes resulted in defective disks and if I was copying files at the same time, some of the files would be corupt. For half the defects I got no warning. You discover the defect when you play it. I doubt that you want to hand out disks with bad spots on them. If you verify quality that will take 15 minutes per disk. The trick is not to push anything. I do a good deal of burning. I buy the sleeve in 2,000 per box. If you count sleeves I am at 5000-6000 disks.
