High Speed Ripping Laboratory for EAC

Cwlondon - I probably share your skepticism of ripping services, and if you do pursue this route I'd very much like to hear about your results. I know that the folks at SlimDevices are quite concerned with audio quality, and the gentleman that runs the company is fairly active on their own Audiophile forum. It would surprise me if the ripping quality of their service was hugely compromised for better margins, but there's no way to know for sure.

That said, I've ripped my entirely collection of about 1000 CDs and I can certainly say it's a process I'd like never to have to repeat. It took many, many months in front of the computer and represents a huge investment in time and energy. I'm very careful to maintain multiple backups of the music so that I'm protected against hardware failure or theft because, quite frankly, the ripped music represents a much higher value to me than the CDs themselves. In this context, a few hundred dollars to have someone else rip the music actually looks like quite a bargain.

That said, it would be very interesting to find someone has used their service and compare the rips with those from a properly configured EAC setup. If 5-10 random CDs all turn out to be identical, that would be enough evidence (to me) that the ripping process they use is at least adequate. This might be worth fishing for.

Anyway, best of luck with improving your ripping results, and let us know if you work out a good time/labor saving process :).

Ripping CD's in their entirety is not too hard. Wait until you decide to extract only those song titles you like on each disc. Now that is a lot of work!

I also second Slothman. The Plextor Drives have a lot of features that make it better than the others. That is based on the advice of my IT helper who I asked to find the best platform. Slothman makes some very good points I was not aware of.

I think most Plextor also do “CD text” which is invaluable when trying to find the song title on my gold Mitsui CDRs. On my computer, I know that I like every song, but I do not always remember what the title and artist is on every CD I burn from my computer. I burn with Ahead Nero and use CD text.

I am at the point where I play the original disc less than 6 times before it is retired and resold or if it really a band I am a fan of, archived.

my setup for audio PC

I use an old fashioned case to hold more hardware.

I don't find ripping CDs to be hard work once you have configured EAC; I use my computer daily and just ripping in the background does it for me.

one question that has not been addressed yet:
for autoloading of cd's check out what is refered to as a 'CD DVD Duplicator' of the 'robotic' type. These can be had for as little as $699 (see below) or up to many thousands:

http://www.discmakers.com/duplicators/products/pico.asp

or

http://www.octave.com/cgi-bin/shop/shop.cgi/act/specs/item/1118262551

although this may be a bit pricey for only 300 cds (at $2/cd) ...

I would imagine that there are ripping services that would do it for you but they are going to charge you am arm and a leg to do it. Prolly more than the CD's are worth. If your CD takes 20-40+ minutes to rip you are going to be paying by the hour and it aint gonna be cheap. Just my opinion as someone who makes a living with their computer.

Another angle. Have you considered polishing your CD's or having that done. My local mom and pop (more like gang of x bandmembers) CD shop will polish CD's for a buck or two to like new, depending on how many you have. They use a big bench grinder with a buffing wheel and polishing compound, heck you could pick one up on eBay for a song. Once polished, they will play and rip like new.

Now that i think of it, my local independant video store has a big, impressive machine that they use to clean DVD's. I'm pretty sure they farm out cleaning and polishing too.