Music storage stand alone PC

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I have some of my CD's on my desktop and laptops at home but not many. It seems to be a fairly slow process to upload a lossless copy of my music cd's and also slow burning a new copy. I don't plan on burning much into the future but do want all my music available on a computer. I'm not a big MP3 fan and like the full uncompressed copy of my CD's. I am thinking of getting a PC for the sole use of storing my 700+ collection of CD's for sharing to a memory stick etc. for listening in my vehicles through the hardwire port. I would utilize the internet for the artwork and titling etc. Any preferences on what would copy my discs the fastest, have the memory/drive capacity for 700+, full length compact discs and would then transfer rapidly though the USB to a portable memory device. The only other use would be internet access only when adding online available cover art etc. I'm thinking without any competing programs the process should be faster and perhaps a ssd of enough memory would be even faster yet. Do I actually need to step up to an I7 quad/octo core or better or is the speed difference to copy and download through the usb going to be served well with a lesser processor like an i3? Thoughts appreciated.
 
If you are just ripping CDs without any compression, then this process is not very CPU intensive. I don't see why you can't just use your current computer to do it. It's a matter of finding the right software maybe, but you'll still need someone to physically insert your CDs one by one into the CD drive, so you won't be able to automate that. What software are you currently using for ripping? Which step seems to be taking too long? At what speed is your CD drive operating?

Is your current computer old/slow? If not, I see no reason for a new computer. Just get an external USB drive on which you can store all your music files. 700 CDs @ approx 700 MB content each will take up about 0.5 TB of disk space, if left uncompressed. If you convert them to FLAC (lossless compressed), they'll take up about half of that, give or take.
 
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The write speed of the USB thumb drive will be your slow spot.

Shouldn't affect the ripping process though. Even if he rips at 48x, that's still only about 7-8 MB/s. Most modern brand name USB drives can support such write speeds without a problem.

But I didn't think he was planning on ripping directly to thumb drive.

As far as copying to thumb drive, you're right - it's going to be his bottle neck.
 
I haven't ripped a CD in probably a decade but I used Exact Audio Copy. I believe it would automatically get the album art from the internet when ripping CDs.

There are probably more modern programs but it worked pretty well audio wise and was surprisingly good at getting album art work considering it was probably like 2008 or so. It depends what file format you want but I assume FLAC.

You don't need to build a rig to rip a CD dude, my computer back then was probably like 1.3 GHZ with 512MB of ram with a generic DVD-RW optical drive.
 
Originally Posted by maxdustington
I haven't ripped a CD in probably a decade but I used Exact Audio Copy.

EAC is still one of the most well regarded CD rippers today, AFAIK.
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This could also be done on a raspberry pi. New model has decent specs. Or even an older surface pro. But I don't see why this all couldn't be done on the current desktop.
 
I can already rip a cd with a couple different programs on my current machines. I'm looking to rip 800 cd's and have the album art download automatically like it does already. I'm looking to save time. Both in ripping and downloading to memory devices. I really don't want to use my current desk top or laptop as they are used for everything by everyone in the household. That's why I'm asking about a stand alone PC with an optical cd drive and SSD. 800 multiplied by a couple minutes is a chunk of time that would be a personal investment of too much of my time right now. If i could find something that would double or triple the speed of this process that would be my goal.
 
I haven't read the whole thread, so please forgive any redundancies:

You don't need much computer to do this. Even the most pedestrian system will be able to handle ripping, organizing and playing.
I'd use the FLAC codec. It is lossless, about 2x the file size of a 320kbps .mp3. If I have read correctly and you want to transfer the files to a USB stick for the purposes of playing in other devices into which you can place that stick, then .mp3 will be your safest bet. Anything 256kpbs and above ought not to bugger up your audio too badly. You could rip the CD's and batch process .mp3-converted copies.
There are Linux distros that are specially catered to acting as media servers. Even without going that far, any Linux distro will have oodles of media players and servers you can access with any device you have from any location you may find yourself.
 
The two areas that will be time consuming is the file transfer to the USB stick and the manual process of placing the CDs in the drive/taking it out. The files and folders can be named automatically but you will spend time on clicking the OK button. Current optical drives should be able to rip quickly and it's not a CPU intensive process.

But good luck, 800 CDs will take a few days of dedicated time.
 
Originally Posted by uc50ic4more
I haven't read the whole thread, so please forgive any redundancies:

You don't need much computer to do this. Even the most pedestrian system will be able to handle ripping, organizing and playing.
I'd use the FLAC codec. It is lossless, about 2x the file size of a 320kbps .mp3. If I have read correctly and you want to transfer the files to a USB stick for the purposes of playing in other devices into which you can place that stick, then .mp3 will be your safest bet. Anything 256kpbs and above ought not to bugger up your audio too badly. You could rip the CD's and batch process .mp3-converted copies.
There are Linux distros that are specially catered to acting as media servers. Even without going that far, any Linux distro will have oodles of media players and servers you can access with any device you have from any location you may find yourself.


Yes. I have an inexpensive NAS setup for both media serving, file sharing, and system backup archiving. Open Media Vault (OMV $0) running on an Odroid HC-2 (~ $65) with a NAS type hard drive (2 TB "Iron Wolf" ~ $80). The whole package takes up little more than the size of the HDD itself. SMB server for storage and backup and miniDLNA media server. The miniDLNA server worker great on windows pc's, android devices, and on my Roku Media Player app. Do the ripping/encoding with EAC using the codec of your choice (FLAC is pretty much the de-facto standard for lossless) on an existing PC and then upload to the server.

It took me some tinkering to setup OMV, as I've never done anything like that before, but it was doable and has done everything I want it to do for a couple of years now.
 
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Originally Posted by sloinker
800 multiplied by a couple minutes is a chunk of time that would be a personal investment of too much of my time right now.

A couple of minutes per CD is very reasonable amount of time, IMO. You are not going to reduce that much further, I'm afraid. Ripping 800 CDs is going to take a lot of time. If you don't have the time, pay someone to do it for you.

By the way, I think EAC actually recommends much slower read speeds (secure mode) in order to minimize errors, if you care about the quality of your rips.
 
Originally Posted by Quattro Pete
By the way, I think EAC actually recommends much slower read speeds (secure mode) in order to minimize errors, if you care about the quality of your rips.

It's been many years since I've done such a thing, but I vaguely recall 12x being the optimal speed for errors rates balanced with time.
Downloading your whole catalogue from The Pirate Bay'd be faster by orders of magnitude and you might be able to find some 24 bit/ 96KHz remasters instead of your 16 bit 44.1KHz CD's. :^)
 
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