We currently sell Elan's ViA DJ. Ripping CD's to the DJ is pretty easy we just load our 200 disc CD Changer made by PowerFile and let it go for a couple days... ( yes days!! ) The dealers out their using Audio Request how do you rip your CDs? Do you rip them one by one? Or is there a solution like the Powerfile for ripping CDs to the Audio Request? I'd love to sell the Audio Request but don't have the time to sit there and rip CD's one by one.

Request uses a Rip station which is a high speed burner. So that leaves you out of the ARQ business.

Alan

All these server companies ought have support for the PowerFile. Especially Escient, who used to sell it as part of their Powerplay system. But, they don't.

Doug @ HomeWorks

Reqest looked at PowerFile and determined that it made too many errors. Such was what I was told after I stopped in at Escient and spoke with them about Escient using PowerFile. Request offers its dealers a very reasonable rate for their burning CDs and as they have 40 or so rip stations they can substatially speed up the process. I, too, liked the way PowerFile worked but one assumes that in the case of ARQ they know what they are talking about. They do change their minds, to wit, the new multi-source players.

Alan

How fast does that rip station rips cd's?

Depends on the CD but on average about 4 minutes per CD

Alan

We tend to rip MP3 128 in under 2 mins a CD. Still, to copy a clients existing 400Disc Sony takes 3 or 4 days of someone maning the ripper.

We try to charge 3 bucks a cd, but sometimes when a client spends a 100K on a system with a ARQ they dont wanna hear about use charging them to rip there collections.

Typicly we quote a 100 CDS per rip station sale.

That being said, i got 3 or 4 hundred CDs to rip this week that are "On The House"

The biggest difference is that the Escient ripping from an audio CD player (the Sonys) are super slow because they are essentially 1x drives, recording in real time. More importantly, they do not have buffers and they will record the skips in the songs and keep going through the rest of the song. CD-ROM type rippers, like the drawers in either the Fireball or the ARQ and the ARQ ripstation, are feeding a buffer with data so they will just spool up the drive and go back over the same data multiple times to attempt to assemble the data. Every rip software has a set number of times that it will re-read a section of the disc to fill in the errors.
There are different software rippers for your PC if you want to rip into your PC's hard drive and then transfer the files into the ARQ or Escient. You could give stacks of CDs to a few different people to rip simultaneously to speed this up.
The old version of BeoPlayer used to keep re-reading the damaged portions of scratched discs until the data was filled in, I had a really bad CD that took over 2 hours to rip with the CD-ROM drive screaming at mach five the whole time, but the file came out perfect and it wouldn't even read in a CD player anymore.

I am actually sitting here in the middle of ripping some CDs with the Powerfile to the Via DJ. "Reqest looked at PowerFile and determined that it made too many errors" I talked to Nate at ELAN tech support and he was saying that the Powerfile takes a long time in order to reduce errors - I was led to believe that ELAN or XIVA/IMERGE chose the Powerfile BECAUSE it produced the LEAST amount of errors and that it probably takes longer than the other rip stations on the market because of it. I am currently ripping at the rate of 5 discs per hour with the Powerfile. I can sit at my computer at home and rip a disc in about 3-5 minutes but then you have to use Producer to upload the file and retype the title/artist/album. Personally I think this process is excruciating! Tell me there is a better company out there!! Who should we be using for our content servers? ...I'm going to start a new post on this Q.

I hope you're charing for this work! I only allow myself to be bored at work when I'm getting paid handsomely. :-)

absolutely!

We are a ReQuest dealer - soon to be a Meda Bravo dealer too. I have 3 computers in my immediate office area. I usually hire my 14 year old son for 50 cents a disc and charge $1 a disc to the client. Using Music Match (we purchased it for $20 from their web site) my son gets all 3 PC's ripping and those keep him hopping (they are all within 15 feet of each other). Ripping is one thing, but he also has to "groom" them which means making sure the ID3 meta tags are correct and the album artwork is there (if the artwork is not ID'd, then he must find the artwork on a Google Image search [not so hard really] or scan it from the CD). Either way he can average about $12 an hour, if he hustles. Personally, I like the Music Match software for ripping, for many reasons. It is cheap. It allows (or forces me) to make sure the ID 3 tags are correct. And it allows me to select different rip rates depending on the need. I usually use 192 but on particluar high end CDs, I might choose 320, depending on the application .

Once we have all the CD's ripped, we park the ReQuest on the network and drag all the files over in Windows Explorer - pretty simple. Yes it tall takes time, but not any more time than any other solution and I'd rather invest in more PC's than a proprietary "rip station". Just my $.02. And I would never give this away - period. Always charge for this - other wise you diminsh the value of this and set yourself up for more freebies in the future. Most of my clients would never balk at paying me to rip their libarary.

Also, there are Internet ripping services that charge about $1 per CD - I think (but yes you have to package them up and ship them). But they are at least worth checking into.

Personally I use EAC at home and convert files to Flac on the fly. The sound quality rounces MP3 but you trade away space. A FLAC file will come in about at about 70% compression.about 1 meg persecond rather than 1.4 per sec. Sure I could store way more MP3s but in listening tests I couldn't go back to MP3 for critical listening. The differance on decent speakers is night and day. But for the space involved... ahh a buck a gig these days.

At work we just use the homeowners computer and set up WIndows Media for them to rip to a defined locataion.

We don't use request or escients. Escients now supports flac! Well they caught on.. it just sounds better... :)

Too many issues with Tune bases made me start doing computer based CD management. Never decided to go back to Escients. People are real happy with the computer server and the abilites to play back different stuff in different places. Or stream the home music to the office...