A ripping fool

Posted on December 29, 2005 No Comments

Today we decided to bite the bullet and join the 90s. Yep, time to rip the CD collection to one centralized spot so that the myself, the wife and the kids stop this mad urge to keep MP3’s on every machine. This also positions us nicely for that [future] day when I bring home some sort of media appliance that will play MP3s from our network through the home stereo.

Anyways… man, what a pain!

Had 3 machines working in parallel and got through about 95 CDs this evening. Not too terrible, but tedious as all heck.

My original bright idea was to map 2 of the 3 to a directory on the “main” machine. Thus, all 3 would be ripping to the same spot. Well, Windows Media Player (wmp) just didn’t seem too impressed by that concept. I suspect the issue was all 3 machines were trying to keep their internal libraries current and seemingly “locking” each other out of the drive. I dunno really, I just know it didn’t work too welll. Lots of locked up machines. So, I ended up having my machine rip to the central location and the other 2 ripping to their local drives. Then periodically I’d close all 3 machines’ WMPs and move the 2 sets of songs to the main area. Thus, the tedium.

For now I’m ripping everything to a bit different than the wmp defaults (wma @ 128 kbps). I decided to go with mp3 format at 192kpbs. Little on the large side, but should I ever need to recreate a CD this seems like a logical way to go. Granted, I just read an article pointing out how even experts couldn’t always spot the difference between a 128 and 256kbps sample song… so maybe I should reconsider and knock it back to 128? Dunno.

Tomorrow afternoon I figure I’ll do about another 50 or 60 more and basically have most of our stuff converted. Then… I might talk to these guys a bit…