CD Rip Station
From Pumping Station: One Wiki
Concept
Provide a means to automatically rip large quantities of audio CDs to the format of your choosing with minimal user interaction.
Directions and Plans
PS:One Rip Station
I purchased a JVC MC-1200U Medium Changer for next to nothing on eBay (in their heyday, the devices retailed for up to $8,000). It has a library of 200 discs with 4-32x Plextor CD-ROM drives, and connects via SCSI. I have tested the device under Ubuntu and Fedora Linux, although newer Ubuntu kernels don't scan multiple LUNs on boot, so the system will hang on boot without a custom kernel (or hot-plugging in the device), and (for some strange reason) Fedora 10 and up have a bug where audio CDs aren't recognized under Gnome. However, Windows 2003 to 2008 will recognize the device, although support for Medium Changers was discontinued in newer version. Under both Windows and Unix flavors, MTX can be used to control the device.
I then picked up Batch Ripper, a component of dBpoweramp which handles the logic regarding what to rip, what to move where, the metadata lookups, and the actual ripping and encoding of the audio files.
The only difficulty, then, is providing an interface for Batch Ripper to talk to MTX under Windows. The Batch Ripper program uses the command line to call executables to perform four key functions: load a disc (Load.exe), unload a disc (Unload.exe), reject a disc (Reject.exe, used if a disc is unreadable, or there's no metadata, for example, and similar in functionality to Unload.exe), and perform an action before a rip (Pre-Batch.exe).
Sounds easy, but the devil is always in the details.
Update 1: The first issue has cropped up, and it's a doozy. It turns out that in order for the drive to rip CD audio, they must support MMC-3. Given that MMC-3 is a relatively recent standard, it's no surprise that the drives don't support it, as the device was manufactured in 1997. The logical approach would be to replace the drives with more modern SCSI drives (DVD drives, even!), but the drives have a non-standard form factor. If emails to the manufacturers are not helpful in acquiring replacement drives that are built for the unit, it will become necessary to acquire 4-to-6 "recent" SCSI CD or DVD drives and then hack them into the drive carriers. Without having a drive on-hand to test, how difficult this will be is yet to be determined.
Update 2: The issue with the JVC remains, but for the time being, it has been replaced by a 200-disc, 2-drive Powerfile R200 library which works just fine thankyouverymuch.
Update 3: Added some functionality to the server so that the user will be prompted to enter in their email address upon login and the system will automatically email them the results of the rip upon completion. Required the installation of sendemail (a command line email client), setting of a User Variable called EMAIL in the under the via System Properties, calling of a truly basic batch file at login to get the email and set the EMAIL variable (persistently) and finally another truly basic batch file compiled as an executable via Bat To Exe Converter and called automatically by the rip program upon completion of the rip.
