ripping a lot of CDs

[jlittle]

I'm getting around to my CD project. My family has about 200 CDs, about half classical, that will be rubbish if their format isn't shifted.

I found an old DVD computer drive and have "connected" it to my desktop. (It can't fit it the drive bay because there isn't a SATA power cable long enough, so it just hangs out the side.)

It works but is slow and noisy. I wonder if a more modern, USB, drive would be significantly quicker, and maybe quieter?

[claydoh]

Quieter, possibly. These USB ones are laptop drives put into a slim case. I have one myself. It is noisy but probably acceptable.

Faster or slower, I am not sure. It might be if it is USB 3, but I still think SATA is faster, though I don't know if the drive itself can send data fast enough for either.
With a quick test ripping a disc, it seems like it is much faster than when I last had and used an optical drive in a PC, probably around 2016

I am in the same situation, but with my wife's DVD collection -- she used to own a local rental shop back in the day, and has at least a thousand DVDs just on one bookshelf, and more in storage.
That's what the USB DVD drive is for, once I get my NAS out of mothballs.

I hate to say it, but I probably will just hoist the Jolly Roger and sail into a bay for most of these. It will be sooo much faster and easier now that I am on an unmetered connection. It is a gray area, really, but I do have the physical media, which will be kept.

[newiron09]

This is a reasonable solution and probably what I would do. Scaling raspberry pis is kind of janky, but your problem’s parameters are kind of janky. Unless money is absolutely not an issue, I would do something like this.

Tutuapp 9Apps

[jlittle]

I persisted with the old DVD drive. After some hardware adventure (the PSU failed, maybe the extra load from the DVD drive tipped it over) I completed the ripping. 42 GB of .flac files.

[claydoh]

I am slowly ripping DVDs now, but the cheap no name USB drive died. I got a better ASUS one, and have started the journey.
I discovered a tool that automates this, but it is not ...uncomplicated to install and use

https://github.com/automatic-ripping...ipping-machine

It is a bit overkill as I don't need to encode my DVDs. If they were Blu rays, it would be necessary. But it helps with file naming, etc. and has a web ui.