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| Triple Threat |
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| SATA Multilane Connector |
So my CD ripping situation is that I put a CD into the CD reading thing there (more about that in a thrilling later blog article), hit a key in Emacs, slap a CD cover onto the scanner, hit another key in Emacs to say that the format is (usually RET), and then inspect the CDDB data that Emacs presents me with, and then I `C-c C-c’, and then I repeat. Since I have three CD players, I can do three CDs in parallel. The time to process one CD is about two minutes, but with the parallelism going on, I can usually process about twenty CDs in ten minutes. (Unless the CDDB info is missing and I have to type stuff in.)
I started on this journey in 1997, when mp3s first became viable. So over the years, I’ve ripped CDs as I bought them. The earliest mp3-encoded albums started sounding pretty crappy to me, since the early mp3 encoders were pretty crappy. By 2007, disks had gotten so cheap that it was viable to store the music in a lossless format, so I decided to re-rip them all and store the music in flac.
Now, I have around 4K CDs. Ripping them all in the traditional, sequential way would just take too long. I don’t really deal well with repetetive, boring, manual tasks. And since I had ripped all these CDs before, all the data was already in freedb, so it would be a totally mindless manual job.
So I bought the Addonics cabinet seen above, which has a SATA multilane connector, and put three DVD readers into it. The only problem in getting it to work reliably was that since all the readers were identical (I mean totally), and the SATA cabinet would bring them up in random order, the poor Linux udev system would name them /dev/scdX at random. So I would never know how to address the top one until after trying 0, 1, 2.
Until I came up with the brilliant idea of uploading different versions of the available Optiarc firmware on each DVD reader. They worked just as well with any firmware, but the firmware versions allowed me to create udev rules to differentiate.
scsi 7:0:0:0: CD-ROM Optiarc DVD RW AD-7170S 1.02 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
scsi 5:0:0:0: CD-ROM Optiarc DVD RW AD-7170S 1.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
scsi 6:0:0:0: CD-ROM Optiarc DVD RW AD-7170S 1.03 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
With the 3-way parallel ripping setup I think I did all 4K over four nights, if I remember correctly. While listening to music very loudly, and watching some tv series on DVD (Smallville?), and being totally shit-faced drunk.
Ah, fun times. At least I think it was fun. I can’t really remember, for some reason or other.
Anyway, here’s the source code for the Emacs parallel DAE interface.