Audiophiles hifi appreciation thread old and new

thought about offering a cd ripping service but i think it might get a bit boring after a while

Years ago (blimey, early 2000's) I was the techie in a group that came up with something very similar to the Brennan.

The prototype I knocked up with a Linux box demoed really well. You stuck a CD in and it would start playing, you could skip to the next track / etc and it all looked like a normal CD player (albeit in a huge box). But part way through playing the second track (usually about 5 minutes in) it would suddenly eject and the music was still playing, you could still skip forward/backwards/etc and select different tracks and it all still worked as if the CD was in there.

(Remember this was early 2000's, people thought this was some kind of voodoo)

Under the covers it was ripping the CD to raw data (using cdda2wav I think) as soon as you put the CD in and using that ripped data to play. If you skipped to the next track and it hadn't already started to rip that one it would stop the track it was ripping and rip/play the one you wanted, then go back and fill in the missing tracks. But it was great watching the faces of the people we were demoing it to when it just ejected part way through the spiel. It was even better when I got a faster CDROM drive and could rip things even faster (can't remember the speeds but ~5 minutes would make me think I had a 12x CDROM in there at the beginning).

The plan was to convert to FLAC or some other lossless format (FLAC was only just around in 2001) and allow people to store their entire CD collection on an internal HDD.

Broadband was also around and we also had the idea of allowing people to buy albums online and have it download the album over DSL to the box (assuming we'd already bought a copy and ripped it - the plan was to seed it with our own album collections and also regularly buy new albums when they came out - if we didn't have it they could pre-order it and we'd rush out to buy a copy and rip it ASAP). To try and avoid copyright/ownership issues we were going to buy a physical copy of each CD bought through the service (and store it for them - shipping it to them in batches as part of their monthly subscription).

Revenue was going to come from the unit sale plus a subscription if you wanted to buy stuff with the online service. We were also going to look to make money on each album sale through the system (hopefully making a small amount on each sale and also chasing cheaper prices by buying albums wholesale [if we got big enough] or in sales/promotions). I wasn't on the money or legal side of things...

Which all brings me to this point:-

thought about offering a cd ripping service but i think it might get a bit boring after a while

Having the prospect of needing to rip lots and lots of CDs, and quickly, we came up with various plans, in the end we looked at using PCs in big tower cases with as many CD drives as possible and automate as much of it as possible (metadata and artwork parts). With CD drives with a 50x read speed you could do a typical album in just over a minute. With 8 such drives in a tower you'd be swapping CDs about every 10 seconds, nowhere near enough time to deal with the artwork/metadata manual checks. We'd planned on doing two runs with each CD (in two different machines/drives) in order to ensure the data was read correctly.

With 2 drives and two passes you'd get about a minute to do the manual stuff with each CD (metadata checks and artwork stuff). The artwork is much easier nowadays as there are plenty of services that will get you that info from the metadata.

It's dull but if you can get someone to pay you to stick CDs in a machine once a minute every minute for a day (for ~400 CDs) whilst working from home then it could work out. The biggest cost/annoyance for the people involved would be transit of the raw media, easier if you just did it for friends who could box it up for you and deliver it in person somehow.

The project died for several reasons. We had too many non-technical people who all wanted to get involved, not enough non-technical work to do, and not enough technical people (only me really). We were all working at a tech startup anyway so we all had enough to do in our day jobs.

#csb

Well done to J.Brennan who had the same idea (probably earlier) and executed on it successfully.