Karaoke Forums

Hi,

After having researched how to rip I thought I would offer this short description for any would be ripper. I have been able to rip my karaoke collection (~100 discs) fairly quickly (over a few days).

I bought a Plextor PX712A dvd writer. According to everything I have read if you want to get high quality rips Plextor is the way to go. When I bought mine there was deal so I got it for $68.

For ripping I use Audiograbber. The software is free and it reads CD+G's. So far I have not had a bad rip. Instead of keying in all the track/artist info I just key in the disc number for each disc. My songs are therefore (for now) labeled ex. SC7501-02 etc. To speed up the process I rip to wave+g. Then each night I perform batch encoding using UniversalFront. This allows me to rip ~20 cd's in an evening (at speed 8x) while doing other things and the encoding is performed in my sleep.

I encode the music both in FLAC as well as Ogg Vorbis. UnviersalFront allows me to run both encoders and place the outputs in their own directory structures. Ex. I use karaoke/library/discnumber for the ogg+g files and karaoke/Archival/discnumber for the flac files. Having the flac files (lossless compression) allows me in the future to encode to another lossy format without having to rip all my cd+g's again. Also when players in the future support it, I can do flac+g. Ripping to flac there future-proofs my efforts (Winamp plays ogg+g, but at the moment not flac+g).

For flac I use setting 5, which is a reasonable compromise between speed and size, and for Ogg I use quality 6 which output variable bitrate files with an average bit rate of ~190 kb/s. This results in excellent sound quality. The downside is slightly larger files, but to me is worth it since a 200 GB harddrive is not that expensive.

All my files are stored on an external harddrive so that I don't wear down the small internal harddrive in the laptop. I bought a 200 GB ATA-100 drive and put it in an external firewire/usb2 enclosure. To ensure longevity it is important that the enclosure is well ventilated. It is also a good idea to get an enclosure with a fast chipset for converting the ATA bus to firewire/usb2. After some research I found out that the "AMS Venus DS3" fulfilled all these desires. It is somewhat more expensive (~$50) than the cheaper enclosures, but it only takes one dead harddrive (from thermal overload) to more than make up for the difference!

So as I said earlier all my files are for now named by disc#-track#. However, the digicat software from Sound Choice (and all my cd+g's are from Sound Choice) can export a tracklisting of your SC CD+G's in text format. I intend to write a little program (unless I find it somewhere) that imports the tracklisting, goes through the directory structure, matches the temporary name with the database and then renames the files to the desired naming scheme. In this way I have saved significant time compared to keying everything in myself.

Hope this is of some help.

Morten

thanks so much for the replies in ref to copying disks in a different key. i must admit i'm not familiar with much of the tech talk about the software. this is all new to me but i will try to learn.

thanks again, bart

Morten, why don't you rip straight to mp3+g with Audiograbber? I do. Saves a TON of time.

* Click on CD on the top bar. (File CD Settings Help)
* Slide your arrow down the options to about 1/3 the way down to Grab CDG tracks (Karaoke), but DO NOT CLICK. This brings up another window... the bottom option is grab to .cdg + compressed file.


This saves you the time to re-do tracks you're already grabbing. Audiograbber allows you to do both at the same time.

Knightshow,

I want to encode in both flac and ogg not mp3.

I did set it up with Mareo so that I could rip a cd and then immediately thereafter encode it in both ogg and flac. However, doing it this way took 30 min for each cd (the encoding takes a lot more time than the ripping) and I would therefore only be able to do a handful cd's in an evening. Doing what I described above allows me to rip a lot of cd's in one evening and then let the computer perform the encoding during night (last night it encoded for 9 hours). Batch encoding is just so much more convinient.

Morten

Ohhhh kay... gotcha.

And you're right... setting up the computer to do the encoding is a good thing. I personally when I was doing the encoding to mp3 preferred to be there overseeing it, even if it was running in the background.