I thought I would start a new thread as I have discovered, what to anyone that knows maths and systems is probably blindingly obvious.
Firstly I downloaded dB poweramp to a single PC. £29
I then bought a USB DVD writer at low cost. £20
I already have a USB 3 1Tb drive and a 500gig hard drive.
dBPoweramp seems to allow you to run multiple copies simultaneously on the same PC, allocating a CD drive and a hard drive to each piece of open software.
By seperating the CD's out into two piles, clean CD's and scratchy CD's you can ensure that when you put a scratchy CD in drive A, drive B continues to work at full speed processing good CD's. The throughput of drive B is thus not effected by the slow scratchy ones. Also non-ripping activities such as unboxing and changing CD's occur whilst the other drive is still ripping.
So for £20 my throughput of rips is at least 4x faster.
I also chose to save as FLAC 0, because it is quick. Presumably if I wanted to I could batch convert seperately overnight?
Any other tips for increasing speed for multiple rips?
I wouldn't worry about using FLAC 0. I use the default FLAC 5, and on my system the encoding, done in parallel with ripping, finishes seconds after the last track has finished ripping.
I don't understand why adding a second drive quadruples your speed?
like resistors in parallel, 1/2 x a 1/2
like resistors in parallel, 1/2 x a 1/2
?
Two equal resistors in parallel have half the resistance, pass twice the current and dissipate twice the wattage.
Your throughput would be at best 2× faster, not 4× – and the former is probably hopelessly optimistic, even if you have two cores and fully allocate one to each ripping process, a condition that you didn’t specify either way.
Your throughput would be at best 2× faster, not 4× – and the former is probably hopelessly optimistic, even if you have two cores and fully allocate one to each ripping process, a condition that you didn’t specify either way.
No the minimum advantage to throughput is a factor of two. The process of taking a CD and transfering the data onto a PC involves other tasks than ripping, inserting and removing CD's, cleaning them, putting them back in their cases, clicking the mouse etc. that all adds up and multiplies by the time the drives aren't ripping to form the rate determining steps of the process when you are only ripping from one drive. By utilising another drive multiple serial tasks that get shifted into parallel tasks and the slow throughput of a certain CD doesn't overtly damage the speed of the whole process because the other drive is able to carry on working at 30x speed. It's a numbers game, there are many more good CD's than bad ones, so by only ever putting a bad CD into 1 drive at once the throughput remains much higher. I'm only trying to explain what I can see in front of me.
I think you're deluding yourself, but whatever...