Skip to main content

Notice

Please note that most of the software linked on this forum is likely to be safe to use. If you are unsure, feel free to ask in the relevant topics, or send a private message to an administrator or moderator. To help curb the problems of false positives, or in the event that you do find actual malware, you can contribute through the article linked here.
Topic: External DVD drives with XLD (Read 11845 times) previous topic - next topic
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

External DVD drives with XLD

Hi there,

Like many I'm thinking of going the lossless library route, I've recently bought a new Macbook Pro, and imported about 300 discs lossless in iTunes, now I'm thinking about bitting the bullet and doing all my main library which is about 1000 discs, will dump the rest that I haven't listened to in years.

Not wanting to ruin my internal drive in the Macbook Pro as I plan on keeping it for at least a good few years, I've been thinking about getting an external drive, as replacing the external is easier and cheaper in the future. I've been looking at the Lacie USB2 DVD drives.

Has anyone tried any of these external drives with XLD?

Flow will be, External DVD drive > XLD > FLAC > ALAC > iTunes.

Intending to store all the CD's in FLAC as it's easier over the long run and can convert easily to any format. Got loads of space so storage is no problem.

Any help / advice would be great, would like to order the external drive ASAP and get started, thats if external drives work with XLD.

Thanks

External DVD drives with XLD

Reply #1
Hi there,

Like many I'm thinking of going the lossless library route, I've recently bought a new Macbook Pro, and imported about 300 discs lossless in iTunes, now I'm thinking about bitting the bullet and doing all my main library which is about 1000 discs, will dump the rest that I haven't listened to in years.

Not wanting to ruin my internal drive in the Macbook Pro as I plan on keeping it for at least a good few years, I've been thinking about getting an external drive, as replacing the external is easier and cheaper in the future. I've been looking at the Lacie USB2 DVD drives.

Has anyone tried any of these external drives with XLD?

Flow will be, External DVD drive > XLD > FLAC > ALAC > iTunes.

Intending to store all the CD's in FLAC as it's easier over the long run and can convert easily to any format. Got loads of space so storage is no problem.

Any help / advice would be great, would like to order the external drive ASAP and get started, thats if external drives work with XLD.

Thanks


I haven't had any problems but the speed isn't all that good so if you're going to rip 1000 discs then prepared to wait for a while.

Btw, do you have AppleCare? if there is one thing to purchase it is AppleCare since I have it both on my iMac and MacBook - it has saved me a couple of times, my DVD drive in my iMac being an example of something that was replaced because of it.

External DVD drives with XLD

Reply #2
Quote
I haven't had any problems but the speed isn't all that good so if you're going to rip 1000 discs then prepared to wait for a while.

Btw, do you have AppleCare? if there is one thing to purchase it is AppleCare since I have it both on my iMac and MacBook - it has saved me a couple of times, my DVD drive in my iMac being an example of something that was replaced because of it.


I do have applecare, got it dirt cheap. I've had the machine for a few months now and after the 300 CDs done so far I don't really want to wreck the drive. Well thats the option anyway, wreck the drive and get it replaced, but this is my main machine and don't really want to be without it or buy an external for all the ripping to save the drive. I'm guessing the 300 i've has just broke the drive in a bit as these things normally last years.

Ripping speed on the internal is poor as is, 2.5x with C2 off, 4.5x with C2 On. Can it really get much worse than this?

Thanks

External DVD drives with XLD

Reply #3
I am using an external ATAPI DVD A in a firewire case and i have had no issues at all ripping 100's of cd's. Speed has been many times faster than the internal in my iMac and MacMini.  The slot loading drives on the iMacs are extremely terrible in performance, speed and build quality. I had many replaced under Apple Care until i just gave up and went bough an external.

External DVD drives with XLD

Reply #4
Quote
I haven't had any problems but the speed isn't all that good so if you're going to rip 1000 discs then prepared to wait for a while.

Btw, do you have AppleCare? if there is one thing to purchase it is AppleCare since I have it both on my iMac and MacBook - it has saved me a couple of times, my DVD drive in my iMac being an example of something that was replaced because of it.


I do have applecare, got it dirt cheap. I've had the machine for a few months now and after the 300 CDs done so far I don't really want to wreck the drive. Well thats the option anyway, wreck the drive and get it replaced, but this is my main machine and don't really want to be without it or buy an external for all the ripping to save the drive. I'm guessing the 300 i've has just broke the drive in a bit as these things normally last years.

Ripping speed on the internal is poor as is, 2.5x with C2 off, 4.5x with C2 On. Can it really get much worse than this?

Thanks


Well it would be a lot of CD's to rip but I'd argue that fair wear and tear should mean that if you flog the drive and get it replaced within the 3 years then it would be cheaper than going to buy an external one.

As for the speed, I'm sitting at around 2.7x but on some difficult CD's it drops so I guess it can't any slower than that really.

I am using an external ATAPI DVD A in a firewire case and i have had no issues at all ripping 100's of cd's. Speed has been many times faster than the internal in my iMac and MacMini.  The slot loading drives on the iMacs are extremely terrible in performance, speed and build quality. I had many replaced under Apple Care until i just gave up and went bough an external.


I wish there as an easier way to replace the slot loading drives with something better without having to use an external drive. Yeah, the drives are a bit noisy and there are a lot of criticisms by customers that for a such a gorgeous machine it is a let down by nickle and diming on getting the most dirty cheap DVD/CD drive humanly possible on the market.

External DVD drives with XLD

Reply #5
Just take the plunge and go external you'll be so happy you did. The performance is far superior. They are dirt cheap these days. Go firewire from my experience they have performed better.

Apple don't care for physical media. There are reports that their computers in 2011 wont have dvd drivers.

External DVD drives with XLD

Reply #6
Just been playing about with XLD and doing some tests with a CD I know isn't great. On the Macbook Pro using CD Paranoia and C2 off I get about 1.5 / 2.0x, and got bad reads, errors of various kinds. Tried running XLD on my 6 year old Powerbook G4 and read fine with the same settings, no errors and speeds in the range of 4.5-7.5x. So I guess the drives in the MBP are like were mentioned above and just nasty anyway. Will look at the external DVD drives. I'm swaying toward the Lacie d2 external DVD drive as I've got a few of the Lacie d2 external HD's and they have been pretty good over the years.

I take it there is no problem disabling the cache and C2 pointers on these drives? There is a lack of info about all this stuff which is shame.

Thanks for the replies so far.

External DVD drives with XLD

Reply #7
Looked at both the USB and USB + Firewire drives and USB is quite a bit cheaper. Any dis-advantages? Sorry for all the questions just looking forward to spending some time converting all the stuff next weekend and over christmas.

Thanks

External DVD drives with XLD

Reply #8
From my experience USB has been slower (not by much), far less reliable too many times the computer refuses to see the drive need a restart or unplug the drive and plug it back in. Scratched disc always have worked better from Firewire.

The price should be about the same. If you buy a DVD drive and external case and put it together yourself. My father bought a usb case and i bought a usb+firewire case for 5$ more. $70Australian  all up i paid.

They are extremely easy to put together.


External DVD drives with XLD

Reply #10
Whenever i have used USB and the discs just wont rip in xld switching over to firewire the discs have worked. The same external dual case (usb+firewire) using the same drive obviously.

Could be something specific to my case but thats my experience.

External DVD drives with XLD

Reply #11
From a USB perspective, I've never had a problem with reliability or speed with two different drives over the course of the past five years or so:  an Acer in a no-name enclosure, and a Lite-On in an old ADS Tech enclosure.  They both can hit 40X+ near the end of 60-70 min. discs in burst mode.

Now, the qualifier is "in burst mode", with both XLD and EAC (under WinXP).  I've always gotten unusably slow speeds when attempting secure ripping (like ~3X or slower)...not sure if that's a USB thing or just those particular drives.  The other odd thing is that XLD will only spin the drive up to full speed when ripping to WAV or AIFF.  If it's encoding on-the-fly to FLAC or MP3, the drive just starts at its "idle" speed - ~5X - and very slowly picks up from there, even though my Mac Mini can do level 8 file-to-file FLAC encoding at 16-18X.

I don't have access to a Firewire to IDE adapter (no more cases, argh!) to do a comparison, and from a little Googling around, they appear to be very rare...hell, a USB 2.0 to Ultra SCSI (?!) adapter popped up, but still no Firewire to IDE "dongle".
"Not sure what the question is, but the answer is probably no."


External DVD drives with XLD

Reply #13
I have a 2008 aluminum MacBook and my external drive is a Plextor PX-B310U. It's a blu-ray reader, DVD/CD writer.

I recently used XLD to rip my entire CD collection into FLAC. Had C2 on, used CDParanoia, all that good stuff. The majority of my discs are clean. It ripped at around 24x, encoding on the fly. All discs were ripped accurately with high confidence. So it was fast and accurate over USB. No problems.

In Windows, EAC usually rips around 3-9x depending on the length of the disc.

External DVD drives with XLD

Reply #14
Hmm, interesting...

@fearcampaign: Is the enclosure Plextor-branded, as well, or is it a different make?

@greynol:  Just to clarify - by chipsets, you mean USB<->IDE/SATA bridges in the external enclosures?

I'm wondering if this is a drive-specific cache issue - I don't see any option in XLD to explicitly disable caching.  Does it try to automatically determine if a drive caches audio?
"Not sure what the question is, but the answer is probably no."

 

External DVD drives with XLD

Reply #15
Yes I mean the bridge chips.

Regarding fearcampaign's "all that good stuff," from my limited understanding, I thought use of C2 pointers and cdparanoia were mutually exclusive.

Anyway, I know very little about XLD but w/respect to EAC and speed, if your drive caches audio data you pay a severe penalty.  EAC's cache flushing routine is inefficient.  3MB is read to get 1MB of data in secure mode w/o C2 pointers; 2MB w/ C2 pointers, regardless of how much data your drive actually caches.  Minimal flushing should be necessary when working w/ C2 pointers, but Andre wanted to ensure regular synchronization of the data, even with drives that have "Accurate Stream".  With much of the extra data being read using C2 pointers w/caching drives EAC could be checking for inconsistent errors that don't get flagged.  For those who don't understand what I'm saying, don't worry about it; it has nothing to do with XLD except to explain why EAC can be so slow.  Why people insist upon using secure T&C with caching drives or even secure mode when it turns out they could get AR verification in burst mode is beyond me.

External DVD drives with XLD

Reply #16
Hmm, interesting...

@fearcampaign: Is the enclosure Plextor-branded, as well, or is it a different make?

@greynol:  Just to clarify - by chipsets, you mean USB<->IDE/SATA bridges in the external enclosures?

I'm wondering if this is a drive-specific cache issue - I don't see any option in XLD to explicitly disable caching.  Does it try to automatically determine if a drive caches audio?


It's all Plextor branded. http://www.plextoramericas.com/index.php/b...lu-ray/px-b310u


Regarding fearcampaign's "all that good stuff," from my limited understanding, I thought use of C2 pointers and cdparanoia were mutually exclusive.


I wouldn't know either. I just know that XLD gave me the option to use it or not. So I selected it as well as the options to use AccurateRip and "verify suspicious sectors".

Either way it ripped relatively fast and every disc came out as "accurately ripped".

I also tried XLD's "XLD Secure Ripper" and got the same result at roughly the same speed.

XLD also correctly set the offset correction value's automatically for my internal drive and the external.

I've been listening to what I ripped over the last couple of weeks and so far so good. No audible errors.

External DVD drives with XLD

Reply #17
@greynol: I'm completely with you on that last sentence, and that's what makes the weirdness of XLD's "non-spin up" behavior in burst mode (with my drives) when encoding on-the-fly so frustrating.

It has the excellent options of "Test and Copy" + "Only when the track does not exist in the AccurateRip DB" - a great combination of speed and security.

I may just have to break down and pick up a USB + FireWire 5.25" enclosure to be able to do some more in-depth bug hunting...
"Not sure what the question is, but the answer is probably no."

External DVD drives with XLD

Reply #18
Drive came today, internal mech is the TSSTcorp CDDVDW SH-S223L (revision SB03). All working fine, just did a test rip and got speeds in the range of 6x-11x. Reports no drive cache, ripped with XLD, CDParanoia 10.2, C2 Off sounded great.

Thanks for the help.