Here's one for you...

PermaBanned · 26 Apr 2011 at 21:19

Well i've finally had enough with the shoddy job my dad did of ripping all the cds, about a quarter of them are mp3, the rest are wma and a fair few of those have DRM meaning i can't even play them. I could convert the ones without DRM but i've tried that and the quality isn't nearly as good, plus i just don't have the CPU power to do that by the end of this year. Besides, they're all jumbled up and in no particular order.

So, long story short: i have 2000+ (rough estimate) CDs i want to rip to decent quality ogg. I also have four SCSI CD drives, six IDE CD drives and one PATA drive (note i can't guarantee that all of them work). Plan is to do the ripping on a Windows 98 computer i'm getting back from a friend in a few days, which i'll wipe and run linux on (probably just use the CPU and Motherboard from it actually, got plenty of other bits). Few questions:

Will this actually work or will it just fail miserably?
I remember something about the cable used making a difference for IDE and SCSI drives, i have a draw full of ribbon cables but what should i be looking for?
There probably won't be enough ports on the motherboard, but it looks like i can link all the SCSI drives together with one cable, meaning i would need 1 SCSI port, 4 IDE ports (one for the hard drive, only seem to be able to link two drives together with one cable), one PATA port and one USB port (for the external hard drive). I assume all this can be achieved at little expense through a trip to the MM for PCI cards?
Power. All but one of the drives use molex connections, plus the OS hard drive would probably need one too. All my PSUs seem to have only five or six. Is it possible to either use more than one PSU, or to increase this number using splitters or adapters? Another trip to the MM?
At some point it would probably be a good idea to find out some decent ripping software for Linux, and some post-ripping organizing software if such a thing exists. Not expecting many of you to be huge Linux fans, but if anyone has any ideas...

Thanks for any and all help, and for reading what in hindsight is probably a very large wall of text about an incredibly benign subject

stulid · 26 Apr 2011 at 21:26

If you got a multi core cpu, you can open multiple instances of what ever program you want to use to do the converting.

Set each instance to each individual core by going into the task manager in turn and setting the affinity to each core.

so if you had a quad core cpu, its possible to do 4 concurrent conversions at the same time.

You just have to sort out all the individual drives and wiring.

PermaBanned · 26 Apr 2011 at 21:50

Which is two at a time, each on not very powerful cores (E2140 @ stock). Would still take an age. Besides, there are other reasons for not wanting to convert them, namely i would have to go through and find all the ones not ruined with DRM, locate each album (since some are 'loose', some are under the artists name, some are under the artists name spelled differently and some are under another artist altogether).

I still think just starting over would be the better option, because it means that not only do i not have to search through the individual files, but i also do not have to search through the individual CDs, just have a massive 'in' pile then several days later have a massive 'out' pile.

Besides, i like getting my hands dirty with old hardware

stulid · 26 Apr 2011 at 21:53

Surely there must be some sort of search parameter that you can do to find the DRM ones?

PermaBanned · 26 Apr 2011 at 21:57

There might be some bash code... not sure how it would work though considering you sometimes only find out they have DRM when you try to play them.

I notice you're avoiding the original plan, is it actually workable at all?

stulid · 26 Apr 2011 at 22:00

You can use more than one PSU at the same time, you just need to connect the signal wires together that tell the PSU to turn on when the front button is pressed.
so both switch on at the same time, remembering to use two kettle leads.

or adapters - http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CB-004-AK&groupid=1929&catid=153&subcat=

A SCSI cable needs a termination link i believe after the last device, IDE can only have two devices per cable (master and slave)