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Comment by LiquidPolymer

2 days ago

I also thought this was a longevity test.

I do love optical media and have a considerable CD, DVD, minidisc, and blu-ray collection. Like a Luddite, I still enjoy burning my own.

I especially like my Superscope disc copier. It completely disregards copy protection and I frequently make a backup of my favorite CDs which I store. Although much of my stock are older blanks (like those listed in this article)I’ll be sad if CD-R disappears from the market.

29 comments

LiquidPolymer

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Teever  2 days ago

Could you recommend a usb CD drive for ripping audio CDs? A local library that I frequent has an extensive jazz collection and I'd like to rip it before they remove it, as I think it's just a matter of time before they do so.

  • Lammy  2 days ago

    If you just want to rip audio CDs, pretty much any USB drive ever made will be fine. If you want a drive that can do everything up to and including UHD BD, try a Pioneer BDR-XS07UHD if you like slot loading or a Pioneer BDR-XD07B if you need a top-loader with snap-spindle for mini CDs or oddly-shaped CDs. These will cost way more than an old USB2-era drive but will be brand new.

    You might be able to trawl your local thrift store and walk out with a $5 external drive from the 2000s, but a drive like that should be opened, dusted out, lens cleaned, and rails lubricated with some PTFE grease: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0081JE0OO

    Exact Audio Copy is still the gold standard for ripping software, and here's how to configure it: https://zexwoo.blog/en/posts/tutorials/eac-ripping/

    Or XLD if you're on Mac: https://zexwoo.blog/en/posts/tutorials/xld-ripping/

    • amiga386  2 days ago

      > pretty much any USB drive ever made will be fine.

      This is not the case. Most of the cheap drives on Amazon sold by random capital letters people are complete shit. As an example, the "CB31005" drive doesn't fucking work. It often gets hung up on reading the TOC and won't even admit there is a CD in the drive. If it doesn't hang there, it reads fine for a while, then at some random point (possibly the first point of error) just gives up and fails to read sectors, forevermore, until you unplug and replug the drive.

      Even with EAC (which is indeed very good), it just spends hours re-reading sectors up to its maximum number of retries, giving up, and inserting silence. Do not buy a CB31005.

      1 reply →

    • GTP  2 days ago

      > Exact Audio Copy is still the gold standard for ripping software

      What makes it the best? I assumed that, since you're just reading digital data, any ripping software would do the same job in terms of quality, and the only differences would mostly be about having some convenient features or a better UI.

      1 reply →

  • jogu  2 days ago

    Any drive will be capable of ripping just fine. If you really want to get into the nitty gritty finding a drive with well known read offsets and the ability to defeat the drive cache is a good bet so you can compare against the accuraterip database.

    https://www.accuraterip.com/driveoffsets.htm

    • rahimnathwani  1 day ago

      Not all CD-ROM drives, even those that can play audio, can be used to rip digital audio. Some only have an analogue audio output for playing CDs. I know at least some IDE CD-ROM drives can't read digital audio.

      It might be true that all SATA drives can read digital audio.

  • tuyiown  2 days ago

    Note of caution about others comments that suggests using cheap CD drive, audio CDs tracks have no redundancy checks, and production of ripping artifacts is directly related to the drive raw accuracy.

    That said CD seek is so slow that drives cannot really afford to rely much on redundancy checks, so maybe this is not of concern.

  • eisa01  2 days ago

    If you have an old mac, you can take out the SuperDrive and use that!

    Worked flawlessly in contrast to a no-name USB DVD drive I bought on AliExpress

    • Lammy  1 day ago

      Fun fact: in the G4/G5 era, the SuperDrive was a Pioneer DVR-1xx rebadged. That's how I got into them in the first place :)

      This is also why the Pioneer-branded models work just perfectly in Mac OS 9 and every version of Mac OS X with no PatchBurn necessary: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/patchburn

    • mahrain  2 days ago

      My experience with Aliexpress USB CD drives is they contain recycled laptop optical drives, sometimes over a decade old!

  • fbnlsr  2 days ago

    As others said, the only thing you should be looking for is a drive that works with Accuraterip. Ripping discs from my local library is a hobby of mine and I've discovered so much music from there. I still buy CDs from thrift shops and the occasional garage sale, but having my music collection neatly organized and ripped/verified in FLAC is something I enjoy a lot.

  • fsckboy  2 days ago

    any CD-R drive can do that, and they are dirt cheap (you should only say CD for audio which refers to audio output rather than the audio CDs themselves) CD-R drives can read audio CDs.

    so can DVD-R drives with computer interfaces.

Mistletoe  2 days ago

Do you have any advice for burning CD-Rs that will play on old players? My Sony CD changer, and the CD players in both cars won’t play CD-Rs I make. They play CDs fine. I assume it is because the lasers have gotten weaker with time and can’t read the CD-Rs which don’t have as much difference between a 1 and 0 pit compared to stamped CDs? I even ordered Verbatim ones with blue azo dye that was supposed to help but still no dice.