Best CD drive for ripping audio?

[Shawn T. Rutledge]

On Sun, Aug 12, 2001 at 01:40:48AM -0700, KevinO wrote:
> I suspect that processor power can make a difference here - especially
> if you are encoding as you rip as I often do. The drive is definitly the

Well yes.  Encoding is slower than ripping for me; I am still running 
dual PII/233's.  But I could distribute that task to other machines, too.
And I might just put a drive just for ripping in my dual Celeron box 
that I use as a server; it should be faster there and that is where I'm
storing MP3's anyway.  I want to set up a script so if I put an audio
disc in that drive it goes ahead and rips it.  In this scenario I'd
rather have a cheaper CD drive rather than putting a CD-RW in that box.
Maybe a 32X Plextor, I heard those are good for ripping?

One of these days I'll probably get one of those Athlon Fry's specials
for my main box.

I want to try to do some image processing with video collected from cameras
around the house (try to have it alert me if somebody other than the
mailman comes to the front door, would be the ultimate goal) and I
suspect the ole dual-PII box will be good for that after I've replaced
it as my main workstation.  And it has a lot of PCI slots which will
be good for putting in several video grabber boards.

Which encoder do you use?  I used Blade because I heard it was the best;
but I ripped some Russian lessons (for practicing in the car on the way
to work) and they don't sound so good - like echoes in a tunnel.  Maybe
Blade is good for music but not so good for speech?  Also I think I did
it at 90-something bps; I'm sure I could get better quality at higher
bitrate, but this echo-y stuff wasn't the sort of artifacts I was 
expecting.  I figured I'd just lose some of the frequency range and that
would be OK.

-- 
  _______                   Shawn T. Rutledge / KB7PWD  ecloud@bigfoot.com
 (_  | |_)                       http://ecloud.org  kb7pwd@kb7pwd.ampr.org
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