Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Dave T]

While visiting a friend this weekend, I set him up with the trial of MC9, and started him along the path of ripping his vast CD collection.  Unfortunately, Auto-Rip doesn't seem yet ready for prime-time.  I did a search on the message board here, and it looks like most of our problems have been brought up already, but I didn't see any assurances from J River people that they would be fixed.   At the risk of redundancy, I'll try to list what we saw.  Do you plan on fixing these before MC9 is released?

His system was a new Dell, with two CD drives.  We were trying to auto-rip by inserting cd's in each drive concurrently.

1) Set up MC9 to associate with audio CD's.  Set option to rip on CD insertion.
This should be equivalent to having "auto rip" permanently turned on, and would be awesome if it worked.  What we saw was that MC9 would correctly start up and start ripping the first two cd's inserted, and would eject both cd's when the second one was done.  When you then inserted a new cd, it would crash every time.

2) Turned off "associate with audio cd's".  
Then, it would get a little further, but after ripping a few cd's, it would either crash, or not see new cd's put in the drives.  We'd have to stop and restart MJ, and never got past 5 or 6 rips before this happened.

3) When you're trying to rip from both drives, it won't eject the cd in the first drive, after it finishes ripping that one.  
Instead, it waits for both rips to be done before it ejects the cd's.  Obviously, it would be preferable if it ejected cd's as it finished them.  Can this be fixed?

Nice to haves:

5) Showing time elapsed/remaining as it rips.
When you're doing a mega-rip of many cd's, it's all about knowing when the computer is going to next need to be fed.

6)Show album names
I really think it should show album names, and not just the song titles - I frequently rip cd's where I'm not familiar with the names of the songs.

Thanks.

- Dave

[JohnT]

There have been several bug fixes for auto-rip/play incorporated into the build for later today. Hopefully you won't experience the crashes anymore. Please try it out.

Thanks,
John T.
JRiver, Inc.

[jeffh]

There have been several bug fixes for auto-rip/play incorporated into the build for later today. Hopefully you won't experience the crashes anymore. Please try it out.

Thanks,
John T.
JRiver, Inc.

Great news. Auto rip is currently the bigest wart on this really great product!

[Dave T]

Ok, I tried it on my computer over the weekend.  It no longer seems to crash, but I did see some funky behavior.  I'm running on a PC with two cd drives, and was trying to auto-rip off of both of them.  I set the option to "associate with audio cd"'s, and verified that the association took by looking in the "file types" under Windows Explorer.  But, I couldn't get MJ to start up when I inserted a CD.  The mouse cursor would show the little picture of a CD, then nothing.

If I started MC and then inserted CD's, auto-rip seemed to work, for a while at least.  But, after 3 or 4 rips, it got into a state where it thought that one cd was another.  I had ripped a James Taylor album early in the rip, and then later on it thought that a "Red Hot Chili Peppers" album was the James Taylor album (talk about being confused!).  Even after I restarte MC9, it thought that RHCP was James Taylor.

Then, after a while, it would no longer recognize new CD's.

Not sure if you need to go through a special sequence of events to reproduce these issues, but I imagine that if you test with a two cd system, you'll run into them pretty quickly.

What else....

I still think it would be nice to show album names - it's hard to see what's going on without it.

And, another question: is there a way to either do the freedb lookup (or whatever MC uses) after doing a batch of rips (like you can do with the album name lookup), or download the song name db locally?  This isn't a problem for me, but was a big problem for my friend, who uses dialup on the only phone line in the house.  He wants to rip several hundred cd's, and doesn't want to lose the use of his phone for the few weeks that will take.

- Dave

[JimH]

... is there a way to either do the freedb lookup (or whatever MC uses) after doing a batch of rips (like you can do with the album name lookup), or download the song name db locally?  This isn't a problem for me, but was a big problem for my friend, who uses dialup on the only phone line in the house.  He wants to rip several hundred cd's, and doesn't want to lose the use of his phone for the few weeks that will take.

Put the CD's in the drive while connected to the Internet, let MC look up the tracks, then go on to the next CD.  Rip later.

[Dave T]

Thanks, Jim.  I didn't know you could do that.  So, it will look up the cd's and remember them the next time they're inserted?  Cool.  But, I don't think my friend would want to do it that way - it would be too much of a hassle and mess to go through inserting and ejecting hundreds of cd's to get the lookup done, and then doing it again to do the rips.  Does anyone actually do it this way?  I thought there was a way to just download the cddb onto your machine locally.  No?  Isn't this a common issue?  Or, do less people out there than I thought connect to the internet off of the only phone line in the house...

Anyway, what about my other ripping issues?  Do you guys see the same problems?  Do you plan on fixing them?

Thanks.

- Dave

[JohnT]

I don't doubt that you've found a problem, I just haven't been able to reproduce it. I auto-ripped 12 CD's yesterday using three different CD drives (popping a new CD in when the previous one ejected) and didn't experience any problem. Maybe if you describe the series of steps you take and then I can try to reproduce it.
Nicer handling of mass rips on dial-up systems will have to wait until the next iteration of MC. Also placing the album name into the ripping dialog. Hopefully beta testing won't be too far off. I'm on a dial-up account at home so I understand what changes are needed.

Thanks for the testing and feedback.
- John T.