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