back to ripping some CDs on a rainy Sunday…so another question: does the rip speed depend on the drive / processing power of the machine? I’m multitasking on my MBA and it seems especially slow to rip a CD today. can’t see if I’ve changed any settings, so not sure what’s going on…
Some CDs, notably older ones IME are slower to rip.
thanks. this looks right - to badly paraphrase Mr. Morrisey, some CDs are slower than others.
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Not really but it does play some part I suspect, as I undestand it… its ripping software controlled thing. I’ve ripped CD’s in Ultra Secure Mode rather than Acc.Rip and the speed varies throughout, sometimes x64 and then half way through the pass it slows down to les than x10.
The end result is a perfect rip so all iz OK
thx Mike
Asking a related question as I’m in a situation with 500+ CDs and dread the humongous task of ripping.
Is there a recommendation for external cd drive to connect to my m2 Mac mini for this task? Anything which will speed up the process.
There are autoloaders you can buy, but ultimately if you want the best metadata and also cover art you’re probably best advised to rip each CD individually.
Alternatively I think there are companies who will rip your CDs for you, for a price, of course.
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The roping speed is often limited by the quality of the CD - whether it’s clean, has any scratches etc. messy discs often took longer to get a good quality rip.
I converted my circa 1500 CDs 30 at a time. Breaking it up like this meant that it never felt like too much time, but i got through them all reasonably quickly.
It probably helped that i had broken my collarbone on a mountain bike ride, and was lacking too many other things to do at the time 
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dbPoweramp allows for multiple rips at the same time if you have more than one drive. but realistically, you’re just going to have to feed them in over a period of time.
edited to add - the CD drive won’t be the critical path in terms of speed. disc will. so any good drive will do. i’ve used an Apple SuperDrive and the speed is fine - but i do have a lot of discs that it won’t read…
I found that different drives would rip or fail differently. So having more than one available is a help with the tricky ones. That said, even with two drives, I had a couple out of 300 or so that would not read bit perfect, and two which just couldn’t be read at all!
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i’m to the point where I’m going to have to buy a second drive - the Apple SD can’t read/rip about 20-25 CDs. Good to hear that a different drive may work…
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I bought a cheap £20 USB drive online and also used one in an old laptop. Funny thing, the laptop drive had a little more success🤔.
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Whilst I used a selection of cd drives, 3 in all, to rip my collection of CDs I did find it helped if the CDs themselves were clean. By that I mean that I cleaned the difficult to rip CDs with a screen/spectacle/lense cleaning wipe. Use same technique as cleaning camera lenses to avoid additional scratches. Made a difference with quite a few. If memory serves me well I only had one cd that I couldn’t rip, it did however play 
. I overcame that by buying a digital download.
I found good old spray glass cleaner worked fixed loads of apparently clean CDs.
Yes ripping speed depends on the drive and state of CD. If there is dust, light scratches or finger prints on the CD, the ripping speed will slow.
I use the Apple CDROM/Writer that connects to my iMAC via USB and it works a treat and is fast… I do set dbpoweramp to secure rips… that way if it sees an error it will do another rip of the track slightly slower… tends to work well with old CDs that are just starting to deteriorate or have deeper scratches.
good info - thanks. i’ll change to secure for the CDs that won’t rip. and when you say ‘Apple CDROM/Writer’ is that different from the Apple Superdrive?
No it’s one of the same. The SuperDrive is super quick, the only downside is that it does not support BluRay. The SuperDrive is upto x24 on CD, but is slower on DVD at only upto x8
I did find older versions of dBpoweramp ripped slower… but the current version works a dream and whizzes through CDs.
I have a SuperDrive and it’s dead slow, the Asus Blu-ray drive is much quicker.
mine just makes a lot of clicking and stuttering noises - making me think it’s doing a bad job