Software for playing CD's?

[chriscollins]

This brings back memories of stories about stations that wanted to keep carting their music when CD's became the norm. ;D

The fact is, technology changes. Either change with it, or die. I'm sure it won't be long before CD players are scarce. If you don't have the man hours to rip 50,000 CD's, then pay someone to do it for you. It's not that hard, really...

R

I agree with Robert. I try not to offer any negativity here, but seriously... Rip the CD's. Do the ones used the most and let the odd man out tracks stay on discs until lasts.

Build two redundant machines. SSD Boot drives and some good LSI RAID 5's... Then let the machines mirror each other. You are dancing in circles, prolonging the inevitable.

 

[Fenris]

The fact is, technology changes. Either change with it, or die.

Sorry, but this comment makes me mad. Music-oriented commercial radio stations are steadily losing audience and becoming more and more irrelevant. Why would we want to emulate ANY aspect of their business model?

We run a full-service analog recording studio, and the same applies. The equipment budget goes toward analog gear or DIY gear that will enhance the uniqueness of the studio. We don't spend more than a few hundred bucks on computers or software, period. We do projects entirely on tape whenever possible. We use a lot of vintage gear, but it's actually more reliable than the computers. There is an oversupply of digital studios and few of them make any money. Why emulate a failing business model?

At our station, we have been moving to digital playback. We're a freeform college radio station with 2 hour block format shows. Every show picks their own music. Most DJ's have their own libraries and its about 60/40 computer/cd now. For personal libraries, we have a separate computer with Winamp installed, as well as iTunes, and another product called SoundByte.

For the station CD library, we started off by sending about 10,000 disc out to a service to be ripped. Pickled Productions out of Chicago was the company. After that, we purchased a CD robot and have been using DbPowerAmp for ripping. I've easily ripped another 10,000 CDs with that.

This brings me to playback. We decided to go with FLAC audio files for the LOSSLESS compression. Try finding a playback product that has 3 decks that will play FLAC.... they don't exist, or so we could find. A computer science student who was a station staffer at the time took up the challenge to write a program. It works well, for what we do, but lacks individual channels and control. If enough people were interested, I might be able to drag him out of his cave to start working on it again.

The initial blow-back from staff was pretty harsh. But once they realized that the station library being digital meant that they could actually find the music, and they didn't have to spend hours searching(or carrying a giant case), they've embraced it.

Moral of the story... yes, ripping that large library sucks. But you're going to have to do it eventually. PM me if you'd like more information.

A quote from "Lean on Me" is apropos. "I don't have to do nothin' but stay black and die."

Transferring our entire library is not going to happen. It's too large, our budget is too small, and our playlist is too diverse. We have too many other things on our "to do" list

We need 3 decks with separate controls, crossfade, and cue. And we need non-lossy storage. The inability to play FLAC is a deal-breaker. Thanks for alerting me to the problem.

We're not going to spend thousands of man-hours and thousands of dollars because of a #$% silly problem like not being able to find #$% CD players that can #$% play CD's without #$% malfunctioning.

Computers use buffering and are more tolerant of CD-R's and scratched discs. The drives are dirt cheap and plentiful. Apparently WinAmp can run multiple instances and it even has a plug-in for MIDI control. I can use a multi-channel soundcard and send each instance of WinAmp to its own channel on the board. I'll have to try it and see if it works.

 

[Fenris]

(double post)

 

[richard.vanderveen]

The fact is, technology changes. Either change with it, or die.

Sorry, but this comment makes me mad.

Just a question: Why do you guys use so many CD's anyway? What's wrong with good ol' vinyl, open reel decks or even compact cassettes?

 

[Fenris]

We have plenty of vinyl and 3 Technics turntables in constant use. Cassettes too.

 

[Robert Bass]

The fact is, technology changes. Either change with it, or die.

Sorry, but this comment makes me mad. Music-oriented commercial radio stations are steadily losing audience and becoming more and more irrelevant. Why would we want to emulate ANY aspect of their business model?

Why does it make you mad? It shouldn't. It's just a case of reality. What makes you think your station will fail by changing technology? You can build a server network that is large enough to handle 5 million songs if you wanted.

R

 

[Demodave]

esimna mentioned this already; but here is more info on a very viable solution from dBpoweramp using their batch ripper program and a robotic CD mechanism:

http://www.dbpoweramp.com/batch-ripper.htm

dBpoweramp Batch Ripper is designed to facilitate automated ripping of Audio CDs, using a single drive, right through to automated multi-drive robotic ripping. Batch Ripper™ appeals to commercial ripping houses, radio stations or even individuals:

• Auto & manual loading (open design, most robots supported), from one to many drives support
• Process overview of each drive and ripping status
• Highest quality metadata providers: AMG & GD3 (non-commercial access is restricted to 400 lookups in AMG, GD3 not included)
• Lowest commercial per-CD metadata rates
• Extensive customizable meta-data rule sets
• Over 120 discs per hour through-put, per machine (6x drives)

Ripping discs at 120 per hour would get thru that huge library fairly quickly. Certainly something to consider.

 

[taylorengineer]

Fenris: It has nothing to do with the "business model" of commercial radio. No one has suggested that you play 200 tracks over and over. We are trying to explain WHY ripping music is a better use of time and money - even if you're a free form format.
I engineer a college station which adds 100-150 tracks every week. They rip them in and we now have 600 GB of .wav music. We still have Denon players for playback of music not in the system.
The students also:
1. Bring in their personal laptop. I have two Henry boxes to make it pro balanced.
2. Bring music on USB drives (thumb drives.) Some DJs have hours and hours of music on that little stick you can hold in one hand. They usually save material as a MP3 so that part sux (same with laptop audio.) I have Denon and Marantz players with USB inputs.

Instead of spending thousands of dollars on CD players (that's what you're looking at for 3 players and 2 spares) why not pay someone a stipend to sit and rip music. Some artists are played more than others - leave the more obscure material for last. You might be surprised to find that with a couple of thousand cuts on hard drive the CD players will get much more rest.

 

[Goat Rodeo Cowboy]

Fenris is apparently in a position to play out his broadcast fantasies.... while we chime in an insist to convert to "our religion" so to speak.

In Atlanta, on the local Public Radio Station, there is a Saturday night national treasure. Some guy named H. Johnson comes in for five hours and we can frolick and lounge and worship in his personal love for things that fit under the label of "jazz". I guess he has been doing this gig for over 30 years. And from I have heard him say, and what I have read, I get the idea when he shows up on Saturday night. crates and cartons of treasured recording follow him into the studio. (Does he bring along his own two-wheeled hand-truck? I get the idea he can look through the cartons and spot the vinyl or the CD he wants next by the way the record shuck is dog-eared after all these years, or the CD jewel case is cracked or discolored. Putting them all on one big hard drive would just plain "take the soul out of his broadcast".... though I must admit there are times when his production techniques could use a bit of help. ;D

I think this whole discussion is over looking a few tips Fenris has left for us. (Emphasis on the word FEW). I gather this is NOT a commercial station. I assume he is on what we in the heartland lovingly (and sometimes NOT so lovingly) call The Left Coast. Some day when we have had a big funeral, the successor to Fenris can make radical changes if appropriate, but for now there is this attachment, this devotion, this subsurvience to the concept: We have human beings who come into the studio and manually play from an eclectic, enormous library of MECHANICAL recordings... and we plan to continue.

Time after time in this discussion space we beg and plead for the industry to somehow return to "the good ol' days" when humans were in the studio and played the music of their choice. So here come someone who has that going on and asks for some suggestion on how he can keep it going on... and we begin demanding that he give in and convert to today's religion of technology.

Reminds me of the day when the most eligible young bachelor in our closely-knit little collection of companies owned by one family announce we was getting married. To which the sage, wise old Baptist Deacon who was our father figure, smiled and said: "That's great. You need to do that. You have no more right to happiness than do the rest of us old henpecked guys."

That's what I hear us saying to Fenris.

 

[WNTIRadio]

If ever there were someone who we would consider "old school" as far as broadcasting goes, it would be Johnathan Schwartz.

Even he has ripped a good portion of his library into the Dalet. The other ones, he plays off CD's.

I think the point that everyone is getting to here, myself included, is that if you at least rip, start to rip, get an intern to start ripping now, you will make life easier for everyone. It's a lot easier to type a title in the search and pull it up. Or list all the songs by length, genre, artist or however you want to arrange it. With the cheap cheap CHEAP price of hard drive storage, there's no reason not to at least begin the project.

Let's say in a year or two you have half the library on hard drive. You have now cut the use of the CD decks in half. They will last longer! Also, you can now back up your library in 40 different places if you want. Plug in a USB drive and back up once a week, and keep that off site.

Really basic question, but has anyone ever thought what would happen if the station had a fire/flood/other natural disaster? Right now, your CD library could be reduced to ashes. Think of ripping as backing up your library.

There WILL be the day the CD player goes away for good. Better start the process now than wait. With 2TB drives under $100, that's a lot of WAV files you can put on each one.

People can still create their own playlist off a hard drive, and not have the problem of scratched discs, lost discs, gathering them all, putting them back away... and have an easier time accessing the library.

I'm not telling Fenris to use Selector and cut it to 300 songs, I'm telling him to start prepping for the future now, instead of being caught off guard by it. Sure it's a huge project, but so were the pyramids. But nothing started until the first stone was laid.

 

[Robert Bass]

My fantasy is to run a station directly from carts... But that's another story. ;D

I agree that Ferris should at least give hard-drive audio a try. I think the jocks would like being able to find a song in 5 seconds rather than 5 minutes. Give it a try and see how it goes, at least. I don't miss my 900 disc automated playback system at all. It was great for its time, but it had flaws. At one point, one of the three jukeboxes jammed up and scratched some of my discs beyond use!

R

 

[317C50KW]

I've been following this but only because I've started dubbing reel to reel automation tapes onto a hard drive. Thankfully the tape stock doesn't shed or need baking, there are 1K and 10K alignment tones at the head of each tape and I've kept 1 Studer machine in good shape over the years. The sound quality of the material so far has been excellent (the tapes are courtesy of someone who's posted on this topic). The music on the tapes is from an adult format in vogue 30+ years ago.

It's funny how time passes us by. One of the trade magazines had a back page article discussing the publication's 20th anniversary. The article happened to mention a number of the storage formats used back in the 90's, including dinosaurs like Bernoulli and MO drives, not to mention DAT tapes, minidiscs and a few others. I still have a use for minidiscs but I have no idea what to do with the 100 or so Sony MO drives I have in a drawer. MO was the backup format for my original digital audio editor circa 1994.

And I won't get started about all the failed ZIP drives in the few Digicart machines we still have in use around our shop.

I'd love to hear the station Fenris works for. If station has a stream, I hope he'll direct us to it.

 

[Fenris]

The station is KDVS. It's a non-profit freeform college station supported by listener donations. But at least we aren't LOSING money like the major labels and the commercial radio stations.

I think this whole discussion is over looking a few tips Fenris has left for us. (Emphasis on the word FEW). I gather this is NOT a commercial station. I assume he is on what we in the heartland lovingly (and sometimes NOT so lovingly) call The Left Coast. Some day when we have had a big funeral, the successor to Fenris can make radical changes if appropriate, but for now there is this attachment, this devotion, this subsurvience to the concept: We have human beings who come into the studio and manually play from an eclectic, enormous library of MECHANICAL recordings... and we plan to continue.

Why, no, not at all. I put together a workable system for storing and playing back digital downloads, which wasn't easy, because the university's IT department is completely useless and takes months or years to respond to simple requests, and we don't have administrative access to any of our computers. I think digital storage is useful as a SUPPLEMENT to the library, not a replacement. Even if we digitize some or all of our library, we still need the ability to play physical CD's.

I have a question. How is it possible that computer drives are reliable enough to rip thousands of CD's at 48x speed without errors, but they're not reliable enough to PLAY CD's in real time at 1x speed? Why can't I just put together a dedicated playback computer, and save a lot of money and work? I smell something here, and it isn't roses.

It was actually one of my PREDECESSORS who made "radical changes" and insisted that the station needed to go digital. Thanks to this genius, we have an obsolete digital cart system sitting in the storage room, that cost thousands of dollars and never got used.

We spend a few grand on a profanity delay. It was broken, unsupported, and unrepairable a few years later. We spend several grand on a broadcast console that uses surface-mount construction and is a PITA to repair. We tried to replace it with a newer model from the same company, only to discover that it was even flimsier and wouldn't hold up to the rigors of a 24-hour college station. I'm here to make sure these kinds of mistakes are not repeated. If we get a new console, it'll be a refurbished Pacific Research model that will last forever. It's hard to raise funds in this economy and we can't afford to waste money.

It's pretty nice working here. We don't require the dubious advantages of an all-digital broadcast chain, we have real DJ's instead of automated playlists generated by computer algorithms, we use analog broadcast processing and calibrate it for sound quality instead of maximum loudness, and we will still be around in 40 years. I think you're just jealous.

 

[esimna]

...because the university's IT department is completely useless and takes months or years to respond to simple requests, and we don't have administrative access to any of our computers. I think digital storage is useful as a SUPPLEMENT to the library, not a replacement. Even if we digitize some or all of our library, we still need the ability to play physical CD's...

The station I am at is a college station. We started the transition because we are essentially land locked. The university will not give us any more space, and since you're a college station as well, you see the volume of music college stations receive. We've been lucky enough that the university IT department understands what we do is NOTHING like the rest of the college. I was able to convince them into letting us run our network 'out-of-band' and thus we have administrative access to EVERYTHING. We host our own servers. We're also responsible for our own upkeep.

The main on-air studio has a cassette deck, 2 turn tables, and 3 Denon C635 CD decks. They break down, and cost much more than they are worth to replace. But for those that insist on using CDs, they are there, and until they break down, they are great. I'd say less than 40% of our on air content comes from CD. For those that insist on still dragging MiniDisc around, the production studio is equipped with one deck, for the sole purpose of digitizing. When that MD deck dies, we will no longer support MD. Period. At some point you need to look at your budget and decide if it is fiscally responsible to constantly be repairing and replacing, rather than upgrading.

It sounds like you are at the point my station was at about 4-5 years ago. It's time to start having discussions with IT about providing a solution that DOES do what you need. Instead of trying to make what they give you work for you. And if you're comfortable with the technology, offer to do it yourself. You might be surprised at the response.

If you don't ask the question, it will always be "No."

 

[PTBoardOp94]

I have a question. How is it possible that computer drives are reliable enough to rip thousands of CD's at 48x speed without errors, but they're not reliable enough to PLAY CD's in real time at 1x speed? Why can't I just put together a dedicated playback computer, and save a lot of money and work? I smell something here, and it isn't roses.

Ripping the discs will destroy CD drives just like playback would. But once they're ripped, you never need the disc again, and pretty quickly you get a lot of discs out of circulation.

Most PCs do use buffers for CD playback: meaning they spin up to 10x for 6 seconds and read a minute of audio, then spin down. That's actually putting more stress on the discs themselves than a standard 1x read like most audio CD players.

 

[ChiefOperator]

I tend to agree with Fenris on this topic.

While we're looking at this from an engineering viewpoint, the station may not be. It may well be that the jocks enjoy "doing radio" instead of simply clicking a computer. As a college station, it's probably alot more fun cueing CDs and back-cueing albums. True, technology has changed, but for these presenters they may prefer the older and perhaps more enjoyable technology (and its headaches) and there is nothing wrong with that.

And once an all digital library is put in, the culture WILL change. There will be be pressure to automate and even VT shows. Is that really within the spirit or philosophy of this particular station? The older technology requires jocks and live programming on the air. That may well be more important than the need to upgrade.

There are still some FMs out there that make extensive use of CDs and even some turntables. Certain jocks enjoy the old mechanical way of doing things.

Fenris- I say keep it as it is and enjoy the unique culture that you have. Sure the upkeep and maintenance will be more, but the payoff is great, I think.

-CO

 

[Fenris]

Some of the younger DJ's play their entire set off a laptop. I provided a USB audio interface so at least it's decent quality. I'm not necessarily against it, my big problem is that I don't like to see broadcast audio sourced from MP3's, since it gets re-encoded for the STL and the online stream.

Most PCs do use buffers for CD playback: meaning they spin up to 10x for 6 seconds and read a minute of audio, then spin down. That's actually putting more stress on the discs themselves than a standard 1x read like most audio CD players.

Interesting. I just realized I can use the A/B source selectors to hook up 3 CD players and a 3-drive computer into the same channels, so I think I'll do both and let the DJ's figure out which technology they trust. And they'll have the option of ripping the entire CD.

I was able to convince them into letting us run our network 'out-of-band' and thus we have administrative access to EVERYTHING. We host our own servers. We're also responsible for our own upkeep.

Not a bad idea. We seem to be moving in that direction.

 

[RadioMan203]

I can relate to Fenris and his dilemma. The station I started at in my teens went from being a high school free-format station to a fine-arts and Classical station serving a much wider area. The station has on the order of 25,000+ in their library and it would take a herculean effort to convert a library of that size to a MOHD format in spite of the convenience it may prove to be later.

Back when I ran an oldies webstream I ripped close to 1,000 CDs to automation TWICE! The first system, the DOS-based Digital Jukebox by Barcus, had to have audio played into it. I invested in a 300 CD carousel and it took quite a bit of time to get it all in there, let alone get the database to match tracks and intro / segue times. The second time was with StationPlaylist where I digitally ripped each disc - much easier but still time consuming.

Most people say go with a disposable CD player and I suppose this is the most economical. I've used Studers and pro-series Denon and the shipping charges alone could be used to purchase players of the BIC throw-away variety. Another death knell to CD players is environment, too, so remember no smoking in the studios and try to keep dust to a minimum.

We spend a few grand on a profanity delay. It was broken, unsupported, and unrepairable a few years later. We spend several grand on a broadcast console that uses surface-mount construction and is a PITA to repair. We tried to replace it with a newer model from the same company, only to discover that it was even flimsier and wouldn't hold up to the rigors of a 24-hour college station. I'm here to make sure these kinds of mistakes are not repeated. If we get a new console, it'll be a refurbished Pacific Research model that will last forever. It's hard to raise funds in this economy and we can't afford to waste money.

You may get this with any technology but there is where a sharp engineer pays off. I've been burned by Arrakis and a couple of other brand consoles and won't touch them. In stations where I get called as a freelancer I won't give them digital as their staffs usually freak if they can't get themselves back on the air. I've had excellent luck with Dynamax consoles - Dave Strode still supported even legacy units and parts are easy to come by. I have an old PR&E board from 1978 donated to a school station and I didn't have the heart to cut a hole in a $5000 studio furniture system to mount this antique.

I truly think analog has its place as long as you can support it. Getting durable CD players that can stand up to daily use may or may not be a crap shoot. At one AM I replaced overpriced "professional" Technics players with their consumer counterparts and they lasted for YEARS instead of months.

 

[chriscollins]

I think he has found a happy medium with the A/B selection and option to rip. I am like you as far as the stream goes. That is why everything is only .wav sourced. If I do get an .mp3, it is put on a list and replaced as soon as a CD or .wav is available.

I also agree that a good talk with IT is a great idea. Schools have good firewalls for the most part and they should be able to cut you off from the rest of the network and go as you want. Our local college has two radio stations and they are setup that way. They run streaming server & host their own website. It gives the students more of an appreciation of where things are going to learn those aspects of broadcast as well.

 

[Fenris]

I've had excellent luck with Dynamax consoles - Dave Strode still supported even legacy units and parts are easy to come by.

Thanks for the reminder, Dave helped us out with a manual for an old Broadcast Audio Corp. console and I meant to check out his current consoles.

Even Rupert Neve is using surface-mount these days, but I like through-hole for the ease of repairing and modding.