flac dev - Sep 2004 - CD Baby using FLAC to archive 40,000 CDs

Hey FLAC gang - 

Just thought you'd like to know CD Baby has switched to FLAC for archiving
the 40,000 CDs we have in stock.

Luckily HD space is down below $1/gig so we got a 6-terabyte RAID-5 box set up
for about $7000.

Got the FreeBSD boxes churning away night and day, ripping and archiving.

I'll do a more formal press release for ya in a couple months as we're
further along, but just wanted to let you guys know.

This isn't an online thing, just an offline backup system, for long-term use
when CDs aren't the main music format anymore.



--
Derek Sivers, CD Baby, Hostbaby
http://www.cdbaby.com  <-- best new independent music
http://www.hostbaby.com <-- web hosting for musicians

--- Derek at CD Baby <dereklist@cdbaby.com> wrote:
> Hey FLAC gang - 
> 
> Just thought you'd like to know CD Baby has switched to FLAC for
> archiving the 40,000 CDs we have in stock.
> 
> Luckily HD space is down below $1/gig so we got a 6-terabyte RAID-5
> box set up for about $7000.
> 
> Got the FreeBSD boxes churning away night and day, ripping and
> archiving.
> 
> I'll do a more formal press release for ya in a couple months as
> we're further along, but just wanted to let you guys know.
> 
> This isn't an online thing, just an offline backup system, for
> long-term use when CDs aren't the main music format anymore.
Cool, definitely keep us posted.

Josh


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On Tue, 24 Jun 2003, Derek at CD Baby wrote:
> Just thought you'd like to know CD Baby has switched to FLAC for
> archiving the 40,000 CDs we have in stock.
> Luckily HD space is down below $1/gig so we got a 6-terabyte RAID-5
> box set up for about $7000.
Well, even if you do have a lot of Morton Feldman (currently my record
for best compression ratio--about 0.25 or so), I don't think you're
going to get 40,000 CDs onto only 6 terrabytes. My guess, actually,
would be 22,469 CDs. Save that number for me if you start a pool.

But I'd be interested to know what sort of hardware you're using, and
extremely interested in knowing how you're ripping the CDs, because I'm
doing a similar project (backing up my entire CD collection--though only
about 800 of them in my case). I've been using cdrdao to this point,
and compressing each disc to one flac file. However, cdrdao has its
difficulties: particularly annoying is that on more than 5% of my CDs
it refuses to read the TOC, instead aborting with an exception claiming
that a seconds field is not between 0 and 59 or something like that.
(I originally thought that this was due to dodgy home-made CDs until
I discovered a bunch of major-label ones that have the same problem.)
Beyond that, ripping storing CDs with data tracks is still an unsolved
problem.

I'm also currently lacking a way to store the PQ subcode data within the
flac file (though someone suggested that this is better done with a flac
file within an Ogg file) and also a way to extract individual tracks.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson  <cjs@cynic.net>   +81 90 7737 2974   http://www.netbsd.org
    Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light.  --XTC

> > Just thought you'd like to know CD Baby has switched to FLAC for
> > archiving the 40,000 CDs we have in stock.
> > Luckily HD space is down below $1/gig so we got a 6-terabyte RAID-5
> > box set up for about $7000.
> 
> Well, even if you do have a lot of Morton Feldman (currently my record
> for best compression ratio--about 0.25 or so), I don't think you're
> going to get 40,000 CDs onto only 6 terrabytes.
No but that's all I bought for now to get started.
So that when it's full we buy another batch of hardware at an even cheaper
price.
Hard drive prices always dropping, y'know!


 
> But I'd be interested to know what sort of hardware you're using
Just el-cheapo FreeBSD beige boxes with Lite-On CD-Rom drives.
They've got the fastest audio ripping I've ever found (24x or so).


> extremely interested in knowing how you're ripping the CDs
cdda2wav to internal hard drives.  Then coverting overnight with no people
around.
Wrote a PHP script where the person can enter our unique SKU for that CD,
it shows it on the screen to confirm it's the correct SKU, then they click
GO.

But definitely doing them as individual songs.  Not as a whole CD.
We need the separate songs for working with services like iTunes + Rhapsody.




--
Derek Sivers, CD Baby, Hostbaby
http://www.cdbaby.com  <-- best new independent music
http://www.hostbaby.com <-- web hosting for musicians