Disc Copying

[charles]

I burn a lot of shows for other people, sometimes in large quanities. The problem I always encounter with this is that it can take a long time. I have a 48x burner, which is plenty fast. But when copying discs, it takes a good 5 minutes or so per disc. I know it will take longer to copy a disc than to burn of my hard drive no matter what I do. I am not interested in spending money on a duplicator at this point in time.

All that said, I present these two questions.
1) Does anyone know of a very fast cd copying program? Or, what do you use? Right now I use either Nero or CDClone.

2) The thought has crossed my mind to upload my shows onto my hard drive, so that they can be burned faster straight from the drive. However, to do this I would have to compress my audio files into something like RAR. If I were to do this would I lose any sound quality for those files?

[leegeddy]

I burn a lot of shows for other people, sometimes in large quanities. The problem I always encounter with this is that it can take a long time. I have a 48x burner, which is plenty fast. But when copying discs, it takes a good 5 minutes or so per disc. I know it will take longer to copy a disc than to burn of my hard drive no matter what I do. I am not interested in spending money on a duplicator at this point in time.

All that said, I present these two questions.
1) Does anyone know of a very fast cd copying program? Or, what do you use? Right now I use either Nero or CDClone.

2) The thought has crossed my mind to upload my shows onto my hard drive, so that they can be burned faster straight from the drive. However, to do this I would have to compress my audio files into something like RAR. If I were to do this would I lose any sound quality for those files?

i remember the days when burning at 8x was fast. how did we ever get by?

i'm sure many folks would agree that using EAC to perform digital audio extraction (DAE) and buring .wav > cdr would yield the best results.

marc

[Humbug]

leegeddys got it in one. Accuracy over speed, every time.

Takes me nearly an hour to extract and 15 minutes to burn a typical disc on my 4 year old laptop. One of the reasons why I Bit Torrent shows now.

[tibbsa]

1) Does anyone know of a very fast cd copying program? Or, what do you use? Right now I use either Nero or CDClone.

Everyone here seems to prefer EAC (Exact Audio Copy), and I'd be wary aboutr using things that claim to be 'fast'.  'Fast' often translates into 'crappy' where ripping CD's is concerned, though a lot does depend on your drive, and the burner used to make the CD in the first place. 

2) The thought has crossed my mind to upload my shows onto my hard drive, so that they can be burned faster straight from the drive. However, to do this I would have to compress my audio files into something like RAR. If I were to do this would I lose any sound quality for those files?

No, if you compress the shows using .RAR or .ZIP or something like that, you would not lose any quality.  If you're going to do that, though, you'd probably get better results by compressing it with FLAC or SHN or something of that nature.  As a bit of a test, I took a ~5 minute 44/16 .WAV from a recording I made in October... here are the size results (using 'best' compression for both):


10/12/2004  01:13 PM        52,555,484 05 - Back To Tennessee (Commander Cody cover).wav
11/08/2004  11:11 PM        26,096,815 commander_Cody.flac
11/08/2004  11:10 PM        31,192,789 commander_cody.rar


Whether the approximate 10-15% savings of using FLAC over RAR (and having to decode the desired show prior to burning) is worth it, is up to you and your free disk space.  But just keep in mind that you'll probably need ABOUT 400 megabytes per 74-minute CD of material you want to store on the HDD, give or take. 

[Gordon]

why do you need to compress to extract to the harddrive??  just use eac and burn as audio.