CD Ripping and NAS Drives

Yesterday evening had a late night "get it off your chest" session with a post on the site blog for our CD ripping service, podServe.

Today a more measured tone and some advice. Advice for people who rip CDs and store their music on a network attached unit. I have found most wireless networks will, if they provide a reliable connection at all, will happily deliver streamed music around you house. That's the getting music out side of the equation. Data volumes are relatively low - you get a whole CDs worth of sound out in around 60 minutes.

Ripping CDs is a different proposition and doing that over the same connection is asking a lot. A decent Mac, PC or a laptop will ring at 10, 15, 20 times faster that realtime. A CD gets ripped in around 3 minutes. The data comes off the CD drive, into the computer and is shunted off to the network. A bit of simple maths, you network wireless pipework needs to be around 20 times fatter, sadly it isn't.

So my advice has to be, when ripping CDs to a NAS drive, invest in a bit of ethernet cable and plug that it, at least for the duration of the ripping session.