[Flac-dev] CD Baby using FLAC to archive 40,000 CDs

[Curt Sampson]

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