Could someone build this machine please?

Greetings! I had this idea about a machine for ripping CDs. You know, I have lots of CDs and all of them ripped to 320 kbit/s MP3s. I don't want to start the big re-rip to lossless. Really, I would not hear a difference. But lossy is such a sad word. But, the amount of time! And worn out drives, maybe! So, I had this idea for a new ripping machine. It would scan the whole disc at once, not read bit for bit. Like a digital camera sensor that grabs the whole disc at once in a few milliseconds, or like a scanner in a photocopy machine. The sensor would see all the bits at the same time, and a processor would do the rest. Convert it to lossless audio files, do an accurate rip check maybe, then the disc tray comes out again five seconds later, and in goes the next CD. Wouldn't that be nice?

Of course I lack the technical knowledge, so what do you think? Is such a machine possible? If so, can someone build such drives and bring them out sometime soon? Would be much appreciated.

Best wishes, LP

 

I think that's an excellent idea. And yes, I can't believe some bright spark engineering type hasn't thought of it already; maybe there's some technical/optical reason it hasn't been done?

 

Alainsane has a good head start
http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threa...g-cd-acquisitions-here-part-25.365297/page-42

 

Here's a story about doing that with records
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11851842

 

Thanks for the replies! That's interesting! I guess the problems could be optical, as you would need to take a microscopic picture of a whole disc at once.

 

somewhere several years ago, I saw info concerning academic projects seeking to do essentially what the OP mentioned, a system to scan an entire optical disc at once (don't know how the optical read / laser issues would work); then presumably throw lots of signal processing horsepower at discerning / extracting data.

Time to assemble technical team and start writing kickstarter blurb.....

 

I'm afraid this is as far as I've gotten.

 

That's a fantastic idea! If the disc could be optically scanned, there would be heavy processing to convert into a file. The CD contains a track with the one's and zero's (like the groove of an LP record) so the optical file would need to be scanned from inside to outside at high speed. I don't think this would save any time, since that's exactly what ripping does.

 

IIRC Foobar has ISO support. Could you make an ISO of the CD? Not sure about tagging and all that but....

 

As mentioned above, i have little technical knowledge, so i am speculating. If it's possible to take this microscopic picture of a CD with all the bits visible at once, can that microscopic picture then be scanned similar to a QR-Code? Is there still that much processing necessary ? I mean, the computer gets his ones and zeros served on a plate already.

 

Reading the file from the disk to create an ISO is the same as ripping it. No time saved. I don't think any optical scanning method has high enough resolution to run over a disk like a xerox machine and extract the data. If such a thing existed I'm sure it would be many times slower and 1000s of times more expensive than a CD drive.

 

Another thing came to my mind: According to Google a gigabyte = 8.000.000.000 bits. So an average CD has maybe half of that, 500 megabytes, 4 billion bits. Does that mean, to take a picture of a whole CD at once, you would need a camera-sensor with at least 4000 megapixel resolution? As bit and pixel would be the smallest units? I hope i am not complete embarassing myself here.

 

As somebody who works with conventional high end scanners all day, I would guess that some of our better ones could possibly get the pits of a CD, but the issue I see is more around the fact that CD's are reflective and you need light to scan them. Possibly they could be scanned like negatives and backlit, but the issue there would be getting the focal length for the optics right, so you were getting focus on the right layer of the sandwich.

I should try scanning a CD at high res and see what I get.

 

I would guess that true optical scanning of CDs is technically possible now, but nowhere close to feasible in terms of size, cost, and functionality of the equipment for the average consumer. In addition, the memory and horsepower needed to do the scan - along with the software to convert the giant picture to data savable in a music file - is not on the horizon, though I imagine in the next 5-10 years it would certainly be doable.

But there's another issue: CDs were not designed for data retrieval. They were designed for live streaming, and to minimize damage. That means the music files are not stored in a particularly logical way but rather scattered around the disc. Even with an optical scanning app, I'm fairly certain you'd still have to load the CD and have another app read the TOC (table of contents) to know what's on the disc - and the app might also have to scan the entire disc for pregap info, and/or to find out where each song actually is physically on the disc.

In contrast, if you scan an LP, the track positions and ends are easily visible, and there are no rules or requirements about pregaps.

So I am not at all sure that optical scanning could knock nearly as much time off the process as one might think.

 

One of our least expensive scanners (we have a number), an Epson 10000XL, doesn't have sufficient optical resolution at 3200 or even 12,000 dpi. I can kind of see the pits, but they aren't all visible, and not sharp enough probably to interpret. Not sure why they even make the claim that this scanner can DO that res, though it certainly is producing the file size. I'll try one of our Creo iQSmart3 scanners later. They don't even make these anymore. The truly high-end scanner business has really dried up.

 

Not to take this thread too off road, but I just scanned a CD using a Creo at 10,000 dpi, and while it's much better, the pits aren't sharp, and there are areas that seem to have no pits at all. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that there aren't scanners readily available that will image a CD, and that even if there were, the time to capture the required resolution is MUCH greater than what it takes to rip a CD using commonly available and inexpensive equipment.

 

Sorry, it's not gonna happen.

We're all bound by the laws of physics, and the one that comes into play here is diffraction. The pit sizes used for CDs are close to the limit of what's resolvable by a cone of incident light. A rule-of-thumb number for the resolution is wavelength (780 nm) divided by the numerical aperture of the objective lens (0.45).

If you were to try and do the imaging at 780 nm, you'd need a camera with an F/# of 1.1, with a field of view at the object of 120 mm. Good luck finding such a thing. (And no, it still doesn't work if you try doing the imaging with blue light.)

 

Can I use the Stanley Kubrick Camera with the lens from the surveillance satellite? Speaking of satellites, would it help if i'd spread the rumour that the
Russians already have a prototype ready, called the "Ripnik"?

 

This device exists today.. 2 different platforms..

Google music and itunes match...

 

crapfromthepast, thank you for posting! You're one domain expert from whom I was hoping that we would hear.