Anyone who has a fair size music CD collection that they want to convert to digital will quickly find that it is a very time consuming process, especially when it comes to ripping several hundred or even over a thousand CDs. Even with several optical drives, it still takes a few minutes to rip a set of discs, not to mention dealing with several ripping programs running simultaneously. Primera, the world leader in developing and manufacturing disc duplication equipment aims to solve this issue with the launch of its "Rent & Rip" program, where a consumer can hire its disc publishing system to rip the discs in bulk automatically.
As part of the program, Primera lends out its Primera Bravo Se(a) Disc Publisher and its PTRip software for $299, which includes the transportation costs to and from the customer. To use the system, the customer fills the input bin with a set of discs to rip and selects whether to import the CDs into iTunes or Windows Media Player from the PTRip software. The machine will then rip each disc in sequence until it has processed and transferred the lot into the output bin. All the consumer needs to do then is empty the output bin, load the input bin with another selection to rip and start the process again.
As most consumers just need to rip their collection once, this seems like a very useful program by Primera, particularly since once the consumer has finished ripping their collection, chances are that they'll only need to rip one or two discs at a time afterwards as they purchase further titles. According to the Primera website's FAQ and documentation, the software automatically tags the ripped files based on artist, track and album information from the online CDDB and will skip and log any discs for which CDDB information is not available. Up to 20 discs can be stacked on the input bin.
Unfortunately, very little information is available about PTRip software, so it is not clear which audio formats and bitrates it supports and what happens when the publisher encounters problems reading any disc. For example, some audio disc ripping software will not report any issue when ripping scratched or damaged discs and the user may not know about the issue until they playing any of the affected songs. On the other hand, for users who all they care about is getting their entire collection on their MP3 player as quick and simple as possible, this will be a useful time saver.
