Brennan B2 and Raspberry Pi

[Bill]

A friend has bought one of these Brennan devices that records all your
CD's to a 2TB hard drive. I've been trying to help him with it, first by
going to his house and getting it to work at all, then latterly by
phone.

It has a Raspberry Pi mounted alongside another pcb. He had connected it
to his ethernet network by removing the back and accessing the connector
as suggested by the manufacturer. Space is terribly tight, and the back
is held on by two different types of screw. Reseating the back panel and
guessing which screws went where allowed the plugs to go in fully and it
worked.

After a day or two he started saying that it was taking at least 10
minutes to record each CD and that this rate he would be dead before his
huge CD collection was fed in. At this stage I remoted to him and
PuTTY'd from another machine into the Brennan, primarily to look up the
spec of the internal CD drive (it should be capable of 24x).

I am hopeless with Linux and have never used a Pi. hwinfo and lspci
don't seem to be supported, but dmesg seemed to work. The result
included the following lines. Should I be alarmed?

[ 3.415877] FAT-fs (mmcblk0p3): Volume was not properly unmounted.
Some data may be corrupt. Please run fsck.
[ 3.432082] smsc95xx 1-1.1:1.0 eth0: link up, 100Mbps, full-duplex,
lpa 0x45E1
[ 3.436744] FAT-fs (sda1): Volume was not properly unmounted. Some
data may be corrupt. Please run fsck.
[ 3.727554] scsi 1:0:0:0: CD-ROM MATSHITA DVDRW UJ8A7AF
1.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0
[ 3.750785] sr0: scsi3-mmc drive: 24x/24x writer cd/rw xa/form2 cdda
caddy
[ 3.750820] cdrom: Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.20

[The Natural Philosopher]

Post by Bill
A friend has bought one of these Brennan devices that records all your
CD's to a 2TB hard drive. I've been trying to help him with it, first by
going to his house and getting it to work at all, then latterly by phone.
It has a Raspberry Pi mounted alongside another pcb. He had connected it
to his ethernet network by removing the back and accessing the connector
as suggested by the manufacturer. Space is terribly tight, and the back
is held on by two different types of screw. Reseating the back panel and
guessing which screws went where allowed the plugs to go in fully and it
worked.
After a day or two he started saying that it was taking at least 10
minutes to record each CD and that this rate he would be dead before his
huge CD collection was fed in. At this stage I remoted to him and
PuTTY'd from another machine into the Brennan, primarily to look up the
spec of the internal CD drive (it should be capable of 24x).
I am hopeless with Linux and have never used a Pi. hwinfo and lspci
don't seem to be supported, but dmesg seemed to work. The result
included the following lines. Should I be alarmed?
 [    3.415877] FAT-fs (mmcblk0p3): Volume was not properly unmounted.
Some data may be corrupt. Please run fsck.
[    3.432082] smsc95xx 1-1.1:1.0 eth0: link up, 100Mbps, full-duplex,
lpa 0x45E1
[    3.436744] FAT-fs (sda1): Volume was not properly unmounted. Some
data may be corrupt. Please run fsck.
[    3.727554] scsi 1:0:0:0: CD-ROM            MATSHITA DVDRW UJ8A7AF
1.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0
[    3.750785] sr0: scsi3-mmc drive: 24x/24x writer cd/rw xa/form2 cdda
caddy
[    3.750820] cdrom: Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.20

Not really

[Theo]

Post by Bill
After a day or two he started saying that it was taking at least 10
minutes to record each CD and that this rate he would be dead before his
huge CD collection was fed in. At this stage I remoted to him and
PuTTY'd from another machine into the Brennan, primarily to look up the
spec of the internal CD drive (it should be capable of 24x).
I am hopeless with Linux and have never used a Pi. hwinfo and lspci
don't seem to be supported, but dmesg seemed to work. The result
included the following lines. Should I be alarmed?

Looks fine. Some storage is complaining because you turned it off without a
proper shutdown, but it seems to be surviving.

While the CD drive may be capable of 24x, CD audio has no error correction.
Therefore if you drive it faster, you may lose audio quality.
Also, 24x is the fastest the drive can do - it's probably a constant angular
velocity drive, so it'll be 24x on the outside of the CD and much less
towards the inside.

CDs are 74-80 mins, so it's doing about 8x on average. 10 mins each sounds
about right.

Does the drive whirr for the whole time? If not, it's possible it's also
spending time encoding the audio.

Theo

[Bill]

Post by Theo
Looks fine. Some storage is complaining because you turned it off
without a proper shutdown, but it seems to be surviving.
While the CD drive may be capable of 24x, CD audio has no error
correction. Therefore if you drive it faster, you may lose audio
quality. Also, 24x is the fastest the drive can do - it's probably a
constant angular velocity drive, so it'll be 24x on the outside of the
CD and much less towards the inside.
CDs are 74-80 mins, so it's doing about 8x on average. 10 mins each
sounds about right.
Does the drive whirr for the whole time? If not, it's possible it's
also spending time encoding the audio.

The worry about the error message is that it relates to the 2TB drive
holding all the audio. So we shouldn't try fsck? It scares me.

I'd forgotten about the slower reading from the inside of CD's. Thanks
for the reminder.

The adverts for the device say that it should import a CD in 4 mins. He
is backing up to an external HD, so should be OK if he has to return it.
The external HD was a journey of its own as it has to be FAT32, which
isn't available as a format in the Windows 10 main machine that he has.
He didn't want to format in the Brennan as he was feeding CD's in.

It records as raw wav type files, then overnight converts to flac for
storage, so there should be no on the fly encoding. I think it has an
inbuilt database of metadata for CD's, but I don't think his stuff will
be covered. I'm not sure when it goes online to lookup data it doesn't
have. That might take time. It has made some glaring metadata errors.

[Andy Burns]

Post by Bill
The worry about the error message is that it relates to the 2TB drive
holding all the audio. So we shouldn't try fsck? It scares me.

Given that the Pi is "hidden" inside the B2, I presume the user is more
or less meant to forget that it's there, and I'd expect it to fsck itself.

If the owner cleanly powers off the box, then you log back on, is the
filesystem then clean?

[Chris Bartram]

Post by Bill

Looks fine.  Some storage is complaining because you turned it off
without a proper shutdown, but it seems to be surviving.
While the CD drive may be capable of 24x, CD audio has no error
correction. Therefore if you drive it faster, you may lose audio
quality. Also, 24x is the fastest the drive can do - it's probably a
constant angular velocity drive, so it'll be 24x on the outside of the
CD and much less towards the inside.
CDs are 74-80 mins, so it's doing about 8x on average.  10 mins each
sounds about right.
Does the drive whirr for the whole time?  If not, it's possible it's
also spending time encoding the audio.

The worry about the error message is that it relates to the 2TB drive
holding all the audio. So we shouldn't try fsck? It scares me.
I'd forgotten about  the slower reading from the inside of CD's. Thanks
for the reminder.
The adverts for the device say that it should import a CD in 4 mins. He
is backing up to an external HD, so should be OK if he has to return it.
The external HD was a journey of its own as it has to be FAT32, which
isn't available as a format in the Windows 10 main machine that he has.
He didn't want to format in the Brennan as he was feeding CD's in.
It records as raw wav type files, then overnight converts to flac for
storage, so there should be no on the fly encoding. I think it has an
inbuilt database of metadata for CD's, but I don't think his stuff will
be covered. I'm not sure when it goes online to lookup data it doesn't
have. That might take time. It has made some glaring metadata errors.

It is complaining about the (micro) SD card in the Pi. (mmcblk0p3 is, I
believe, partition 3 on the (micro) SD card.

It's only whining because it wasn't unnmounted, because someone
power-cycled the Pi.

Digital audio ripping is very variable according to disk quality and
drive ability, and i've found that reading one dodgy disk can then slow
down subsequent rips until after a reboot.

I had no idea that Brennan boxes had a Pi in before now!

[charles]

Post by Chris Bartram

Post by Bill

Post by Theo
Looks fine. Some storage is complaining because you turned it off
without a proper shutdown, but it seems to be surviving.
While the CD drive may be capable of 24x, CD audio has no error
correction. Therefore if you drive it faster, you may lose audio
quality. Also, 24x is the fastest the drive can do - it's probably a
constant angular velocity drive, so it'll be 24x on the outside of the
CD and much less towards the inside.
CDs are 74-80 mins, so it's doing about 8x on average. 10 mins each
sounds about right.
Does the drive whirr for the whole time? If not, it's possible it's
also spending time encoding the audio.

The worry about the error message is that it relates to the 2TB drive
holding all the audio. So we shouldn't try fsck? It scares me.
I'd forgotten about the slower reading from the inside of CD's. Thanks
for the reminder.
The adverts for the device say that it should import a CD in 4 mins. He
is backing up to an external HD, so should be OK if he has to return it.
The external HD was a journey of its own as it has to be FAT32, which
isn't available as a format in the Windows 10 main machine that he has.
He didn't want to format in the Brennan as he was feeding CD's in.
It records as raw wav type files, then overnight converts to flac for
storage, so there should be no on the fly encoding. I think it has an
inbuilt database of metadata for CD's, but I don't think his stuff will
be covered. I'm not sure when it goes online to lookup data it doesn't
have. That might take time. It has made some glaring metadata errors.

It is complaining about the (micro) SD card in the Pi. (mmcblk0p3 is, I
believe, partition 3 on the (micro) SD card.
It's only whining because it wasn't unnmounted, because someone
power-cycled the Pi.
Digital audio ripping is very variable according to disk quality and
drive ability, and i've found that reading one dodgy disk can then slow
down subsequent rips until after a reboot.
I had no idea that Brennan boxes had a Pi in before now!

I should add that mine failed to boot last autumn. A nre SD card from
Brennan solved the problem.

[Chris Bartram]

Post by charles

Post by Chris Bartram
I had no idea that Brennan boxes had a Pi in before now!

I should add that mine failed to boot last autumn. A nre SD card from
Brennan solved the problem.

I run a RPi as a music player with an external DAC. It runs Runaudio
(http://www.runeaudio.com/), and generally works well, but with previous
Linux images (volumio, for example) I had problems with corrupt cards,
especially after an unexpected power cycle. I make a point of using
decent quality SD cards, but it has been pointed out to me that
industrial grade cards may last better:
https://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/secure-digital-cards/1249645/ .

I've not yet tried this as the current one with Runeaudio has lasted
over a year, even surviving a dodgy PSU that at times caused a boot failure.

[Bill]

Post by Chris Bartram

Post by charles

Post by Chris Bartram
I had no idea that Brennan boxes had a Pi in before now!

I should add that mine failed to boot last autumn. A nre SD card from
Brennan solved the problem.

I run a RPi as a music player with an external DAC. It runs Runaudio
(http://www.runeaudio.com/), and generally works well, but with
previous Linux images (volumio, for example) I had problems with
corrupt cards, especially after an unexpected power cycle. I make a
point of using decent quality SD cards, but it has been pointed out to
https://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/secure-digital-cards/1249645/ .
I've not yet tried this as the current one with Runeaudio has lasted
over a year, even surviving a dodgy PSU that at times caused a boot failure.

Well, I have spent all afternoon on the phone to the friend and looking
into his Brennan. The SD card and main HD still say they were
improperly unmounted and may be corrupt. The main drive gives an error
message about an invalid cluster chain.

We spent some time looking at how to power the device on and off safely,
which is not terribly clear. We got an external CD drive to rip, but the
CD name failed to appear, so when it had finished (in about 2/3s the
time of the internal drive) we couldn't find it on the HD. It turns out
that he has been ejecting 'unnamed' CD's during the standard ripping
process because of the black hole they fall into. We assume this doesn't
affect the mounting of any drives. Many of his (and my!) CD's don't seem
to appear in any online databases.

He is hopefully now going to raise these questions in the manufacturer's
forum.

Thanks to everyone for the help, discussion and ideas.

[Huge]

On 2018-02-19, Bill <***@gmail.com> wrote:

[21 lines snipped]

Post by Bill
Well, I have spent all afternoon on the phone to the friend and looking
into his Brennan. The SD card and main HD still say they were
improperly unmounted and may be corrupt. The main drive gives an error
message about an invalid cluster chain.
We spent some time looking at how to power the device on and off safely,
which is not terribly clear.

Send it back for a refund.

[Johnny B Good]

On Mon, 19 Feb 2018 10:08:25 +0000, Chris Bartram wrote:

====snip====

Post by Chris Bartram
Digital audio ripping is very variable according to disk quality and
drive ability, and i've found that reading one dodgy disk can then slow
down subsequent rips until after a reboot.

That sounds like a Microsoft Windows experience. The cause was due to
the driver code detecting a high error rate, causing it to drop back to a
lower UDMA performance mode, one stage at a time in the hope of easing
the stress on the interface to eliminate the high rate of errors until
finally resorting to the least stressful[1] of all modes, PIO mode, which
once selected, could not be reverted back to UDMA mode automatically.

If the driver had dropped from UDMA mode 3 down to 2 then 1 before
eliminating the high rate of errors, it could automatically revert back
to the faster UDMA modes provided it hadn't resorted to PIO mode. The
idea behind this behaviour was to automatically select the fastest
reliable UDMA setting with hard disk drives since not all drives fully or
reliably met their claimed UDMA specification.

It was a way to save the user the need to test and and adjust to find
the optimum performance setting between the drive and the ATA interface
itself which was apt to demonstrate 'compatibility issues' at the maximum
theoretical UDMA settings with various models of drive and brands of
interface chips used on the main board and plug in adapters.

This rarely resulted in resorting to PIO mode in the case of hard disk
drives, unless they were actually 'going bad', but it was a bit of a
disaster with optical media since defective media could trigger this drop
back to PIO mode, leaving the optical drive locked in this mode just for
the sake of one troublesome data CD or DVD leaving the put upon user to
google for the solution (either a registry edit or else uninstall/re-
install the optical device to trigger a reset back to UDMA mode[2]).

[1] Least stressful for the drive but horribly stressful for the CPU
which now had to do *all* the grunt work of shifting the data instead of
offloading it to the DMA controller.

[2] Microsoft must have addressed this issue in the more recent versions
of Windows if you've only had to reboot the machine to restore full
performance to your optical drive.

[Chris Bartram]

Post by Johnny B Good
====snip====

Post by Chris Bartram
Digital audio ripping is very variable according to disk quality and
drive ability, and i've found that reading one dodgy disk can then slow
down subsequent rips until after a reboot.

That sounds like a Microsoft Windows experience.

Actually, recently on Linux. One CD, seemingly undamaged, just refused
to rip, sticking at one point, and then the next one was slow. I was
wondering if the first one was one of those deliberately nobbled ones
from the early 2000s.

Post by Johnny B Good
The cause was due to
the driver code detecting a high error rate, causing it to drop back to a
lower UDMA performance mode, one stage at a time in the hope of easing
the stress on the interface to eliminate the high rate of errors until
finally resorting to the least stressful[1] of all modes, PIO mode, which
once selected, could not be reverted back to UDMA mode automatically.
If the driver had dropped from UDMA mode 3 down to 2 then 1 before
eliminating the high rate of errors, it could automatically revert back
to the faster UDMA modes provided it hadn't resorted to PIO mode. The
idea behind this behaviour was to automatically select the fastest
reliable UDMA setting with hard disk drives since not all drives fully or
reliably met their claimed UDMA specification.

I've seen all that in the past, but in this case it feels like drive
firmware setting a read rate. That's just a guess, obviously, without
delving very deep. From what I recall, PIO dropback on Windows with an
optical drive survived a reboot?

[snip]

[Johnny B Good]

Post by Chris Bartram

Post by Johnny B Good
====snip====

Post by Chris Bartram
Digital audio ripping is very variable according to disk quality and
drive ability, and i've found that reading one dodgy disk can then
slow down subsequent rips until after a reboot.

That sounds like a Microsoft Windows experience.

Actually, recently on Linux. One CD, seemingly undamaged, just refused
to rip, sticking at one point, and then the next one was slow. I was
wondering if the first one was one of those deliberately nobbled ones
from the early 2000s.

Post by Johnny B Good
The cause was due to the driver code detecting a high error rate,
causing it to drop back to a lower UDMA performance mode, one stage at
a time in the hope of easing the stress on the interface to eliminate
the high rate of errors until finally resorting to the least
stressful[1] of all modes, PIO mode, which once selected, could not be
reverted back to UDMA mode automatically.
If the driver had dropped from UDMA mode 3 down to 2 then 1 before
eliminating the high rate of errors, it could automatically revert back
to the faster UDMA modes provided it hadn't resorted to PIO mode. The
idea behind this behaviour was to automatically select the fastest
reliable UDMA setting with hard disk drives since not all drives fully
or reliably met their claimed UDMA specification.

I've seen all that in the past, but in this case it feels like drive
firmware setting a read rate. That's just a guess, obviously, without
delving very deep. From what I recall, PIO dropback on Windows with an
optical drive survived a reboot?

That was my experience (shared by all windows users) who suddenly found
problems playing DVD videos due to the optical disk drive transfer mode
dropping into PIO mode, seemingly "Out of the Blue", for no obvious
reason and remaining in that mode even after a reboot.

It required the user to take remedial measures to restore it back to a
UDMA mode (typically modes 1 or 2 in the case of a DVD drive, rarely, if
ever, modes 3 and above, which was the preserve of the later models of
hard disk drive).

Of course, SATA has largely eliminated this problem since it can
distinguish between media and interface errors (and even allow hot
swapping a SATA interface cable without crashing the drive interface - a
luxury not provided for with IDE). SATA isn't going to try to remedy
media issues by futilely slowing down the interface.

[Brian Gaff]

I was going to say, I hope its not just using lossy compression. There are
lossless compression systems. flac is what I tend to use.
However not having heard of this device, I'd hope it had some kind of eggs
in one basket fail safe mode for errors on drive and maybe would have two
drives inside it anyhow.
Not all dvD drives are equal. I've noticed that on some cds some drives
slow right down in an attempt to reduce errors. I think they use checksums
to spot errors in each frame of data, so if multiple reading is going on it
could easily go on for ages and sometimes does.

Also how is it looking up the cd db info to label the cds and tracks etc.
many cds seem not to have any cd text or an entry in any of the common cddb
databases or worse, multiple entries each slightly different!
I think ripping cds is not something I bother to do for all my collection
nowadays, although I can no longer read the cases, I have labelled them and
getting up off a sofa to get a cd and play it is good for your circulation!
Nothing to stop people ripping favourite tracks of course and making up a
playlist that way or indeed burning this to another cd if you like. large
ripped collections really only make sense if you are running a disco or a
radio station or have multiple users who use the same media.
Also of course if you really want a totally unlimited collection plenty of
subscription on line services can provide that and if you are always adding
to a collection the subscription route might be more cost effective.
Brian
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Post by Theo

Post by Bill
After a day or two he started saying that it was taking at least 10
minutes to record each CD and that this rate he would be dead before his
huge CD collection was fed in. At this stage I remoted to him and
PuTTY'd from another machine into the Brennan, primarily to look up the
spec of the internal CD drive (it should be capable of 24x).
I am hopeless with Linux and have never used a Pi. hwinfo and lspci
don't seem to be supported, but dmesg seemed to work. The result
included the following lines. Should I be alarmed?

Looks fine. Some storage is complaining because you turned it off without a
proper shutdown, but it seems to be surviving.
While the CD drive may be capable of 24x, CD audio has no error correction.
Therefore if you drive it faster, you may lose audio quality.
Also, 24x is the fastest the drive can do - it's probably a constant angular
velocity drive, so it'll be 24x on the outside of the CD and much less
towards the inside.
CDs are 74-80 mins, so it's doing about 8x on average. 10 mins each sounds
about right.
Does the drive whirr for the whole time? If not, it's possible it's also
spending time encoding the audio.
Theo

[Adrian Caspersz]

On 19/02/18 08:55, Brian Gaff wrote:

<snip>

Post by Brian Gaff
Also of course if you really want a totally unlimited collection plenty of
subscription on line services can provide that and if you are always adding
to a collection the subscription route might be more cost effective.

It is.

I have saved thousands, subbing to Spotify instead of filling cupboards
with CDs, some that may get played maybe five times in their lifetime.

[Andy Burns]

Post by Brian Gaff
not having heard of this device

This is the only time I've seen one mentioned, outside the small-ad
pages of private eye.

[Huge]

Post by Andy Burns

Post by Brian Gaff
not having heard of this device

This is the only time I've seen one mentioned, outside the small-ad
pages of private eye.

+1

It's too late now, but I don't see the point of them unless you don't own
a computer, in which case, buy one, since a computer is cheaper than one
of these boxes anyway and can do all kinds of other stuff.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Brennan-B2-2Tb-Metallic/dp/B017Q9MMSA

£569? Some kind of joke, surely?

[Chris Bartram]

Post by Huge

Post by Andy Burns

Post by Brian Gaff
not having heard of this device

This is the only time I've seen one mentioned, outside the small-ad
pages of private eye.

+1
It's too late now, but I don't see the point of them unless you don't own
a computer, in which case, buy one, since a computer is cheaper than one
of these boxes anyway and can do all kinds of other stuff.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Brennan-B2-2Tb-Metallic/dp/B017Q9MMSA
£569? Some kind of joke, surely?

It's a lot of cash. I have a player with Runaudio on a Pi, and I got
given an external USB disk enclosure, so all it cost me was the Pi, a
pair of 1TB disks for storage, and a DAC.

[alan_m]

Post by Bill
After a day or two he started saying that it was taking at least 10
minutes to record each CD and that this rate he would be dead before his
huge CD collection was fed in.

So to listen to them all it would take at least 6x longer - well past
his death.

[T i m]

Post by alan_m

Post by Bill
After a day or two he started saying that it was taking at least 10
minutes to record each CD and that this rate he would be dead before his
huge CD collection was fed in.

So to listen to them all it would take at least 6x longer - well past
his death.

However, the point of having a 'library' of music like this is so you
have easy access to whatever you want to listen to at the time and /
or having a very wide range of material on offer if you put it on
shuffle.

Or, you make up your own playlist where you would be unlikely to
listen to every track on each album.

Cheers, T i m

[jim]

Post by alan_m

Post by Bill
After a day or two he started saying that it was taking at least 10
minutes to record each CD and that this rate he would be dead before his
huge CD collection was fed in.

So to listen to them all it would take at least 6x longer - well past
his death.

:-)

[Bill]

Post by alan_m

Post by Bill
After a day or two he started saying that it was taking at least 10
minutes to record each CD and that this rate he would be dead before his
huge CD collection was fed in.

So to listen to them all it would take at least 6x longer - well past
his death.

:-)

There's also the potential cause of death. On the third day he had the
device, his wife was complaining to me about all this awful music
playing in the lounge.

He lives in a huge old house and previously was confined to his "music
room" (previously dining room) with all the walls covered with racks and
shelves of tapes, LP's and CD's.

[Brian Gaff]

Windows 10 has fat 32, it only works though if you use the command prompt to
format with. There is a bug in the windows format front end apparently.
Brian
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Post by Bill

Post by alan_m

Post by Bill
After a day or two he started saying that it was taking at least 10
minutes to record each CD and that this rate he would be dead before his
huge CD collection was fed in.

So to listen to them all it would take at least 6x longer - well past
his death.

:-)

There's also the potential cause of death. On the third day he had the
device, his wife was complaining to me about all this awful music playing
in the lounge.
He lives in a huge old house and previously was confined to his "music
room" (previously dining room) with all the walls covered with racks and
shelves of tapes, LP's and CD's.
--
Bill

[Brian Gaff]

Yes but one supposes the reason for the rip is that he does not want to play
all of all of them.
The one big problem with ripping for me is the glitch at track markers.
I have never seen a music server capable of mending the join seamlessly.
Indeed, for example if you to play the side 2 of the Carpenters Now and
Then cd, it has track markers but is fine on a standard cd player. Do a rip
to hd and its gappy at the markers. You can of course remake the cd to get
rid of them. What I had to do is rip the whole cd by time and lose the
markers on the second half, which make it all one big track.
Classical cds are the same of course.
Brian
--
----- -
This newsgroup posting comes to you directly from...
The Sofa of Brian Gaff...
***@blueyonder.co.uk
Blind user, so no pictures please!

Post by Bill
After a day or two he started saying that it was taking at least 10
minutes to record each CD and that this rate he would be dead before his
huge CD collection was fed in.

So to listen to them all it would take at least 6x longer - well past his
death.
--
mailto : news {at} admac {dot} myzen {dot} co {dot} uk

[Dave Liquorice]

Post by Brian Gaff
The one big problem with ripping for me is the glitch at track markers.
I have never seen a music server capable of mending the join
seamlessly.

Google "gapless playback".

It's a function of the rip and playback software. The rip shouldn't
prefix the audio stream from a track marker with silence and the
playback software has to join the audio streams from two seperate
files on the fly,

ie The playback software has to have both streams open, one playing,
the other cued to the correct point.

If the software has to close the outgoing file and open the incoming
there will be a small glitch. If the incoming is prefixed with
silence you get a gap. If the playback software looks for the start
of actual audio on the incoming, to skip the gap, there will be a
glitch.

My test album for this is Darkside of the Moon. The Squeeze Server
makes a resonable job, there is a small glitch. Gone Mad Music
Player (Android) is almost perfect using the same files. Speak to Me
/ Breathe and On the Run has a small glitch that is hardly
noticeable. On the Run to Time as a little click, that indicates a
step change in the streams from the end of one to the begining of the
other.

[dennis@home]

Post by Brian Gaff
Yes but one supposes the reason for the rip is that he does not want to play
all of all of them.
The one big problem with ripping for me is the glitch at track markers.
I have never seen a music server capable of mending the join seamlessly.

My Yamaha amps appear to do seamless playback from my NAS.
They also react faster than when I used a Pi3 as a media player so they
must have quite a bit of RAM and CPU power.

[charles]

Post by Bill
A friend has bought one of these Brennan devices that records all your
CD's to a 2TB hard drive. I've been trying to help him with it, first by
going to his house and getting it to work at all, then latterly by
phone.
It has a Raspberry Pi mounted alongside another pcb. He had connected it
to his ethernet network by removing the back and accessing the connector
as suggested by the manufacturer. Space is terribly tight, and the back
is held on by two different types of screw. Reseating the back panel and
guessing which screws went where allowed the plugs to go in fully and it
worked.
After a day or two he started saying that it was taking at least 10
minutes to record each CD and that this rate he would be dead before his
huge CD collection was fed in. At this stage I remoted to him and
PuTTY'd from another machine into the Brennan, primarily to look up the
spec of the internal CD drive (it should be capable of 24x).
I am hopeless with Linux and have never used a Pi. hwinfo and lspci
don't seem to be supported, but dmesg seemed to work. The result
included the following lines. Should I be alarmed?
[ 3.415877] FAT-fs (mmcblk0p3): Volume was not properly unmounted.
Some data may be corrupt. Please run fsck.
[ 3.432082] smsc95xx 1-1.1:1.0 eth0: link up, 100Mbps, full-duplex,
lpa 0x45E1
[ 3.436744] FAT-fs (sda1): Volume was not properly unmounted. Some
data may be corrupt. Please run fsck.
[ 3.727554] scsi 1:0:0:0: CD-ROM MATSHITA DVDRW UJ8A7AF
1.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0
[ 3.750785] sr0: scsi3-mmc drive: 24x/24x writer cd/rw xa/form2 cdda
caddy
[ 3.750820] cdrom: Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.20

The normal way forward would be to ask Brennan. But 10 minutes a CD is
about how long it took me.
mind you, I only have about 400 CDs.

[Andrew]

Post by charles
The normal way forward would be to ask Brennan. But 10 minutes a CD is
about how long it took me.
mind you, I only have about 400 CDs.

Dump the linux junk, buy a PC and install
Exact Audio Copy. Much better.

[Adrian Caspersz]

Post by Andrew

The normal way forward would be to ask Brennan.  But 10 minutes a CD is
about how long it took me.
  mind you, I only have about 400 CDs.

Dump the linux junk, buy a PC and install
Exact Audio Copy. Much better.

Dump the ripping effort and subscribe to a streaming service ...

[jim]

Post by Adrian Caspersz

Post by Andrew

Post by charles
The normal way forward would be to ask Brennan. But 10 minutes a CD is
about how long it took me.
mind you, I only have about 400 CDs.

Dump the linux junk, buy a PC and install
Exact Audio Copy. Much better.

Dump the ripping effort and subscribe to a streaming service ...

Indeed. 500+ quid buys lots of months on Spotify /Amazon...

[Huge]

Post by Andrew

The normal way forward would be to ask Brennan.  But 10 minutes a CD is
about how long it took me.
  mind you, I only have about 400 CDs.

Dump the linux junk, buy a PC and install
Exact Audio Copy. Much better.

Ah, yes, sage advice. Spend hundreds of pounds for spyware infested shit
that doesn't work any better than what you can get for nothing.

[Chris Bartram]

Post by Huge

Post by Andrew

The normal way forward would be to ask Brennan.  But 10 minutes a CD is
about how long it took me.
  mind you, I only have about 400 CDs.

Dump the linux junk, buy a PC and install
Exact Audio Copy. Much better.

Ah, yes, sage advice. Spend hundreds of pounds for spyware infested shit
that doesn't work any better than what you can get for nothing.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ often works worse than. I mean, if you
were going to use Windows, CDEX is free, but the best tools are on Linux
IMO.

[alan_m]

Post by Theo
if you
were going to use Windows, CDEX is free

Warning CDEX is now full of spyware and possibly viruses.

It works well but you have to find a copy of the older versions (V1.70
and earlier) when the original developers were still in control and it
came with no unwanted additions.

I'm using an older version on a win10 64 bit PC

See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDex

-
-
mailto : news {at} admac {dot} myzen {dot} co {dot} uk

[Chris Bartram]

Post by alan_m

if you were going to use Windows, CDEX is free

Warning CDEX is now full of spyware and possibly viruses.
It works well but you have to find a copy of the older versions (V1.70
and earlier) when the original developers were still in control and it
came with no unwanted additions.
I'm using an older version on a win10 64 bit PC
See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDex
-
-
mailto : news {at} admac {dot} myzen {dot} co {dot} uk

Noted, thank you. I think I have an old version (but to be honest I
usually just use abcde on Linux).

[Bill]

Post by Andrew

Post by charles
The normal way forward would be to ask Brennan. But 10 minutes a CD is
about how long it took me.
mind you, I only have about 400 CDs.

Dump the linux junk, buy a PC and install
Exact Audio Copy. Much better.

I use EAC here. It takes over 12 minutes to copy a 53 minute CD on this
quite heavily loaded 32-bit W7 laptop. I like EAC; the friend tried it
but found it complicated.

He is asking Brennan on their forum and getting replies from the
designer of the machine. Their basic answer is to connect a good desktop
external CD drive via USB, which they say might cost less than returning
the unit for repair or replacement. They say replacing the internal
drive (as used in old Lenovo T43 laptops) might make little difference.
The discussion over the difference between the advertised 4 mins per CD
vs actual 10 mins has so far remained polite.
He has a cheap Chinese external usb-powered CD drive. He has been unable
to get the Brennan to recognise it. It was this that started me using
Teamviewer, then puTTY to try to see if the Pi saw it. We still have no
answer to that, as we keep getting distracted.

He has now saved 400 CD's to the device, but only scratched the surface
of his collection. He likes the audio quality, but also seems to be
having problems with the labelling and/or numbering of the loaded CD's
and tracks (eg artists are only searchable by Christian names).

[Huge]

Post by Bill

Post by Andrew

Post by charles
The normal way forward would be to ask Brennan. But 10 minutes a CD is
about how long it took me.
mind you, I only have about 400 CDs.

Dump the linux junk, buy a PC and install
Exact Audio Copy. Much better.

"Much better"? [derisive snort] Nothing about Windos is "much better".

Anyway, I've ripped thousands of CDs on my Linux box.

[16 lines snipped]

Post by Bill
He has now saved 400 CD's to the device, but only scratched the surface
of his collection. He likes the audio quality,

Is he ripping them as MP3s? If so, stop now, go back and start again using
a lossless format. I wish I had. :o(

Post by Bill
but also seems to be
having problems with the labelling and/or numbering of the loaded CD's
and tracks (eg artists are only searchable by Christian names).

That's a function of the ID3 tagging the Brennan box is applying to
the files and which media player you're using to play them. This is
(potentially) a problem no matter how you rip them. I assume it's
getting the tags from one of the on-line services such as MusicBrainz,
which since the data is user-supplied is full of inconsistencies and
errors. I'm still finding glitches in the tagging for files after ~15
years at it. Oh, and forget about classical music. The ID3 scheme is not
designed for it and fits very poorly. I gave up with classical music,
but fortunately I only have a few hundred classical CDs.

[Chris Bartram]

On 19/02/2018 11:33, Huge wrote:
[snip]

Post by Huge
That's a function of the ID3 tagging the Brennan box is applying to
the files and which media player you're using to play them. This is
(potentially) a problem no matter how you rip them. I assume it's
getting the tags from one of the on-line services such as MusicBrainz,
which since the data is user-supplied is full of inconsistencies and
errors. I'm still finding glitches in the tagging for files after ~15
years at it. Oh, and forget about classical music. The ID3 scheme is not
designed for it and fits very poorly. I gave up with classical music,
but fortunately I only have a few hundred classical CDs.

I've found CDDB more reliable, but it's best with manual intervention to
choose the best entry. Presumably the Brennan box just takes the first hit.

[Bill]

Post by Andrew
Dump the linux junk, buy a PC and install
Exact Audio Copy.

Just for the record, I've been doing some tests with Windows ripping.

On the same CD, on the same Windows 7 laptop, ripping to wav
Exact Audio copy took 8' 44"
dbPoweramp took 4' 24"
Windows Media Player took 4' 16".

Results were consistent over several passes. I assume EAC is doing lots
of error checking even though this is a new, rarely played, clean disk.

Previous attempts to rip using WMP on a W10 laptop with the same CD took
over 9 minutes.

[dennis@home]

Post by Bill
A friend has bought one of these Brennan devices that records all your
CD's to a 2TB hard drive. I've been trying to help him with it, first by
going to his house and getting it to work at all, then latterly by phone.
It has a Raspberry Pi mounted alongside another pcb. He had connected it
to his ethernet network by removing the back and accessing the connector
as suggested by the manufacturer. Space is terribly tight, and the back
is held on by two different types of screw. Reseating the back panel and
guessing which screws went where allowed the plugs to go in fully and it
worked.

Why is it so expensive?
If you have a PC or a RPi you can plug in a CD drive and do what the
Brennan does using free software.

I just put all my CDs as FLAC on my NAS drive and the musiccast system
can play them without any problems. As can all my android and PCs.

[charles]

Post by ***@home

Post by Bill
A friend has bought one of these Brennan devices that records all your
CD's to a 2TB hard drive. I've been trying to help him with it, first
by going to his house and getting it to work at all, then latterly by
phone.
It has a Raspberry Pi mounted alongside another pcb. He had connected
it to his ethernet network by removing the back and accessing the
connector as suggested by the manufacturer. Space is terribly tight,
and the back is held on by two different types of screw. Reseating the
back panel and guessing which screws went where allowed the plugs to
go in fully and it worked.

Why is it so expensive?

Probably convenience. It's portable, so I could take mine anywhere.

Post by ***@home
If you have a PC or a RPi you can plug in a CD drive and do what the
Brennan does using free software.
I just put all my CDs as FLAC on my NAS drive and the musiccast system
can play them without any problems. As can all my android and PCs.

[Chris Bartram]

Post by ***@home

Post by Bill
A friend has bought one of these Brennan devices that records all your
CD's to a 2TB hard drive. I've been trying to help him with it, first
by going to his house and getting it to work at all, then latterly by
phone.
It has a Raspberry Pi mounted alongside another pcb. He had connected
it to his ethernet network by removing the back and accessing the
connector as suggested by the manufacturer. Space is terribly tight,
and the back is held on by two different types of screw. Reseating the
back panel and guessing which screws went where allowed the plugs to
go in fully and it worked.

Why is it so expensive?

Because it's a packaged solution,a nd not everyone can (or would want
to) build it.

Post by ***@home
If you have a PC or a RPi you can plug in a CD drive and do what the
Brennan does using free software.

That's what the Brennan *is* doing, of course. cdparanoia, abcde maybe.
Quite clever really; a few commodity PC parts, a RPi, and a DAC in a
nice box. Free software and a few scripts, job done.

Post by ***@home
I just put all my CDs as FLAC on my NAS drive and the musiccast system
can play them without any problems. As can all my android and PCs.

Well, yes. A seriously time-expired laptop with a CD could do the
ripping and encoding with no trouble.

[dennis@home]

Post by Chris Bartram
Well, yes. A seriously time-expired laptop with a CD could do the
ripping and encoding with no trouble.

You can buy a new laptop/tablet for about £160 that could do the ripping
and server (and player with a decent USB sound card or bluetooth) with
an external CD and Disk.

It would also get you something like amazon music for about three years
and save the trouble.

I wonder what does an echo dot sounds like if you connect it to an amp
using the jack or bluetooth? Bluetooth should be able to do at least CD
quality if the amp is any good but I have no idea what DAC is in an echo
dot.

[newshound]

Post by Bill
A friend has bought one of these Brennan devices that records all your
CD's to a 2TB hard drive. I've been trying to help him with it, first by
going to his house and getting it to work at all, then latterly by phone.
It has a Raspberry Pi mounted alongside another pcb. He had connected it
to his ethernet network by removing the back and accessing the connector
as suggested by the manufacturer. Space is terribly tight, and the back
is held on by two different types of screw. Reseating the back panel and
guessing which screws went where allowed the plugs to go in fully and it
worked.
After a day or two he started saying that it was taking at least 10
minutes to record each CD and that this rate he would be dead before his
huge CD collection was fed in. At this stage I remoted to him and
PuTTY'd from another machine into the Brennan, primarily to look up the
spec of the internal CD drive (it should be capable of 24x).
I am hopeless with Linux and have never used a Pi. hwinfo and lspci
don't seem to be supported, but dmesg seemed to work. The result
included the following lines. Should I be alarmed?
 [    3.415877] FAT-fs (mmcblk0p3): Volume was not properly unmounted.
Some data may be corrupt. Please run fsck.
[    3.432082] smsc95xx 1-1.1:1.0 eth0: link up, 100Mbps, full-duplex,
lpa 0x45E1
[    3.436744] FAT-fs (sda1): Volume was not properly unmounted. Some
data may be corrupt. Please run fsck.
[    3.727554] scsi 1:0:0:0: CD-ROM            MATSHITA DVDRW UJ8A7AF
1.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0
[    3.750785] sr0: scsi3-mmc drive: 24x/24x writer cd/rw xa/form2 cdda
caddy
[    3.750820] cdrom: Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.20

Going off at a tangent, but relevant if the collection is mostly popular
rather than classical music. I have most of my CDs on a NAS drive (so
accessible anywhere around the house) and have half heartedly been
digitising the LPs (which is pretty time consuming).

However, I've just subscribed to Spotify (they had a cheap 3 month offer
before Xmas) and am starting to build up playlists for my phone, tablet,
and desktop. OK the digitising won't satisfy purists but it is good
enough for my late 60's hearing. I reckon it probably saves money over
buying stuff on name or reputation, and then finding out I don't like
it. Also gives the opportunity to go back and listen to stuff that I
never quite got round to buying.