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What equipment do I need for the fastest ripping of CD+G's that will provide exellent quality playback? Getting tired of lugging around 2000+ CD+G's.

PowerKaraoke's CD+G burner ($40) is pretty good as is CDGRip by Invincion (free) for rippers that name the files for you as well as zipping them. If you don't care about zipping the files then Audiograbber is an okay ripper (free). Out of the three I like PowerKaraoke's ripper the best.

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I have to agree with Danny on Power Karaoke it rips very clean and you can set various factors such as speed to rip, bit rate, it saves to mp3+g, wav+g, bin or it will even zip it for you. Great program you can download a trial version of it and yep the cost is $39.00

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I like everyone when I first meet them. If you don't like me that's not my problem it's YOURS!
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Thanks for the advice! Pardon my ignorance as I am just now beginning to look into this. But what exactly does it mean to "zip the files" and what advantages does it offer me?

If you rip to MP3's, bitrate is unbelievably important especially when your talking about tracks that will be played back through high powered PA systems. At one time, people claimed that 128Kbps MP3's were CD quality, it think that has subsided a bit and people realize that you can still hear the difference. On lower grade consumer equipment 128K might be enough. However, for PA you should be going much higher. Personally I used to rip all of my CD+G's at 256Kbps, anything less and I could still hear the artifacts from the compression. More recently, I've switched to ripping all mine in WAV format (which is theoretically lossless). It takes considerably more room but Hard Disk space is cheap. I'm actually in the process of going back through my collection and slowly converting them to WAV. Just food for thought.

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DJ Tony
Let It Rip Karaoke

So if I'm thinking of ripping 2000+ CDG's in wave format, how big would the hard drive need to be?

If you're planning on ripping them into WAV format, it would take about 80-90 GB to rip 2000 songs.

You would probably be better off to rip them to mp3 in 320kbit/s quality. Would bring the amount of dataspace you need down to about 20 GB.

He's talking 2000+ Discs, Sevarin.

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The Line Array Experiment is over. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Really? 80-90 GB for 2000 SONGS in wave format? I bet he meant to say DISCS. What do think?

His numbers are not off. He meant songs. The OP meant discs.
check this link from tricerasoft.com
http://www.tricerasoft.com/storage.html

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The Line Array Experiment is over. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Wow! Then I would need like 1,300 GB if I wanted to store it all in wave format, huh?

a 3 terabite harddrive would be enough with room to spare for new songs. It would take you forever to load 2000+ discs in wav format.

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The Line Array Experiment is over. Nothing to see here. Move along.

For speed of ripping (as opposed to bitrate) it is more of a question of reading the CD without errors. Most of the ripping programs allow you to rip at 2x,4x or 8x rate which is how fast the songs are compared to natural speed.

This has nothing (directly) to do with the bitrate that the song is saved at, and how much space it uses. (as for that I went with .wav, just so I knew I would not regret it later).

The advantage with the faster speed of ripping is of course the time savings, while the disadvantage is the error rate. The speed of ripping increases the chance that a song is converted with errors, this can be anywhere from the annoying hicups or "mess" in the graphics to failed songs. I ripped at a 4x rate for most of my songs, and my error rate is about 1 song in 100 with problems only about 1 in 1000 with total failure (with new disks). Older, scratched or dirty disks will have a higher error rate and proabably should be recorded at slower speeds.

This is a non trivial issue as 2000 disks will take about 500 hours to rip at 4x but about 2000 hours at 1x. The difference will impact how many songs have errors in the computer files.

Holy crap! And I've been using these discs for several years so they have some wear and tear on them. I've got so many irons in the fire right now, there's NO WAY I could find that much time. Too bad there isn't some service available where a person could legally order a hard drive loaded with only the discs I own.

Holy crap! And I've been using these discs for several years so they have some wear and tear on them. I've got so many irons in the fire right now, there's NO WAY I could find that much time. Too bad there isn't some service available where a person could legally order a hard drive loaded with only the discs I own.

I'm thinking your time is a little off. I rip at 1X and a 15 song disc only takes 15 minutes so that makes it 4 discs per hour maybe a little longer depending if you have to change names and such so 2000 discs would be 500 hours or so.

If the discs show wear it is better to rip at 1X so you don't get errors.

Mustang do you really have 2000 discs? If you do I'm sure that a lot of the songs are dupes and could be eliminated while ripping. As for HD size I have a little under 14000 songs (no dupes) and it only takes about 55gb ripped at 192 tis why I only have a 320gb hard drive.

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I like everyone when I first meet them. If you don't like me that's not my problem it's YOURS!
A stranger is a friend you haven't met yet

[/quote]Mustang do you really have 2000 discs? If you do I'm sure that a lot of the songs are dupes and could be eliminated while ripping..[/quote]

Yeah. Back in the day, I started out with all the cheap sets. AH, BS, NK, SAVA, SGB, etc. I've "grown" since then, and so do have a lot of dupes. However, several of my clientelle still prefer many of those versions, and so I want them to always be able to choose if at all possible.

So, back to the original question...

Then PowerKaraoke's burner would be a good one to get for speed and quality ripping?

I also don't have a laptop yet. What should I be looking for there? I don't plan on using it for ANYTHING other than my shows. I like the idea of a huge external hard drive for future growth. Any recommendations for quality DEPENDABLE hardware?

Not always the case, I have a couple discs that ripped better at higher speeds than the slower 1-4X speed. Typically though i'd agree - I think it also depends on the quality of the drive in question whether it can read cdg code well.

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I would strongly recommend a Plextor CD-RW for CDG ripping. Many of the tracks I ripped before I got my Plextor have minor glitches in the graphics, which has hardly ever been a problem with the Plextor.

Something else to consider is to rebuild a couple of cheap towers at home just for ripping. I'm talking like a PII or PIII you could find at a thrift store for $20. Drop used IDE Plextor DR-RW drives into them, and you can have them simultaneously converting your CDGs while you're busy doing other things on your "real" computer. It doesn't take much of a computer to do the conversion, I started with an old Dell PII 333mhz junker. Once they're ripped you can easily move them to your external drive you host with across a network or by connecting that drive to the cheapo boxes you use for ripping.

Personally, I hate laptops for DJ/KJ as I don't think they handle the abuse well, but I seem to be alone in that opinion...
I'm also harder than most on my equipment and tend to drink many beers while DJ/KJing. I'm the guy most likely to spill beer in my keyboard. Another used keyboard, $2, repairing or replacing a laptop: $$$$

The most important things on your hosting computer is good sound (most any SoundBlaster compatible 16 bit sound chip/card will give you that) and two independent video outputs with TV connectivity. IE, one output for your monitor (or the screen on your laptop) and another to run to the TVs where you host, such as S-video or composite. While S-video looks better, composite is MUCH easier to work with & split to multiple screens or feed a RF modulator with. You can down-convert S-video to composite, but it doesn't seem to look as good as starting with composite. On many laptops the external video output merely mirrors the output on the screen which is NOT adequate for karaoke hosting. (Saw someone do that once; I had his gig the next week. He was also streaming his karaoke songs from YouTube! ) There are devices which connect to your USB that'll give you an extra independent TV video out, but they're pricey and too unstable IMO. It's not hard or expensive to build a mini-tower and put in a video card that supports two screens with one being a TV-compatible video out. I'm currently using an Nvidia GeForce 6200 OC and it's been great. I started with an old ATI with RCA composite output I got used for $5 that didn't conflict with the on-board video on the previously mentioned olf Dell PII and that worked great too. The only reason I ever stopped hosting with it was after 3 years of hauling it from gig to gig (and several drops) I literally beat the hell out of it to the point it died.