Ripping

[Murrough]

I've read a lot about which CD+G drives to using for making backups of disks for use in kJams. So I would like to share. The Apple USB SuperDrives (HL-DT-ST) work very well. I am currently backing up all my 7500 songs from CD+G's to the Mac. I currently use 3 SuperDrives through a powered USB hub and the average rip speed ins about 5x to 9x across all three drives, with the rip speed being the limiting factor. All music is at Lame 320Kbps. The Apple OS needed a terminal patch along the lines of 'sudo nvram boot-args=”mbasd=1″' key'd in to terminal. After reboot, all three connected SuperDrives are recognized and kJams will happily rip from all three simultaneously (probably based on the cores and your processor). I learned not to press eject before the last disk is finished plus about 20 seconds as the system ejects one at a time. However for 3 disks with say 45 songs, the rip time is 10 minutes, which is not a bad throughput for best quality encoding. Its also best to spend a bit of time adjusting naming capitalization and disk names up front, etc and start all three at the same time when complete. As the instructions say, rip them to the untouched "kJams Music" folder. Then to make them portable, copy them into a brand new folder name on a portable disk and import that library by adding it to an empty catalog.

Cheers, Murrough

[dave]

sudo nvram boot-args=”mbasd=1″

what is that for?

[Murrough]

OK, On iMacs that have DVD drives built in, Apple disable the external Supa Drives from working. Ie they only worked on the Macbook Airs and the machines that did not have a inbuilt drive. So that command 'gets round' that default state and ensures the external drives can be recognised by the OS.
Not sure it works on all machines and all versions of the Apple OS, but it worked for me after spending a bit of time searching for it on forums.
Of course Apple do not publicly support it.

[DeusExMachina]

Dave:
FYI, this only affects the Apple External SuperDrive. The argument mbasd stands for "MacBook Air Super Drive". For some reason Apple choses to specifically check for this drive at startup, and cripple it on all machines other than the MBA (i.e. machines that have an internal drive). Possibly this is to eliminate drive conflicts at boot. This command writes to the startup plist file telling OSX to ignore that nonsense.
Doing so breaks other things, however. DVDs, for instance do not work as expected. Neither DVD Player nor VLC will play them as DVDs (though you can play them in VLC by playing the VOBs directly). So I suspect that the issue was a region code/copy protection issue that Apple wrote into firmware to prevent the external drive being hooked up to another Mac that already had a drive, thus letting DVDs be copied. Regardless, overwriting that variable value with sudo gets around the main problem, that OSX won't use the drive at all.

[dave]

[dj ralph]

Hello, new to this discussion, so - just purchased KJams for our macbook pro- now need to rip/import our hundreds of CDG's into KJams. have been searching now for two days for the correct external drive without success. Those listed on the site either don't exist anymore or will not work with a macbook. Any suggestions? Would The Apple USB SuperDrives (HL-DT-ST) be what I am looking for, or is there something else out there? Thanks for your help!

[Karanight]

Welcome dj ralph, there's no science in my answer but it might help. I've always found the cheapest CD drive you can find tends to do the job whilst the dearer ones are less likely to do the job. Having said that I'm sure you'll get sure fired answers about current drive that will deffo work

[dave]

all drives are compatible with your MacBook, regardless of whether they say so.

[dj ralph]

Thanks for responses - and Dave - you are right, except that they will not read CDG's. That's what I need.

[dave]

every single drive that i link to under "works for sure" most certainly *does* read (and write) CD+G discs.

i recommend a drive from the very first link, which leads here

[dj ralph]

OK Dave, I'm going with your suggestion, Thanks!

[dj ralph]

So, here we are 10days later and have equipment that does not work. Spent $140 for KJams software and another $140 for the external hard-drive from Karaoke Pilot and that does not work either. Have tried to call those people and that appears to be a lost cause. WTF.

[dave]

I'm the guy you need to talk to and i can promise you it will work!

Please give me a call! I'm here right now

[dave]

Update: Okay we spoke on the phone and it was just a bit of confusion bout the drive from PilotKaraoke (it came with instructions for windows and driver downloads and installation and all this other stuff, which is not related to the mac)

So they just plugged the drive in, and everything is working great now