Hey, I’m in need of a new external drive for CD ripping. I’m not really looking for any audiophile grade drive unless your suggesting one but the crappy 20 dollar verbatim drive I use causes more issues than I’d like (finicky connection, inconsistent ripping, etc) and I’m open to any suggestions.
Depending on your budget, Astell and Kern makes a stand-alone CD ripper.
https://www.musicdirect.com/astell-and-kern-ak-cd-ripper-mkii-open-box
I looked that up but it seems to only be compatible with direct ripping to A&K Daps
Damn. I think you are right. I always just assumed it could output to a hard drive. Seems like a dumb limitation. 
A lot of these audiophile cd rippers are single use only. One ripper only rips to a specific nas etc
I’ve been looking at this
That sounds like the ticket. If you are comfortable with working on a PC guts, you could probably get an internal version that would perform the same but cost less.
So are you only doing CDs? If so, then you really don’t need a Blu-ray drive
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Also look up the external asus zendrive on amazon. It has better reviews and its hella cheap. It only plays DVD’s though, not blu-ray like the one you linked.
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Might rip a few blurays as well. This serves both purposes
Ah. You could look for an external 5.25 inch bay, but getting an all in one unit is most likely easier
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An Apple superdrive ($80) should work. It is plug and play on Mac, and if you install the Windows bootcamp driver on a Windows PC, it should work great.
It is CD/DVD compatible only though.
I bought a cheap 20 USD external cd/dvd drive two months ago to use with my laptop and it’s doing the job just fine. You know, moving the ones and the zeros from one place to another. And when it breaks I’ll get another.
Mine was fine for a while. Now if you do 5 disks in a row it starts producing extensive read errors from overheating so I think its time for an upgrade for me
Mine did some similar noises but what was happening is that when the disk is inserted windows media player would start automatically (and I forgot to close it) and the drive couldn’t do both things at the same time (rip and play). After that it copied disk after disk no problem. And even if there was one that’s what Amazon returns are for.
I’m ripping with a mac and dbpoweramp with iTunes disabled so its okay for that.
Though this drive was bought at Canada’s equivalent of RadioShack so it’s well past the return date
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