[sivers]

At the time, the CD was often the practical master. Many recordings had come from analog tape, sent to a mastering house, who burned the final master to a CD.

Anyway, I skipped this detail in the original article, but Apple let go of the requirement to use their special “put the CD in the drive” tool. We were able to deliver using master WAV/FLAC files, converted to their AAC requirements, and uploaded.

[y3sh]

Yep, I was on the other end of this at the time and had a bunch of those gold colored CDs labeled MASTER for each album

[vehementi]

Yeah I was going to say, surely you did not end up ripping 200,000 CDs in a couple of weeks

[dreadlordbone]

It was 5,000 clients who paid $40 each totaling $200,000. Not 200,000 CDs.

[lostlogin]

If they hadn’t, surely there was a scriptable method that didn’t involve re-ripping?

[adrianmonk]

Or I guess you might have been able to do a scriptable method that does involve re-ripping.

That is, stick a CD-RW in the drive, and write a program that would:

(1) Erase the CD-RW, then burn one album's worth of WAV files to it. (Ideally, do it accurately like with a cue sheet file.)

(2) Drive the Apple software's GUI (using AppleScript?) to enter the track metadata, re-rip, and upload.

(3) Repeat until done.

If something ejects the CD-RW, that might mess up the automation. Some drives will pull the CD back in if the tray or disc bumps into something while ejecting, so maybe a strategically-placed heavy object is enough.