Anyone know a good CD player that has a USB out and will work as a drive with my ROON Rock for ripping cd’s? It would be great to have a standalone player for rare occasions that could also function as my usb transport for the Rock. Thanks!
I would imagine any external PC CD/DVD drive will suffice.
I have an older LG external which has C2 error correction functionality that I use for ripping. Mind you I use it connected via USB to a computer and rely on dBpoweramp for ripping to a NAS. The NUC ROCK is pointed to the NAS for the media libraries.
Thanks. Yep, I have it working with an external lG usb drive now. Just was wondering if there was a more standalone cd player/transport that would work and serve double duty.
I’m using Cocktail Audio X50D which is Roon Ready, a CD Trasnport/Ripper and optional storage which can be linked to Roon library. And it has USB, digital coax & toslink, and I2S outputs to external DAC. I’m using the USB out to my DAC now.
I have installed a disk into my X50D and all my ripped CDs are stored on it. And I added the drive to Roon library so all my ripped albums are added to Roon Library.
If I understand what you want correctly, I don’t think what you describe exists. There might be a smart way to achieve the same functionality, but read replies carefully to be sure we do understand!
How is the rest of your kit connected up? That could be important.
I once asked Linn how I could use the Linn Karik transport to rip my CD collection. their reply paraphrased was
“don’t bother putting the wear and tear on the Karik, buy a cheap CD transport for your PC and wear that out and throw it when you’re done !!”
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Just get a basic £20 USB CD drive (or stick with your external lG drive) for ripping your CDs. You’re not ripping in real time, so as long as it can read a CD sector by sector it will be fine.
If you want a more HiFi looking CD player with analog outputs, get one separately to the above, connect it directly to your amp and use it solely for that purpose, effectively bypassing Roon.
A dual purpose device (ie. RCA outputs for audio and a USB connection for connecting to a computer) is likely to add more than £20 to the cost of a traditional HiFi CD player. Likewise a device that could both play and rip a CD and store the results somewhere on your network is likely to be even more costly — as it’s basically a computer with a CD player attached.
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If you wanted to use your USB CD player as an audio source that appears in Roon then take a look at the Roon Entry Points extension (specifically the CD feature).
Annoyingly you can’t install Roon Extensions on ROCK or else the above would be a one-stop solution to both your needs ie. act as a CD player for both ripping and music playback into Roon.
What you could do however is install the Roon Extension Manager on a small Raspberry Pi (or any other computer on your network other than your NUC/ROCK) and then enable both the CD ripper extension and the Roon Entry Points extension. Your CD rips would then be sent to your Library and your CD audio would appear as a personal/private ‘radio station’ in Roon.
Lots of help on setting up and using the Roon Extension Manager and the various extension on the forums here.
Although unless you really need your CD player to appear as an audio device inside Roon (ie. you need to leverage Roon’s multi room features) and like tinkering, it’s problay simper to keep to separate devices for ripping and playing.
[EDIT: post removed, thought I have found a CD/DVD player for a sensible price that could do what you want. Turns out I was mistaken]
Interested to know what you found though… ? 
It was a Panasonic CD/DVD player but it only ‘ripped’ to a local USB stick. When I first saw a link to it I was mistaken in thinking it could also be connected to a computer for use as a USB CD drive. Even if that limited functionality was useful, I’'d be extremely wary of it as you have no way of updating it’s inbuilt CD ripper software, so who knows how well it performs that task. Compared to dbPoweramp or EAC (or even the CD ripper built into RoonOS or the Roon CD Ripper Extension) I can’t imagine it being very sophisticated.
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Upcoming Schiit Urd is a CD Transport that also has both USB In (for passthrough from a streamer) and USB out for connecting to an external dac
I am very interested in Schiit’s take on an optical transport. Rumoured price is $1299 US which does deflate my eagerness a tad in acquiring one.
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Maybe this one will do?
https://www.melco-audio.com/products/d100/
Edit: Maybe not if you are planning to connect it directly to your Roon Rock?
Aside from being a transport it can also act as a USB>S/PDIF converter since it can output both over usb and coax/aes and has an optional usb input but I agree, it’s very pricey for what it is
Check out Shanling ET3 Transport. I’m using it and it is a very versatile.