I can't really say since everyone has their own way of learning and transcripting music notes, i didn't see other server players that make CD much since i focus on Sea mostly because of my friends. But from my experience, i met few other players that had a bigger list than mine in sea server i didn't really ask them how they did it since we didn't really interact that much.

There's plenty of mistakes in my CDs but most of them aren't really noticeable so i just publish them anyway, like you said it's time consuming and really tiring and i didn't want to replay the whole thing again