Ripping in FLAC using EAC

[mowgli80]

I don't think different software ripping a CD will sound different. All the software use flac library sourced from the same code to encode or decode and just have different GUI. An easy way to check for difference is to take rips from different softwares with the same settings and tags and run md5/sha sum on them. With the same settings, the check sum will be the same, which means the file has been ripped identically.

 

[gobble]

The challenge comes before the encoding process begins really. Reading the correct 16 bit sample at 1.73mbps continuosly for a few mins is not possible on most cd's and pc's and any ripper has to retry multiple times. When the cd is even slightly scratched it gets worse.

G0bble

 

[mowgli80]

I don't think FLAC encoding is real time, so CD drive's throughput should not be a factor. Neither is number of processes or CPU scheduling etc. a factor. If it was so, a command line ripper will work far better that a windows software running on an emulator in Linux . An encoding done in 2 mins or 2 hours will still have the same data for the same input and will sound the same.

Moreover, I don't think 2 Mb/s is difficult, even for a CD drive. Most of the blu ray movies are encoded with much higher bitrates and still work with the same drives. Moreover, a bad hardware will affect all software equally.

 

[gobble]

In that case there would be no need for software like EAC. The world has been deluding itself....
G0bble

 

[bhagwan]

Screw the technology and enjoy the music.

Cheers

Correct;

Enjoy the music..

If one cannot tell the difference - is it not better ?
Less effort & more enjoyment; Forget the technicality - just sit back & appreciate what your ears & brain [heart] is telling you !
At least that is how I see it [rather hear it] !

:indifferent14:

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

I don't think different software ripping a CD will sound different. All the software use flac library sourced from the same code to encode or decode and just have different GUI.

For FLAC, I think you are right. For MP3 (which probably shouldn't concern any of us except maybe for pocket players) rips can be different as the encoding software can be of different versions and not produce the same result (Or so I read ). This is because it is a commercial format, and the latest bestest costs more to use.

I don't think FLAC encoding is real time, so CD drive's throughput should not be a factor...

You can play and listen to a CD in "real time." As long as it is not damaged, it will will present no challenges. This is part of my answer to those who claim that an audio PC needs super-fast hdds, or high-performance RAM... hey, it works from an optical drive!

In that case there would be no need for software like EAC. The world has been deluding itself....

What? About hifi?

Surely that could never happen!

:lol: :yahoo: :lol: :yahoo: :lol: hyeah:

I would tend to agree with Gobble here. EAC goes to great extent to judge that that data it picks up from the CD is as close to the original as possible. It uses a DB on the cloud to calculate the offset need for each drive. I don't think quality of the drive (as long as it is decent) makes that much of a difference as does the quality of the media. I have seen EAC return between 90-95% accuracy for old CDs, though it always returns 99-100% accuracy for new CDs. I would go so far to say that this level of accuracy will not mean much to our ears unless we have heard the original in the studios and can remember each and every nuance of the song.

I suspect that for any optical disc in good condition, just about any ripper will do just fine, although even then, EAC is going to give some feeling of security. EAC comes into its own when the disc is not in perfect condition.

I don't know what is the big difference between EAC and the cdparanoia-driven stuff on Linux. I have not attempted to study it properly. On the to-do list! I'm sure Gobble has good reason to use EAC. And, I don't think the world is deluding itself on this one.

Screw the technology and enjoy the music.

Very much my attitude to different file formats, sampling rates, etc, these days.

 

[gobble]

For FLAC, I think you are right. For MP3 (which probably shouldn't concern any of us except maybe for pocket players) rips can be different as the encoding software can be of different versions and not produce the same result (Or so I read ). This is because it is a commercial format, and the latest bestest costs more to use.

Thad
I have ripped a CD using the default ripper in macbook or some trivial software (I don't recall which) and the resulting SQ was thin, strained and terrible. It is therefore not difficult to imagine a mp3 ripped off common software will also sound equally terrible even if the encoder is top notch. Therefore I would say even if ripping into MP3s the rip quality should be as good as it can be that a WAV or FLAC listener would want for his audiophile system.

You can play and listen to a CD in "real time." As long as it is not damaged, it will will present no challenges. This is part of my answer to those who claim that an audio PC needs super-fast hdds, or high-performance RAM... hey, it works from an optical drive!

Typically since there is no time for error recovery during playback in real time some mathematical error correction is applied by extrapolating the bits for the byte samples assumed to be errorred. That is why high end CD players have a three lens pickup so even if one lens data read is suspect, the data read by the other two lenses can be used for reconstructing the byte sample on the fly as in a RAID 5 stripe.

[/Quote]

What? About hifi?

Surely that could never happen!

:lol: :yahoo: :lol: :yahoo: :lol: hyeah:

I disagree, somewhat - HiFi is not a mere delusion - it is a form of madness where the severity of the symptoms are in direct proportion to the amount of money spent. hyeah:

I suspect that for any optical disc in good condition, just about any ripper will do just fine, although even then, EAC is going to give some feeling of security. EAC comes into its own when the disc is not in perfect condition.

Recalling now the experience with the macbook rip, I would be very vary of ripping even a good optical disk using anything but secure ripping software.

I don't know what is the big difference between EAC and the cdparanoia-driven stuff on Linux. I have not attempted to study it properly. On the to-do list! I'm sure Gobble has good reason to use EAC. And, I don't think the world is deluding itself on this one.

Cdparanoia cannot do C2 error correction and caching drives can fool it. From the cdparanoia wiki page:

cdparanoia is more or less the only secure ripper available for the Linux operating system and works best on drives that have the Accurate Stream feature and do not cache audio data.

A C2 error is a read error of a compact disc. C2 errors can to a degree be recovered by the hardware error detection and correction scheme. A CD drive can have extraction errors when the data on the disc is not readable due to scratches or smudges. The drive can compensate by supplying a "best guess" of what the missing data was, then supplying the missing data. C2 error correction is an analysis over many interleaved frames, an improvement over C1 error correction, which analyzed just one frame, resulting in more accurate data correction.[1] C2 error correction codes are also used by the Digital Audio Tape (DAT) format.
Some copy protection schemes add false C2 errors to discs to discourage copying.

RubyRipper uses Cdparanoia and

It will repair any files (mathematically) so that it's impossible to successfully blind-test with the original via an ABX test for example. The log file will optionally report any position that needed more than 3 trials, so you can check the position yourself.

The possibility for false error correction is there.

HTH
G0bble

 

[mowgli80]

Most of the error correction only comes into the picture for badly damaged media. paranoia claims bulletproof extraction from a good media in their faq so I do not see where one rip sounding better than the other arises. If the media is badly damaged, why waste space and time on a "lossy(from errors)" lossless rip . Might as well buy better media

 

[gobble]

Most of the error correction only comes into the picture for badly damaged media. paranoia claims bulletproof extraction from a good media in their faq so I do not see where one rip sounding better than the other arises. If the media is badly damaged, why waste space and time on a "lossy(from errors)" lossless rip . Might as well buy better media

It appears you don't have a CD collection that is 3 or 4 years old or that you have been obsessively maintaining CD's in bullet proof cases without a single smudge or scratch. Or then maybe you just don't have a practical idea. I guess if you found that odd CD of Alanis Morrissette or whoever that you like and it was a bit scratched, you would head to the store and spend another 500 bucks to buy a new one so you could rip it to your HDD. And there are those who won't bother buying duplicates of their 100 scratched CD's just so they can rip it once and junk it now that they have moved to a computer based setup.

You just aren't being practical, you are also being pig headed with an ostrich in the sand attitude in your refusal to understand what is being talked about. I am not going to respond to any more posts from you.

For the others, here is some more useful info from the CdParanoia FAQ

I can play audio CDs perfectly; why is reading the CD into a file so difficult and prone to errors? It's just the same thing.

Unfortunately, it isn't that easy.
The audio CD is not a random access format. It can only be played from some starting point in sequence until it is done, like a vinyl LP. Unlike a data CD, there are no synchronization or positioning headers in the audio data (a CD, audio or data, uses 2352 byte sectors. In a data CD, 304 bytes of each sector is used for header, sync and error correction. An audio CD uses all 2352 bytes for data). The audio CD *does* have a continuous fragmented subchannel, but this is only good for seeking +/-1 second (or 75 sectors or ~176kB) of the desired area, as per the SCSI spec.

When the CD is being played as audio, it is not only moving at 1x, the drive is keeping the media data rate (the spin speed) exactly locked to playback speed. Pick up a portable CD player while it's playing and rotate it 90 degrees. Chances are it will skip; you disturbed this delicate balance. In addition, a player is never distracted from what it's doing... it has nothing else taking up its time. Now add a non-realtime, (relatively) high-latency, multitasking kernel into the mess; it's like picking up the player and constantly shaking it.

CDROM drives generally assume that any sort of DAE will be linear and throw a readahead buffer at the task. However, the OS is reading the data as broken up, seperated read requests. The drive is doing readahead buffering and attempting to store additional data as it comes in off media while it waits for the OS to get around to reading previous blocks. Seeing as how, at 36x, data is coming in at 6.2MB/second, and each read is only 13 sectors or ~30k (due to DMA restrictions), one has to get off 208 read requests a second, minimum without any interruption, to avoid skipping. A single swap to disc or flush of filesystem cache by the OS will generally result in loss of streaming, assuming the drive is working flawlessly. Oh, and virtually no PC on earth has that kind of I/O throughput; a Sun Enterprise server might, but a PC does not. Most don't come within a factor of five, assuming perfect realtime behavior.

To keep piling on the difficulties, faster drives are often prone to vibration and alignment problems; some are total fiascos. They lose streaming *constantly* even without being interrupted. Philips determined 15 years ago that the CD could only be spun up to 50-60x until the physical CD (made of polycarbonate) would deform from centripetal force badly enough to become unreadable. Today's players are pushing physics to the limit. Few do so terribly reliably.

Note that CD 'playback speed' is an excellent example of advertisers making numbers lie for them. A 36x cdrom is generally not spinning at 36x a normal drive's speed. As a 1x drive is adjusting velocity depending on the access's distance from the hub, a 36x drive is probably using a constant angular velocity across the whole surface such that it gets 36x max at the edge. Thus it's actually spinning slower, assuming the '36x' isn't a complete lie, as it is on some drives.

Because audio discs have no headers in the data to assist in picking up where things got lost, most drives will just guess.

This doesn't even *begin* to get into stupid firmware bugs. Even Plextors have occasionally had DAE bugs (although in every case, Plextor has fixed the bug *and* replaced/repaired drives for free). Cheaper drives are often complete basket cases.

Unfortunately with all the understanding and insight the developers have either not gone to the levels of EAC or are unable to prove that CDParanoia is as good, primarily -because EAC is closed source!! So really the developers can't be blamed for that and we should sympathize with them. But there are enough posts on the Internet of people discussing how CDParanoia reports a different checksum each time for a scratched CD meaning its reading different data each time. I don't see similar complaints about EAC and scratched disks so for now, I choose to rely on EAC. I would love to move to an entirely open source linux based app one day though.

G0bble

 

[jls001]

I don't see why anyone should question your choice of EAC. Looks like it simply the best tool for the job.

dBPowerAmp is even better, btw. I didn't believe it either, but heard the difference myself.

 

[mowgli80]

It appears you don't have a CD collection that is 3 or 4 years old or that you have been obsessively maintaining CD's in bullet proof cases without a single smudge or scratch. Or then maybe you just don't have a practical idea.

No, I was smart enough to know CD was a bad medium and stored everything on reliable HDDs . Infact I always download music and buy cd to pay for it and put thee CD into the bin.

I guess if you found that odd CD of Alanis Morrissette or whoever that you like and it was a bit scratched, you would head to the store and spend another 500 bucks to buy a new one so you could rip it to your HDD. And there are those who won't bother buying duplicates of their 100 scratched CD's just so they can rip it once and junk it now that they have moved to a computer based setup.

Please read my post again. I said its better to buy another copy of badly damaged media rather than hearing a bad "lossless" recording of the same. I am sure your entire collection isn't badly damaged . For mild scratching etc, paranoia claims to work pretty well so no issues there. For badly damaged CDs, I wouldn't mind going through other channels as I have already paid for the content. FYI

What are the differences between Paranoia versions?
... Where Paranoia III concentrated on bulletproof extraction from good media and reliable extraction from damaged media, ....

Also from the faq

Does cdparanoia lose quality from the CD recording? Does it just re-record the analog signal played from the CDROM drive?
No to both. Cdparanoia (and all other true CD digital audio extraction tools) reads the values off the CDROM in digital form. The data never comes anywhere near the soundcard, and does not pass through any conversion to analog first.

Now if you still claim EAC sounds better than paranoia ...

Sadly, you are stressing on the wrong part of the faq. That faq is pretty old and most of what you quoted may not be true now. Hardware and computing has improved by leaps and bounds since then.

You just aren't being practical, you are also being pig headed with an ostrich in the sand attitude in your refusal to understand what is being talked about. I am not going to respond to any more posts from you.

Adieu

 

[bhagwan]

dBPowerAmp is even better, btw. I didn't believe it either, but heard the difference myself.

Spot On !
Therefore I am 're-ripping' 5000 CD's
Trust me - it is not a job any person would enjoy...I hate it for sure...
You have to hear the difference to understand & appreciate what dB does.
Do not ask me why ? I have no technical answers - but when you rip in EAC & in dB - the difference is chalk & cheese...

 

[gobble]

Wow! I hope dbpoweramp runs on wine ? I am going to try this.
G0bble

 

[jls001]

Spot On !
Therefore I am 're-ripping' 5000 CD's
Trust me - it is not a job any person would enjoy...I hate it for sure...

I appreciate the pain you're taking!

Re-ripping 5000 CDs is certainly not a welcome prospect.

I will have to think hard whether I have the patience to re-do all my CDs.

PS: if EAC or dBPowerAmp fails you, you can always use plain old Windows Media Player to rip your CD to wave. I have often had problem with EAC trying for hours to rip a particularly bad CD. In such situations, I simply use WMP as it isn't choosy or too particular about the way it extracts the CD data. My thought is at least I have an usable backup.

 

[bhagwan]

I appreciate the pain you're taking!

I will have to think hard whether I have the patience to re-do all my CDs.

Sir,
I have 2 box full of your CD's [300 ++]
They are being ripped.
I should be done by Sunday.
200 + have been ripped.
Please do come with a HDD & I will transfer all the music to you.
Grey Goose - Compilations etc. are a few that could not be ripped - accurate data was not there - I guess - maybe some other reason - but all CD's take under 5 to 8 mins to rip.

 

[square_wave]

I am sorry, I do not agree with what you have to say;
Technically - you are 100 % correct.
However, when you listen - they sound different.

Same goes with EAC & dB
When you rip the same cd - 2 times - different location on same HDD & play back - same software used [for play back] they [files] sound different.
I do not have a reason - why - but the dB ripped files are 'better' than the EAC files.

If this was not the case - why would I re-rip 5000 ++ CD's [I already have them in flac] - ripped with EAC.
I am re-ripping the music in Wave - dB
Ponder..

I found this to be true too. Wavs sound slightly better. Not sure why. I have always ripped to wavs. I have friend who ripped almost 300 cds to flac using EAC. After many trials and listening, he is now in the process of ripping them all again to wav using db poweramp. Shift delete and a few minutes took care of all the 300 albums in flac !!

Not sure why they sound different and I dont want to waste valuable time trying to find out. What matters is the result.

 

[IndianEars]

square wave... I ( and a large number of audiophiles) agree with you that wav sounds better than flac.

However, such opinions do not find resonance on this forum.

Many forum members here seem to "listen" with their logic rather than their Ears, so I have now stopped posting such comments / sharing such views here.


He that doesn't know but knows that he doesn't know is simple, teach him.

He that knows but doesn't know that he knows is asleep, wake him.

He that knows and knows that he knows is wise, follow him.

He that doesn't know and doesn't know that he doesn't know is a fool, shun him.

 

[square_wave]

That defines the difference between a blind believer and one who uses the grey cells between the ears in addition to the ears themselves.

Cheers

You sure are a wise man

 

[square_wave]

square wave... I ( and a large number of audiophiles) agree with you that wav sounds better than flac.

However, such opinions do not find resonance on this forum.

Many forum members here seem to "listen" with their logic rather than their Ears, so I have now stopped posting such comments / sharing such views here.


He that doesn't know but knows that he doesn't know is simple, teach him.

He that knows but doesn't know that he knows is asleep, wake him.

He that knows and knows that he knows is wise, follow him.

He that doesn't know and doesn't know that he doesn't know is a fool, shun him.

It is actually a mindset. Think no more about it.

A wave file and a flac file is pretty much the same if you look at them from a data perspective. Once you look beyond data into the multifarious chain of events that go into the playback of these formats....maybe one could find some answers.

I remember this conversation on AA a few years ago where many people like Gordon Rankin and Steve N participated.

Computer Audio Asylum

 

[arj]

I found this to be true too. Wavs sound slightly better. Not sure why. I have always ripped to wavs. I have friend who ripped almost 300 cds to flac using EAC. After many trials and listening, he is now in the process of ripping them all again to wav using db poweramp. Shift delete and a few minutes took care of all the 300 albums in flac !!

Not sure why they sound different and I dont want to waste valuable time trying to find out. What matters is the result.

SW, is this because it was ripped as FLAC or because it was played as FLAC /
What i mean is if we convert the ripped Flac to Wave, does it sound better ?