I want to rip all my CDs with EAC (Exact Audio Copy) to FLAC.
Supposedly, if the track quality in EAC is 100% the CD has been ripped
100% accurately. I have also installed "Accurately Ripped". This
program sometimes reports different CRCs with a confident level much
bigger then 1 although EAC reports 100% accurate results. How is this
possible? Which program should I trust?

Besides the above question how much a difference would I see/hear in a
100% ripped file (with EAC) and a file with a non-matching CRC value?

Please note that personally I don't care if the SILENT gap between to
files differs by 500ms as long as the audiable part is accurate.

Regards,
Rob

"rob" wrote in message
oups.com

I want to rip all my CDs with EAC (Exact Audio Copy) to
FLAC. Supposedly, if the track quality in EAC is 100% the
CD has been ripped 100% accurately. I have also installed
"Accurately Ripped". This program sometimes reports
different CRCs with a confident level much bigger then 1
although EAC reports 100% accurate results. How is this
possible? Which program should I trust?

Trust the program that gives the identically same results no
matter how many times you run it.

In general, this is a trivial requirement and its easily
met. Not so with CD ripping programs.

One thing I noticed when I use EAC is that it reports back that sometimes
there is a track timing error from the CD player. If I rip it again it
cleans up. This may occur on 3 out of 12 tracks and is more the norm for
me. Maybe my drive is packing up?

B~

In alt.music.mp3,rec.audio.pro, On Wed, 03 Aug 2005 12:53:09 GMT, "B.
Peg" wrote:

One thing I noticed when I use EAC is that it reports back that sometimes
there is a track timing error from the CD player. If I rip it again it
cleans up. This may occur on 3 out of 12 tracks and is more the norm for
me. Maybe my drive is packing up?

I noticed EAC works differently (either better or worse) on
different drives, if you have both a CDROM and a CDR/W drive on your
system, try the other one, it may be a lot more reliable.

B~


-----
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rob wrote:
I want to rip all my CDs with EAC (Exact Audio Copy) to FLAC.
Supposedly, if the track quality in EAC is 100% the CD has been ripped
100% accurately. I have also installed "Accurately Ripped". This
program sometimes reports different CRCs with a confident level much
bigger then 1 although EAC reports 100% accurate results. How is this
possible? Which program should I trust?

Besides the above question how much a difference would I see/hear in a
100% ripped file (with EAC) and a file with a non-matching CRC value?

Please note that personally I don't care if the SILENT gap between to
files differs by 500ms as long as the audiable part is accurate.

Regards,
Rob


Can you hear the difference? IF not, what does it matter?
People get all worked up about accuracy.
There are multiple levels of error correction, and error masking going
on in the normal CD playing process. You can't hear that either.

Remember that you're gonna be ripping you cd collection again for the
next big format and the one after that...and the one after that...
mike

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"rob" wrote in news:1123051226.639937.249970
@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com:

I want to rip all my CDs with EAC (Exact Audio Copy) to FLAC.
Supposedly, if the track quality in EAC is 100% the CD has been ripped
100% accurately. I have also installed "Accurately Ripped". This
program sometimes reports different CRCs with a confident level much
bigger then 1 although EAC reports 100% accurate results. How is this
possible? Which program should I trust?

Besides the above question how much a difference would I see/hear in a
100% ripped file (with EAC) and a file with a non-matching CRC value?

Please note that personally I don't care if the SILENT gap between to
files differs by 500ms as long as the audiable part is accurate.

Regards,
Rob


Here are some reasons for differing CRCs
http://www.exactaudiocopy.org/eac16.html

Have you set up EAC for your drive?
http://users.pandora.be/satcp/eac03.htm#-

You could ask at this EAC forum
http://www.digital-inn.de/forumdisplay.php?forumid=14

--
fred

No I am not going to re-rip my CDs again. I rip it lossless to flac and
then simply convert it to another lossy format. If another format comes
up I just setup a batch process to convert all flag files to that new
format.

This is one reason why I want the best ripped result. The other reason
is that I do not want to sit down in front of my good stereo and listen
to each song carefully just to make sure it was ripped right. If I
listen to music I listen to the music I feel like listening at that
time.

Thanks for the reply.

Yes, I did all this. Secure mode, accurate stream is on, drive caches
audio data is checked and drive is capable of C2 is disabled. My drive
actually does not cache data and reports C2 but I just want to be on
the safe side.

Also note:

1) Tracks with the problem are neither the first nor last tracks.
2) Confidence level is high (5)
3) Typically only 1 sometimes 2 tracks are affected.
4) If ripped again AccurateRip often gives good results.

Rob

On Wed, 03 Aug 2005 12:41:15 -0700, rob wrote:

Thanks for the reply.

Yes, I did all this. Secure mode, accurate stream is on, drive caches
audio data is checked and drive is capable of C2 is disabled. My drive
actually does not cache data and reports C2 but I just want to be on
the safe side.

Also note:

1) Tracks with the problem are neither the first nor last tracks.
2) Confidence level is high (5)
3) Typically only 1 sometimes 2 tracks are affected.
4) If ripped again AccurateRip often gives good results.

What happens if you do a null sum with two rips of a track that give
different CRCs and then normalise the result? Check the waveforms line up
first.
CDs are not really a random access medium, so one may just have a sample
or two more before the song starts than the other.


Rob

If you are using Windows XP with the native driver. Try using the NeroASPI
driver as is recommended by EAC. EAC says the Windows driver works fine in
most cases, but they say the NeroASPI driver is more stable.
iRobot

"philicorda" wrote in message
news
On Wed, 03 Aug 2005 12:41:15 -0700, rob wrote:
I looked at EAC years ago, when it was Beta V0.8 or something. I notice
it's still not made it to V1 yet. Does this mean anything ?

geoff

I looked at EAC years ago, when it was Beta V0.8 or something. I notice
it's still not made it to V1 yet. Does this mean anything ?

Not really. Version numbers are completely arbitrary; they're just a way
of keeping track of whether someone is using a known-broken version or
not and encouraging them to move to something newer.

*GENERALLY* 1.0 is the first version you ship expecting to be paid for
it... on the other hand, there are a lot of folks who won't buy 1.0 of
anything no matter how many earlier releases it has, so I've seen one
product completely skip that version number.

The project I'm currently working on is using non-numeric version names.
As long as we know which one's which, and the customer has some
reassurance that they're upgrading rather than downgrading, that's fine.

rob wrote:
No I am not going to re-rip my CDs again. I rip it lossless to flac and
then simply convert it to another lossy format. If another format comes
up I just setup a batch process to convert all flag files to that new
format.

This is one reason why I want the best ripped result. The other reason
is that I do not want to sit down in front of my good stereo and listen
to each song carefully just to make sure it was ripped right. If I
listen to music I listen to the music I feel like listening at that
time.


OK, I'm curious.
When you listen to the track on your "good stereo", what are the
symptoms of a track EAC said was good and you think is bad?
mike

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I haven't tried it as I just start looking into all this. And
honestley, I am not going to try it either. The problem is that I might
not hear a difference on one song but I might on another. As far as I
understand EAC gives no indicator about how bad an error is, just that
there is one or there is none. So in some cases nobody would ever hear
a difference whereas in other cases the error might be very audiable.
Of course I could check out a few dozen such cases and then make an
educated guess. I know you probably would do that as you have the time
to re-rip all your CDs whenever a better codec comes out. I prefer to
do some bigger up front work first to do it right the first time.

You can see an easier cd ripping procedure here
http://www.fleximusic.com/support/cd14.htm


"rob" wrote in message
I want to rip all my CDs with EAC (Exact Audio Copy) to FLAC.
Supposedly, if the track quality in EAC is 100% the CD has been ripped
100% accurately. I have also installed "Accurately Ripped". This
program sometimes reports different CRCs with a confident level much
bigger then 1 although EAC reports 100% accurate results. How is this
possible? Which program should I trust?

Besides the above question how much a difference would I see/hear in a
100% ripped file (with EAC) and a file with a non-matching CRC value?

Please note that personally I don't care if the SILENT gap between to
files differs by 500ms as long as the audiable part is accurate.

Regards,
Rob

100% merely means EAC didn't have to read any sectors twice.
Less than 100% means some sectors had to be reread because of an error.
If you are using secure mode and not burst, you will get a perfect rip even
if some tracks have less than 100% PROVIDED EAC concludes with no errors.
If it states the presence of errors, it is only because it could not correct
them.

To summarise:If EAC concludes with no errors then you got a perfect rip.

FWIW, I've been using EAC almost daily for years now. Before that it was
cdparanoia.

"mike" wrote:
Can you hear the difference? IF not, what does it matter?

Can you listen without any distractions to every moment of 80 minutes
worth of material in real time, compare it with an original, detect and
note any differences, determine the rate of dropped, altered or
repeated samples for hundreds or thousands of audio CDs that may need
to be copied, and repair the errors in this way? I don't think so.

Copies of many CDs are inevitably copied again. Think of a historical
archive 200 years from now--none of the originals will be reliable any
more; only the discs that have been recopied several times in series
will be playable. Any uncorrected errors in the process will only
accumulate in the copies until eventually, something will sound very
wrong and nothing much can be done about it.

A few years ago I did a series of careful tests of several CD-ROM
drives. One of the errors that I observed was abrupt reversal of
channels (i.e. an odd number of samples was repeated or skipped). In
other cases larger groups (e.g. dozens) of samples were skipped or
repeated. How can you fix that kind of thing?

rob wrote:
I haven't tried it as I just start looking into all this. And
honestley, I am not going to try it either. The problem is that I might
not hear a difference on one song but I might on another. As far as I
understand EAC gives no indicator about how bad an error is, just that
there is one or there is none.

I've found that EAC almost never reports an error on a reasonably clean
CD. On BADLY scratched CDs, I often can't hear the errors reported.
On REALLY BADLY scratched CDs, the biggest problem is skips, complete
read failures. Listening critically to each and every error reported
would increase my ripping time almost none. YMMV if your CD player
isn't up to snuff.

So in some cases nobody would ever hear
a difference whereas in other cases the error might be very audiable.
Of course I could check out a few dozen such cases and then make an
educated guess. I know you probably would do that as you have the time
to re-rip all your CDs whenever a better codec comes out. I prefer to
do some bigger up front work first to do it right the first time.

For me the problem is space. I use MP3 cause I simply don't have the
space to store uncompressed music. I'd much rather have listenable
music at my fingertips.

FWIW, you reported setting up EAC with different settings than those
supported by your drive??? Sure this is a good idea?

FWIW2, people seem to get really wound up about a bit error
when the music was acquired by a nonlinear microphone,
digitized, mixed, resampled, compressed, infused with copy protection,
re-analog'd with a 1-bit D/A converter and played back on
speakers that can't possibly faithfully reproduce the material.
But gotta get rid of that bit error...
mike





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mike wrote:
I've found that EAC almost never reports an error on a reasonably clean
CD. On BADLY scratched CDs, I often can't hear the errors reported.
On REALLY BADLY scratched CDs, the biggest problem is skips, complete
read failures. Listening critically to each and every error reported
would increase my ripping time almost none. YMMV if your CD player
isn't up to snuff.

For what it's worth: I've successfully copied tracks off CDs I've found
in the street, after they've been run over a few times, simply by
letting the normal CD-audio interpolation do its job. I lose the more
damaged tracks, and the result probably isn't as clean as a more serious
patch would be, but the system's more robust than most folks give it
credit for.

On 4 Aug 2005 07:02:56 -0700, David Satz wrote:


A few years ago I did a series of careful tests of several CD-ROM
drives. One of the errors that I observed was abrupt reversal of
channels (i.e. an odd number of samples was repeated or skipped). In
other cases larger groups (e.g. dozens) of samples were skipped or
repeated. How can you fix that kind of thing?


Fortunately, nowadays anyone doing this seriously (and I would guess that
includes many people in a pro audio group) has easy access to tools that
do the job correctly. At least one optical drive manufacturer is very
aware of the demands of the professional audio community and produces
drives and software that can operate accurately and that will verify that
the data has been transferred accurately.

Cheers.

James.

"mike" wrote ...
OK, I'm curious.
When you listen to the track on your "good stereo", what are the
symptoms of a track EAC said was good and you think is bad?


When Rob is listening on his "good stereo" his CD player is
reacting to exactly the same read errors as EAC is. People
forget that the error detection/correction in Red Book audio
discs is not nearly as robust as for computer files. But you
can play games with audio reconstructing missing sample
values that nobody can hear.