Converting CDs to FLAC/MP3

Never mind. I was thinking of the hard drives. You're talking about the DVD drives. In that case, I have to agree with you.

 

Whatever.

 

Having access to more than one drive is useful. My main ripping drive when I did the bulk of my collection was a full size LG DVD writer connected via USB but with its own external PSU. I didn't put a great deal of thought or homework into buying it; it just looked pretty solid and had respectable reviews, and I found (and still find when I reach for it) that it ripped the majority of CDs accurately in a single pass (if the CD was already in the AccurateRip database) or securely if the disc wasn't in AccurateRip (and I always submit my rip results to the AccurateRip database. It's only polite to contribute to something you benefit from).

However, every now and again i'd come up with a disc that had maybe one or two tracks that wouldn't rip accurately, or one that was scratched to bits as a result of my wife using it in the car. I saved all my "difficult" discs until i'd ripped the rest of them, with the worst offending disc being Collideoscope by Living Colour, which is the only DualDisc I possess (DualDiscs were a bad idea).

Tricks with difficult to rip or damaged discs?

1. Clean the disc. Obvious, but sometimes works a treat.
2. Try a different CD drive. I don't know why, but the Blu Ray reader in my tower PC occasionally rips discs or individual tracks that nothing else can read. Ditto the SuperDrive in my 2009 MacBook Pro (using XLD to verify with AccurateRip).
3. Set your ripping software to secure mode and leave the disc overnight. Occasionally, a badly damaged disc will rip perfectly if you leave it long enough to repeatedly rip and re rip dodgy frames. You only need to get it ripped once. If the disc is no longer playable on a CD player you can always burn a replacement CD-R from your rip.
4. Even if a track generates an error, you may not be able to hear a skip or pop. Interpolation and error correction is a wonderful thing. Unless you really can't live with the prospect that your rip has an inaudible error on it, does it really matter?
5. That DualDisc. Wouldn't even play on any of my PC drives. I gave up in the end and connected the optical out of my CD player to the optical in of my MacBook, ripped the whole album into Audacity and then chopped it up into tracks manually. Didn't even like the bloody album that much, and having had to spend that much time ripping it didn't make me like it any more. Eventually, I tried it in a new drive in a new PC and it ripped perfectly in a single attempt. Haven't listened to it since and won't be buying any more DualDiscs.
6. Second hand CDs. Seriously. Some of those CDs of my wife's that served their time in her car were unsalvageable. 3 used CDs for a tenner at the local record store and the problem's solved.

 

i personally rip to Flac using DBpoweramp, I keep the Flac for back up & home use using Jriver, & i make a Extrame VBR MP3 copy with Standard (Increased Spatialization) Crossfeed for on the go headphone use tru Jriver aswell.

 

For myself, it is not really a question of being able to discern a difference, if indeed that made that much of a difference to me.

I have CD's, a good DAC, a couple of excellent (but not UBER priced TT's), new and old albums.

If something that I listen to sounds good to my ears, then I am good with it. I don't worry about some "specs" that my ears have no interest in.

Quite frankly, many CD's have a hard edge to them that compressed files don't seem to have, for what ever reason that is unknown to me. Many CD's sound perfect, which tells me that there is nothing wrong with my system. Unfortunately, most of them do not. I want to listen and enjoy them, but I choose not to, because I find them irritating.

If I thought that compressed music didn't sound good, I would not be listening to it right now and every day. I have hundred's of CD's that I could listen to instead.

 

Life is too short to maintain two sets of the same songs for listing in two places, FLAC and MP3. Having tried managing two sets of the same data, I'm a big fan of one set of data that is able to be transcoded on the fly when it is loaded on the player or as it is streamed to somewhere else.
Maintaining two sets is too much headache.

 

I use a $20 LG external USB CD drive that I've worked like a rented mule. It's probably slower than some, but if you're ripping CD's that are in good condition you shouldn't have any issues with accurate rips 98% of the time.

The one thing that nobody has mentioned so far that you should be aware of is that you can have a perfectly good looking disc that you will not get an accurate rip from for various reasons.

I've got a few oddballs that are totally mint and I can't get an accurate rip from. One is John Mellencamp's "Scarecrow" that's a record club pressing made in Canada. And I've also had 2 mint copies of Jackson Brown's "The Pretender" that I couldn't get an accurate rip from either. One reason could be that nobody else has submitted your particular pressing to the accurate rip database. Then there is the CD drive offset (which I don't know a lot about) but I've heard that can be a culprit in not getting an accurate rip either.

 

I have some old players, that are nice player's but do not play anything but MP3 files.

But I also have some extra recent android smart phones that I could use for players for now, if I wanted to use them for that. I'm guessing that they would play FLAC, never tried. I don't think that I have really used a portable player since 2013.

My car is a 2002 Grand Marquis that has a CD player, but I have an adapter, where I can plug in the output of a smartphone.

Some day, I will get another better player.

 

Another reason for this is disc rot that you cannot see with the naked eye. Occasionally a disc just goes bad. There's recent thread about this with a number of examples in the main music sub-board.

 

I dunno, looks like you've got a little cauliflower in there, buddy.

Sleeping in the Produce aisle again...?

 

Recently burnt out a laptop drive after a few years of ripping discs - I have a large collection, 4000+. I really should have invested in a spare drive. I can still get a replacement for the laptop, but it's a PITA. Today I went down to Micro Center and bought a full size internal drive and a large aluminum enclosure. You'll pay more for the enclosure than the drive itself. They had two main brands of internal drives, ASUS and LG. From what I could tell they were basically identical and happened to be made in the same factory. We'll see how this setup does.

 

I think you struck gold with LG drive! As you are also from the UK, you will almost certainly have encountered several copy protected CDs: there are far more European CDs with copy protection than US ones. The LG obviously copes well. My laptop DVD drive simply does not cope with even the mildest copy protection, and simply suggests multiple thousand frames need re-ripping.

My brother got me a slot loading version of the Matshita / Panasonic former top rated drive, which ripped a few CDs error free before swallowing and markings a CD. Slot loading CD players are the work of the devil!

This is when I bought the USB to powered sata / ide adaptor. I've bought a Samsung SH-224, other drives have been rescued from PC towers either free of for a couple of pounds.

The first drive I tried an old ide interface Lite-On immediately ripped one of the copy protected CDs, first pass giving an AccurateRip very quickly. It ripped CDs that didn't have any protection much quicker than the laptop drive. After a 2,000 odd CDs, it more and more often refuses to open the drawer, so a paper clip is required and the drive is in semi-retirement. However good this drive is, it couldn't rip the HTOA on a Blur CD.

A work colleague had replaced his OC with a laptop, and knowing that I ripped CDs, gave me two Pioneer drives for free. One of these (but not the other!) immediately ripped that hidden track without errors, and the track played back without any audible issues. Blur Think Tank is the CD if anyone has it. I've also successfully ripped the HTOA (hidden track one audio) on White Ladder by David Gray.

After giving up on a copy protected European copy protected Sarah McLachlan, Afterglow CD and buying an American preceding, the Pioneer ripped the European version giving an AccurateRip. The fact that it gave an AccurateRip, shows that some others had a drive that coped with it.



Copy control. Not Red Book, not a "proper" CD.

Biggest epic fails? Unmarked CDs that had bronzed, couldn't even read TOC.

With two or three drives on the go, the only CDs that haven't ripped are the bronzed ones. A badly scratched CD described by Music Magpie as very good, which few up a few frames with errors, they immediately refunded the money and said dispose of the CD in anyway you see fit - great service!

One of the drives, I can't recall which, successfully ripped a DualDisc which my wife owned. I wouldn't let this anywhere near my CD player as they are slightly thicker than a Red Book CD

 

The only CDs I know from memory out of the 1200ish I ripped that had copy protection were an Ultravox compilation and 12 Memories by Travis. Both ripped with dBPoweramp using the non standard CD options on the LG. I think I only came up against one hidden first track CD (White Ladder, David Gray), and Second Coming by The Stone Roses has something like 75 4 second silent tracks on it prior to one final track. The hidden first track ripped easily, and there is a DSP setting that cuts out silent tracks.

My pet hate: leaving 20 minutes of silence at the end of a CD prior to a bonus track, or, occasionally a silly noise (can’t remember which Marillion album does this with a burst of manic laughter after a period of silence, but it’s not my idea of fun, boys).

It might have been cool for Nirvana to have done it on Nevermind, but nobody else has an excuse. Happily, the DSP options in dBPoweramp allow such silliness to be removed. Loads of artists did this.

I’ll have to go back and look at Think Tank for the hidden track now; maybe I missed it, maybe I ripped it and just forgot about it.

 

The hidden track on Think Tank is Me, White Noise with Phil Daniels.

There are a lot of CDs with easily defeated protection, such as Warner's use on Madonna GHV2 amongst many more. My laptop's drive, or rather the drive's firmware cannot cope.

It has to be said that it is totally feasable for someone to not own a single CD with copy protection, or that their drive copes with every variation.

 

I think it's cool, and I preserved the long gap on "Nevermind" when I ripped it.

 

I’m just impatient. All of the long silences have gone from my rips! I accept I am deviating from the artist’s intent. I can live with that.

 

When I make my vinyl rips, I strive to preserve the exact gaps between the songs. I even put in a few extra seconds between the "sides" in the attempt to simulate the time it would take to turn the record over. Of course, it's all by feel.

 

This is one of the things I love about music. People care about different things, and I can totally respect someone else who goes to that effort even though it isn’t something i’d do. This is music. It matters!

 

I use freeware XLD (X-Lossless Decoder) for Mac for all my CD rips and format transcoding. It senses your drive, and sets the CD drive offset values automatically. You can manually override these settings, but I've never needed to do that. It also queries the Accurate Rip database, but offers an option to treat mismatches as inconsistencies in the log. It has three ripping modes. I prefer the Secure Ripper, but the Burst mode is much faster, and the results are the same 99% of the time.

 

It's for waking up stoners and drunks and telling them to shut it down and go to bed.

 

Some people even like to clip off the silent tops and tails of a file. I hate that with a passion for more than just aesthetic reasons.

 

I had been using linked one with no trouble for more than 2 years.

You do not need laptop and good display on it.

Cocktail Audio X10 - The Next Generation in CD Ripping


It is a standalone CD player but I use it's digital output to feed EMMlab Dac2 for better sound.

 

If AccurateRip verifies the rip it doesn’t matter if you use burst mode, it’s still a perfect rip. I haven’t changed my dBPoweramp settings for years, but I think it rips each track in one pass, checks it against AccurateRip, and if it matches then stops. It only does more passes if the disc isn’t in the database and only re rips frames if errors come up.

As you say, 99% of the time a CD will rip in a single burst with no errors. As I may have said in an earlier post, I kept the small number of discs with errors on one side to be looked at once I ripped the bulk of my collection. Most were fine with prolonged secure ripping.

I’m more relaxed about discs with inaudible errors than I used to be. After all, if I play a CD on my CD player it could be error correcting and interpolating left, right and centre and I’d be completely oblivious to it unless there is an audible gap / skip / noise.

 

Whilst EAC is the best it can be quite fussy, for those discs I use latest version of WMP to FLAC, and surprisingly it does a great job, listening is perfect, gets
all the meta data, and much quicker.
I've done 6 FLAC/WAV vs MP3 blind tests - I spot it every time, not doing any more, it's easiest to notice in cymbals, all system dependent of course.

 

What DAC are you using? I can't see it listed in your profile