Ripping CDs Directly To FLAC

Those were just some examples of how I make use of CUETools. It's a very useful tool to have in your tool set. If you explored what it can do and tried it you might find some uses for it. It does some things that dBpoweramp doesn't do.

I actually made use of CUETools yesterday to fix a bad rip. A used CD that had a small scratch. dBpoweramp wouldn't rip it without errors. EAC wouldn't rip it without errors. I took the EAC rip with a CUE file and ran it through CUETools. CUETools identified 9 samples in one track that were bad and fixed them. And I ended up with the equivalent of an accurate rip.

It doesn't happen often that I get a disc that won't rip. But when it does it is nice to have tools that can fix it. Before CUETools the way I would have dealt with that would have been to keep trying to rip the disc using different CD drives, using both EAC and dBpoweramp, till I managed to get a good rip. That gets time consuming. And sometimes that strategy will work, but most of the time it won't. CUETools fixed it for me quickly and easily. A very useful tool to have. Having CUETools means I'm even more willing to buy used CDs that have scratches than I was before. It's rare now that I find a CD that I can't get a perfect rip of.

 

Have you tried CUERipper's paranoid mode? With hard to read discs, it's been my experience that this works better and faster than EAC.

 

No I haven't. And I didn't try CUERipper on that disc either. My experience in the past (years ago) is that EAC secure mode works better at getting an AccurateRip with scratched discs than cdparanoia. I've generally avoided paranoia ripping modes since. I should probably revisit. And should probably try CUERipper on that disc I had problems with to see how it does.

My previous experiments with CUERipper using its secure mode is that EAC does better for scratched discs. I didn't try the CUERipper paranoid mode.

 

How does it work for fixing tracks that already have been ripped? Can it fix non cue file rips or individual files. I downloaded the CUEtools and I'm thinking not. Don't see where you activate a repair with non cue files and all I could get was the accurate database. I suppose the CUEdatabase is based on full CD rips in one file per CD?? I can see where this feature for CD's as you describe as a useful function for this software.

 

Sure it can, as long as it is a proper rip. But of course not "individual files" as in "I only have two tracks from this album". It needs to be a proper rip of the whole album, but the format does not matter.

 

Making false assumptions and statements about free software that you’ve never tried is not “being inquisitive.”

 

CUETools primary purpose is the verification of existing rips. It doesn’t need a cuesheet if the original CD doesn’t have pre-gap or data tracks. If it does, you will have difficulty verifying some discs. It can suggest or predict the correct pre-gap or off-set on a lot of discs.

 

I was certain that girls had cooties until I finally kissed one

 

One doesn't jump into a fire to find out if it burns you. Was only quoting others information on other forums that I could find, not a lot of good information out there, so far as I can find. Yes, jumping into the fire first would probably be the best experience, first hand.
I've yet to be able to make this software work correctly, will give it another shot tonight. Do I need to download some other piece of software to enable the CUEtools to do repairs? I really want to test this out. Is there any step by step process available online to walk me through it?

 

It’s (free) software, not life threatening or even computer threatening.

I don’t know of any tutorials. You simply need to run it in “Verify” mode under Action and select the folder with the tracks in it. If the rip is verifiable to the CTDB database, but has errors, you then run it in “Encode” mode with the “Repair” option.

 

All of the software talked about here, and many other threads never mentions MediaMonkey for ripping flac. Is there a reason for that?

 

MediaMonkey's built-in ripper isn't as sophisticated as EAC or dBPoweramp, although I understand it's better than iTunes. I don't think it does any post-rip validations, for example.

 

In the past, I've managed to generally get good rips when I just take the 1 track that won't rip and play it back on a CD player, capture the digital output with a sound card to a digital file, then trim it and use it with the rest of the rips. But... that's assuming the error correction in the player will cover up the scratch. No question, if it's a really bad scratch, it'll go "tick tick tick" or something like that at some point, and you're screwed.

I have gone in and manually redrawn the waveforms, but it's way too much trouble, especially if there's major error bursts. A few ticks you can see in the waveform and remove very easily.

No, it's another burst-ripper so it's no better and no worse than iTunes.

 

Interesting thing I found is that CD copying is somewhat software driven so that one program might work when another hangs forever even when using the exact same hardware. So that brings me to a last resort I have tried and had some success with. And that is burn a CD-R copy of the problem disc and see if I can rip it well enough to not hear any issues even if it is not exact bit perfect. I use re-writable discs sometimes for this method.

I first clean disc well with soap and water. Rip secure with 3 to 4 diff drives and note how many bad frames each reports. Then I use the ripper drive with lowest reported bad frames and make a copy in Nero. That copy is my new master to try out for that one problem track. This has helped me a few times, but not always.

 

The Gold version of MediaMonkey has AccurateRip support. The free version of MediaMonkey does not.

I have no experience with the Gold version of MediaMonkey. With AccurateRip it should be fine for ripping. AccurateRip will let you know if there were errors or a bad rip.

Not many people here use MediaMonkey. So that's probably why it doesn't get mentioned as much. I do regard it as a good media player and library manager. It's good software. I've played with the free version. I use JRiver Media Center and am happy with it. So not much incentive for me to buy the Gold version of MediaMonkey just to experiment with it.

 

In the past I would have taken a lot more effort to get a clean rip. Trying different ripping drives, trying with C2 enabled and C2 disabled, trying both EAC and dBpoweramp, trying slower ripping speeds, and other tricks. But now with CUETools it is just so easy to do a repair and be done.

In this case it was just 9 samples. I never listened to see if they were audible. Didn't bother to look at the errors in an audio editor. Just ran it through CUETools to do a repair and was done. CUETools is amazing.

 

The ripping software does make a difference. Each does it differently. EAC and dBpoweramp differ in how they read the disc, how they handle problem areas on the disc. Sometimes EAC will have a bad rip but dBpoweramp will rip that disc with no errors. Then sometimes dBpoweramp will have a bad rip but EAC will rip that disc with no errors. When I have a problem disc I try ripping in the other program. If that doesn't work then I resort to CUETools and other tricks to get a clean rip.

 

I'm ripping on three computers most of the time when I am doing more than just adding a title or two to the collection.

Computer 1 has four drives, two SCSI two IDE drives, computer 2 has two drives and computer 3 has two drives. So out of all these choices and the fact that I am not ripping very many scratched discs, I can almost always get a good AR on all tracks with a bit of retries on different drives. It's the burned CD-Rs that will be the fussiest to get 100% AR.

I'm currently ripping a Jazz collection of 1,100 discs. A buddy of mine I built a music server for because he had not the time nor inclination for the project, and I had the extra Dell pent 4 on hand, so why not. Now I am ripping his entire collection for him as well. It's going fast as possible. I sure learned a lot by doing several thousand discs before I got to this batch of rips.

These are the things I learned previously that are useful now at this point.

1. Have several drives open and ready to rip with in the event you get a fussy disc that seems to rip very slow on a certain drive. It may rip fast and just fine on another drive.

2. Use several computers if you want to get a large collection ripped and not take up your entire life with the project. Two computers ripping while you are switching out the disc on a third computer sure makes progress seem faster. The ripping computers can be older ones, like that one out in the garage you thought was a goner - too slow, or the one your in-laws are dumping because they just got a brand new one. Anything Pent 4 or above, 1g of ram preferred, 80g HDD should be fine.

3. Of course use a router with at least two or three eithernet ports out of it, as you need the internet for tagging databases, etc.

4. Know where to find artwork for the titles that come up without artwork, and quickly grab a good scan, save it to desktop and attach it just before you rip disc. I have a scanner and a fast photo editing software handy for titles that show no art online anywhere. If it's a rare CD I like having a good scan of the cover. I even add a second scan of the back cover if it's a super rare and expensive one.

5. I think having a good tagging software, and an additional program for finding album song tags, and writing them to your files is helpful. I like to go in and fix a potential error right away rather than later. I've caught a spelling or tagging error when I am nearly at end if the album being ripped. It's nice to fix it quickly rather than re-rip which I have also done.

Look at your discs under a very bright light before you rip. One small smudge can make for some errors. Normally a small smudge or spec of dust is not going to cause any issues, but I have seen cases where the errors and difficulty of getting a 100% AR was completely eliminated by a quick cleaning.

When I do decide I want to clean a disc, I take it into the kitchen or bathroom and put it under cold running water with dish soap. Gently rub disc in a circle, and rinse, dry off. Amazing how that can help on a few cases of stubborn discs not ripping right.

Now so far as tagging goes, it took me a long time to figure out what I wanted, and how it should look, and what fields are what.

In dBpoweramp there are two Artist fields to be filled in. One is called Artist and the other is called Album Artist. No one I asked had any idea what the differences are here. And if there are any differences - do they really matter if all you want to do is type Stones and see your Rolling Stones collection appear in the search results.

This is what I noticed. The Album Artist field's text will creat the name of the folder the albums are going into. The Artist field's inserted text will simply be searchable by that name, but not create a new folder name with the albums in it.

So for a Mothers of Invention album like "We're Only in it For the Money" I want it to be titled as artist MOI. But I want all this groups albums to appear in the Frank Zappa folder. So Album Artist if FZ, Artist is MOI and all have the important metadata, and all Zappa goes into same place.

This might seem common sense and not needed to be explained, but apparently it does need to be explained because I am seeing the tags come up in the databases in reverse of what I just suggested be done. And I've grabbed downloads with tags in reverse of this.

Just like I want both John Mayall (solo artist) and his Bluesbreakers material in the same folder, and I don't have to hunt several different folders to see if Hard Road is in the collection or not.

I'm trying to keep the drives/folders as neat and tidy as the tagging data is. And as a beginner I was given so many various tagging styles for various albums - I truly blew it my first year or two of ripping.

Doing Classical titles is a whole other tagging nightmare I will not go into here except to say that dBpoweramp is not ideal for ripping classical. It can be done, but dBp does not offer up all of the fields for doing it properly.

 

I rip a lot of classical in dbPowerAmp. I always have to do tag editing after the rip. I rarely do more than minimal tag editing in dbPoweAmp.

 

For classical I copy and paste in as much info as there is to get from all databases to save typing later. At least if it's there I can rearrange the fields later. If I do nothing - I might not have as much to work with later. Most of my classical is 20th century and often obscure, tons of stuff that album covers never show up for its that rare. 90% imports as well. But things have improved since I started that section almost five years ago. When I started ripping not much was coming in as data at all.