EAC and Wavpack?

Regards,
Please, you recommend using the Wavpack for rip?
When using Cuetools it becomes wav without problems, the quality will remain the same as the original CD.?
I have several CDs, the truth is that I want to understand if you lose quality when using wavpack.

 

If you use the lossless setting of Wavpack, it does not affect the audio quality in any way. Included in the specification for WAV files is a possible simple lossless compression. Almost nothing uses it because that cannot compress very much in a WAV file losslessly. Some hardware that can play normal "uncompressed" WAV files can't handle the official lossless WAV compression, because it is so rare. Many people have never even heard of it.

With the lossy compression settings, I don't know why anyone would bother since there are better known widely supported lossy compression formats.

If your phone or MP3 player or other player can handle WAV files processed through Wavpack, that could be good for you personally, a little, but many other players will not be able to play those files.

Wavpack is something to play with but I can't "recommend" it. It apparently does exactly what it says it does, and it can be commended for that.

 

Thanks, JohnO
What advantage or disadvantage do you have when making a wavpack copy with the traditional CDrip wav? ... I mean in audio quality not in the weight of the file.
I want to have an exact copy of my CDs, what would be the best option?

I have several backup CDs in .wv format, some mention that this process will affect the quality ... Very different having in wav format is an exact copy!!

In your experience, do you recommend keeping the backup of my CDs in .wv format or making the copy with the traditional CDrip wav?

 

For anything for which I want an exact backup, I would (I do) rip the CDs and make backups using regular WAV, then compress those WAV files losslessly to FLAC. Most recent players can play FLAC directly. The FLAC files can easily be converted back to WAV if you need to burn another audio CD, and many CD burners can burn from FLAC files directly.
FLAC is lossless and can compress better than the lossless WV from Wavpack.
There are other lossless compression types that can compress a bit better than FLAC, but they are not as widely supported.

 

I'm not sure what exactly a "wave pack" is. However I would not use plain old .wav files, even if quality is paramount. This is because .wav files contain no metadata. Therefore I use FLAC, because it supports metadata.

 

WavPack is a lossless audio file compressor similar to FLAC, and is 20 years old. It is supported by very little software (you can read the short list of players), while FLAC is in countless hundreds of devices and software players and encoders.

 

You don't lose quality with WavPack. It's a lossless format. Although it did later develop a hybrid format that was a combination of a small playable lossy file and a larger correction file. When the lossy file and correction file were processed together you ended up with a perfect lossless version of the original audio. Kinda neat in a theoretical sense. But not very useful in reality because almost nothing supported it.

Despite the name, a WavPack file is not a WAV file. If you import a WV file into Audacity, Audacity cannot read the file because it is not a WAV file or any other format that Audacity supports natively.

WavPack was interesting back in 1998 and the early 2000s. Interesting in a computer science sense due to its design. Interesting in that it was designed to use integer math and efficient processing which made it compatible and easily portable to other CPU chips and designs. Many CPUs back then did not have floating point processing. The developer probably thought WavPack would become the dominant format. It didn't. Modern formats like FLAC that did become standard are better given modern processing and modern OS support.

If you're looking to archive anything in a lossless format then choose FLAC. FLAC is open source and used for archiving. I'm confident than in 50 years and even 100 years you'll still be able to decode and play FLAC files. In 100 years with WavPack you'll have to dig into an old source code archive and figure out how to find a compatible compiler and emulation environment to compile the old source yourself and try to make it all work. WavPack isn't a good archive format choice.

 

Thank you all for your comments..
I decided to delete all the wavpack files and proceeded to do my backup on image CD (.nrg)
Without ruling out the possibility in the future perform direct backups to wav or flac.

regards

 

WAV, FLAC, WavPack - all can be transcoded between each other losslessly. Ripping to FLAC means you can make a wav or wv file later, but also can use software like Exact Audio Copy to embed metadata like song titles in FLAC.

You can't play the audio directly from a disc image.

 

I’m not sure where you’re getting the idea that WavPack filed or CD images are a good option for this. It’s certainly not being fed to you on this forum. If you are content to do things incorrectly/repeatedly, proceed as you wish.

If you want to do things correctly, look for a guide that will walk you through configuring EAC and the FLAC encoder. Follow every step to a T.

 

The Nero image format is not a good way to archive audio CDs. It is not a format widely used in audio. The only reason to use Nero would be if you have a CD that has CD Extra content (like video or other data) on the CD and you want to archive that content as well as the audio content.

Use CUERipper (included with CUETools) to rip your CDs. Rip to an image file and FLAC. CUERipper will create a CUE file for the CD and also embed the CUE info in the FLAC tags.

For your existing rips you can convert them to an image in FLAC format using CUETools.

 

This thread encouraged me to do some investigation, and I thought that this was pretty cool: I discovered that foobar2000 can rip an entire CD to a single FLAC file with embedded cue sheet. A second step in foobar2000 can embed artwork to the same file. Now, you have one big file that includes track breaks and multiple artwork. Logitech Media Server will handle it exactly as you expect: you can play the full album or any individual track and artwork is displayed. Not going to re-rip my 6500 albums, but if starting out again this is the way I might go.

 

I'm confused by the purpose of your original post. Was your goal here to ignore every word said by the experts and to instead use the most obscure, and least supported, audio formats in existence?

CD image files seem to me to be one of the worst means possible of backing up your music since these are not easily translated into anything useful. And by the time that you need to use these images to burn replacement CDs, you may find that working CD burners will have gone the way of the floppy disk, or that Nero has become a historical footnote. Either way, this means that you may have gone to a lot of effort for nothing down the line...

 

It is true I deviate from the original post.

I thought that the best option for a backup of my CD was an image (nrg). A friend told me that if I wanted to have an exact copy, I would have to get the image (nrg) and the quality would be the same as the original..But I had doubts about that.

Thanks to all of you, those doubts have been resolved.

 

There are two problems with using Nero.
The Nero ripping program does not do secure rips or verify the rips using AccurateRip. The rips done with Nero can end up having read errors in the audio data, especially if the CD is scratched.
Nero is proprietary and not free. In 10 or 15 years it may be difficult to find a copy of Nero and may be difficult to get it working on the current version of Windows. So you may not be able to read or use those NRG files.

FLAC is free and open source. And the CUE format for audio CD image files is well supported. It's a format that will still be supported 20 years from now. And software 20 years from now will still be able to open and read the files.

Ripping programs like CUERipper and EAC do secure ripping and verify the rips using AccurateRip. So you know you're getting a good rip with no errors.

 

Foobar and CUERipper and a few other rippers can rip a CD to a single FLAC with an embedded CUE sheet. And some media players like Logitech and Foobar can play those files with the embedded CUE sheet. JRiver Media Center can also play CUE files, but requires a separate CUE file it doesn't support embedded CUE sheets.

So that can work with some media playing software. But you'll run into some quirks and special case scenarios when doing that. For example, those programs are designed expecting separate files for each track. Some operations may not work correctly or at all. For example changing the name or artist of one song is most likely not going to work. Or even just something like changing the name of the album may not work correctly. Or operations that measure the dynamic range or loudness of each track may not work correctly. So while those programs can play CUE files. Actually doing that for your entire library and expecting to manage your library as you do now is not going to work as you expect.

 

When I want to copy a CD for the car I use ImgBurn using the "Create image file from disc". Once I have the image I check it against the original CD with the "Verify Disc" option, if it passes the verification something that happens 99% of the times, I then burn the CD and use "Verify Disc" again to check the image and the burned CD match.
It's fast, easy and free.
I only whish dBPoweramp could do an image from disc,but it can't.