Skip to main content

Notice

Please note that most of the software linked on this forum is likely to be safe to use. If you are unsure, feel free to ask in the relevant topics, or send a private message to an administrator or moderator. To help curb the problems of false positives, or in the event that you do find actual malware, you can contribute through the article linked here.
Topic: Recommendation for a very good drive for CD-ripping - still Plextor PX-230A ? (Read 8123 times) previous topic - next topic
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Recommendation for a very good drive for CD-ripping - still Plextor PX-230A ?

hello,
I'm looking for a very good drive for CD-Ripping. I read a bit through the forum and there is a lot of hype for the Plextor PX-230A.
Is this still the best drive until today ? It is an IDE drive and about 12-15 years old so I'm not shure if it is a good idea to go for this drive in a PC from 2016.
I'm ripping my CD's with EAC in accurate rip mode and was using a Plextor PX-891SA and various LG and Samsung drives from 2013-2016 and wasn't very satisfied with the performance. How can it be that ripping  CD's from 2015 - 2018 takes 30 - 60 Minutes ?
Also the Plextor had an open/close bug after only 3 month of using. I always thought that Plextor is a quality manufacturer ? I guess I was wrong.
Any suggestions would be much appreciated
thanks in advance
regards
-SKH_Audio

 

Re: Recommendation for a very good drive for CD-ripping - still Plextor PX-230A ?

Reply #1
Plextor is not the old Plextor long long ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plextor

But I don't even think the old Plextor was that good. I had a PX-R412Ci at about 1997/8, with a SCSI card and the total cost was over $300, yet the drive died within 2 years.

Just buy a cheap Liteon or some other brands, they cost less than $20.
https://forum.dbpoweramp.com/showthread.php?37706-CD-DVD-Drive-Accuracy-List-2016

Re: Recommendation for a very good drive for CD-ripping - still Plextor PX-230A ?

Reply #2
Ten years ago I ripped my collection. I wore out a 2nd-hand PX-230A (could have been doubtful when I got it ...) and was lucky to get a NOS one to replace it. It really took care of quite a lot of my worn 2nd-hand CDs that two other drives had failed at - but there are plenty of reasons to spend your money elsewhere:

* See the accuracy list. (Maybe the PX-230A figures are a bit biased by people like me who save that drive for troublemaking CDs, but that is only a hunch.)
* Having two or more different drives will help a lot! (Maybe someone can give input on "who owns who", so you don't buy ones that are identical save for the front panel? BTW, the 230A was a rebadge but with custom firmware.)
* For older CDs, AccurateRip has much better coverage by now (also, you have cross-pressing verification easier accessible). If it is good, it is good.
* The CUETools database can even repair rips. And again, once it is good, it is good.
* SATA/IDE bridges could make you want to do really bad things to your computer. And to whomever might happen to be on the sidewalk underneath your window.


I'm ripping my CD's with EAC in accurate rip mode and was using a Plextor PX-891SA and various LG and Samsung drives from 2013-2016 and wasn't very satisfied with the performance. How can it be that ripping  CD's from 2015 - 2018 takes 30 - 60 Minutes ?

But EAC does not check AccurateRip before it is done, eh?  It will test & copy everything before it looks up AccurateRip? You could speed up everything by ripping in burst mode, and only re-rip those who fail to verify. (Am I still updated on this? Been a while since I used that application. Also, EAC rips to .wav and only afterwards invokes conversion, right?) 
dBpoweramp (from the creator of AccurateRip) does something smarter: burst rip -> check if Accurate and if not, proceed with all the secure ripping routines. When done reading one track, encode it while reading the next from the CD.

Re: Recommendation for a very good drive for CD-ripping - still Plextor PX-230A ?

Reply #3
thanks a lot for your replys so far. I just bought 2 new SATA liteon drives for 19 and 12 bucks, one from 2007 and another one from 
2013.
I started ripping my entire CD collection with EAC using the settings according to this guide http://blowfish.be/eac/index.html
You can still see it at https://web.archive.org if you click on 2014, FEB 20
According to this guide I had to use the Secure mode for the best results.

When I started ripping my collection accurate rip didn't even exist as a feature in EAC and when it first occured I ignored it for a couple of years. I always thought if I configurated everything according to the blowfish guide and didn't get any reading errors why shouldn't it be accurate ?
As the years passed I somehow had to use the feature because I couldn't get rid of it and at the moment I'm thinking about if it would be worth it to re-rip my entire collection. But many CD's I ripped during the last month weren't in the database and therefore couldn't be confirmed with checksums so does it even make sense ?
Also isn't the audio quality always the same even if the checksums don't match?
The idea of using burst mode for new CD's and if the checksums from the accurate database match the rip is accurate as well sounds pretty interesting but why didn't no one recommend this mode back in the day? It was always like "if you want it really lossless you have to use the secure mode".
I never used dBpoweramp yet because everyone was always so crazy about EAC.

Re: Recommendation for a very good drive for CD-ripping - still Plextor PX-230A ?

Reply #4
I always thought if I configurated everything according to the blowfish guide and didn't get any reading errors why shouldn't it be accurate ?
The reason why I suggested burst + AccurateRip was because you complained about speed. It does not get less accurate by reading once more and getting the same, but it takes longer time.


But many CD's I ripped during the last month weren't in the database and therefore couldn't be confirmed with checksums so does it even make sense ?

New ones? The AR database is updated only every few weeks.
CUETools can retro-verify - and if it has submissions enough and the errors are small enough, it can repair. (It repaired this! https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,113978.0.html )
Have a look at the settings before you dump your entire collection into it - and make sure you have backup of everything in case you asks CUETools to write tags to your files. A power outage while writing to some file somewhere unknown while you are sleeping ...

If I were to re-rip thousands of CDs now, I would also have considered the CUERipper application in the CUETools package.




When I started ripping my collection accurate rip didn't even exist as a feature in EAC
[...]
The idea of using burst mode for new CD's and if the checksums from the accurate database match the rip is accurate as well sounds pretty interesting but why didn't no one recommend this mode back in the day?
When it didn't have AccurateRip? :-o

Re: Recommendation for a very good drive for CD-ripping - still Plextor PX-230A ?

Reply #5
I listen to a lot of music which never appears in the accurate data base even if it's a few years old.
They also don't appear in the free db database as well

So it appears that using the Secure mode makes sense here. If the CD is in the data base I could switch to burst mode and if it is confirmed accurate it should be equal to a secure ripped cd although the C2 pointer reading error  detection  option isn't activated here right?

When I started using EAC I thought there wasn't accurate rip included. I think it was a 0.98 version. Well it is some time ago so maybe it was there and I failed to check it in the installation, who knows. Thanks a lot for this  great  CUETools suggestion.

Using CUETools to verify all the Audio CD's I ripped with EAC without the accurate rip mode but in secure mode sounds like a great idea. Then I don't need to re-rip everything which would drive me insane anyways. My collection is full of thousands of CD's from the last 30 years.......

Don't worry my entire collection is double backuped. But why do you mention it ? Can the programm do harm or only if configured wrong? If so I have to read the best FAQ for it anyways before I start throwing my whole collection into it.

Re: Recommendation for a very good drive for CD-ripping - still Plextor PX-230A ?

Reply #6
So it appears that using the Secure mode makes sense here. If the CD is in the data base I could switch to burst mode and if it is confirmed accurate it should be equal to a secure ripped cd although the C2 pointer reading error  detection  option isn't activated here right?

Right. (Essentially. Some minor caveats, e.g., AccurateRip disregards the ends due to offset, blah blah blah.)



Don't worry my entire collection is double backuped. But why do you mention it ? Can the programm do harm or only if configured wrong?

CUETools can write the verification results as tags to files (which means your media player could read and index them). Some people prefer that audio files are never altered; see e.g. https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,97164.0.html for a foobar2000 component that writes out metadata in separate files.
There is always a risk if there is a power outage while updating a file. If that happens when you update a single album, you know where and can open the folder and check that everything is OK. But if you were in the middle of a process that takes days?
(OK, it seems CUETools changes the datestamp, so with everything added alphabetical by folder name, you could find the newest file on the disk, and then check that the next one is OK.)

If you have either a cuesheet that knows index marks, or you have the EAC log in the folder, then CUETools knows enough to look it up in AccurateRip.

Re: Recommendation for a very good drive for CD-ripping - still Plextor PX-230A ?

Reply #7
well sometimes I changed tags of the albums in foobar for example if I find out later that the recording year or song titles  were just wrong in the freedb data base. To me it doesn't make sense to rip the whole album again just because there were some wrong tags in it.
Shure it's nice to have the most unaltered rip ever but seriousley to me it is more about the soundquality. If the soundquality is equal to the original CD why should I care if any meta data which doesn't have anything to do with the soundquality is in a certain way?
I kept all EAC logs for my rips and I could have them checked with Cuetools that shouldn't take long.
Since my entire collection was ripped in secure mode maybe I'm lucky and it is mostly confirmed as accurate.
But as mentioned I own many many many CD's which will most likely never appear in that database because the music is just too underground and not well known enough.
I remember listening to the Nevermore Dreaming Neon Black rip latley and it had a drop out in it. So this one is most likely not accurate. By looking at the original CD I found out that it was a russian bootleg.. So that one goes into the garbage...

Re: Recommendation for a very good drive for CD-ripping - still Plextor PX-230A ?

Reply #8
AccurateRip ignores tags. It only checks audio data.