Do lossless files differ if downloaded from store vs. ripped from CD?
Reply #15 – 2013-01-14 01:03:03
Wow. Silly me. I never considered all of these factors until recently experimenting with EAC and re-ripping all my CDs I had originally ripped with iTunes. I will say that I definitely noticed some differences in certain CDs - there were little bits and pieces that EAC picked up that iTunes basically ignored altogether. It is so easy to fall prey to the belief that something mainstream or seemingly "corporate" is trustworthy and is selling you something you can rest assured is of quality. I would hope that Beatport or any of these other digital music sites aren't just buying random CDs and ripping them without care for any potential flaws in the discs etc... I think Beatport in particular gets copies from record labels, because they sell a lot of stuff that is extremely underground. I think it's unlikely that certain artists' material would come from a physical CD considering the nature of underground music... The album art is extremely makeshift regardless of the musical content etc... You can kind of get an idea of the $ put into specific stuff just by looking at the album art and the name of the label it comes from. As for Discogs, I am thinking they do the same thing, but they're weird. They'll show a certain album under one label and then they'll show the same album under another label, and one of them will be "unavailable" due to territory restrictions or something like that. Bandcamp is simply a platform for independent artists to share their music over the Internet in a more convenient way for listeners (they sell stuff in all different file types). I think some artists on that site upload their music from their own computer while others are under certain labels so I'm not sure how they distribute their music on there. My next question is this - if I have a CD that has little "nicks" or what looks like pieces of glitter embedded in the CD, and I rip it using EAC and I get a 100% track quality, no errors reported and AccurateRip says it is accurate, then can I trust it? It is pretty unlikely you hear tiny differences between an EAC and iTunes rip. The few milliseconds per track that may be different between these rips may result in a clearly audible click or may already been interpolated very well. But we talk about some milliseconds distributed over some minutes of a song.