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Topic: Best method to rip entire music collection (Read 13346 times) previous topic - next topic
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Best method to rip entire music collection

Reply #25 –
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I've just done about 120 of my 750 or so cd's without the -V ... should I rerip those and use the -V or is there a way I could check them without doing 'em over?


use for testing (from flac --help):

  -t, --test                  Same as -d except no decoded file is written
.halverhahn

Best method to rip entire music collection

Reply #26 –
Correct.  -t will compare the MD5 checksum of the WAV file resulting from the FLAC decode with the MD5 of the original WAV, so that'll be a good check to see if the file is intact.

Best method to rip entire music collection

Reply #27 –
Is EAC always incredibly slow to rip CD's?  I did turn some options on, based on recommendations in this thread and others.  My first CD has taken over 30 minutes to rip!  At this rate I might be done in 10 years  I was thinking 10 minutes a CD might be OK, but 30?  I realize I probably have too many of the secure options turned on but I'm confused on what I really absolutely need to get the best rip with the fastest time tradeoff.  Thanks!

Best method to rip entire music collection

Reply #28 –
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3) Important: Use EAC, ideally with AccurateRip if you can. Don't settle for CDDA or other "quick and easy" ripping tools if you only want to do this once. There's a BIG hidden gotcha: you will have no idea whether your rips were actually done properly!  EAC auto-retries to fix most rip problems, notices others (and lets you remove the 'pop').


We had a big Iron Cage match on the subject of ripping/encoding software on the Riovolution boards not long ago.  The resulting general conclusion after a lot of analysis was that EAC, while nice in that it guarantees your rip by going over and over the same spot (nothing amazing about the technology) does not actually provide a more accurate rip than other solid programs like ECDDA.

Yes it "guarantees it", but the larger question is does it deliver something the other rippers don't (i.e., do you need the guarantee)?  Kind of like buying snow tires if you live in Mexico; great to have no doubt, but is it really justified or necessary?  The answer after analyzing the result from a bunch of tests of sample albums (wave analysis) is no.  Basically if you are anal or just nervous EAC gives you peace of mind, but in 99.99999% of cases you get the same result with any quality ripper/encoder, including ECDDA.

In fact I tested EAC and ECDDA with some fairly damaged disks and they both performed identically; they got perfect rips off a couple of damaged disks, and in instances where one tool totally failed the other totally failed as well.

For me the downside with EAC is that:

1.  It is a command line encoder with a horrible interface (just a PITA to use I've found)

2.  It doesn't rip encode straight to a codec like Flac.  It rips to WAV and encodes to the format selected, meaning you effectively double the time to rip an album (my collection isn't even that big and it took me weeks, so double the time was unacceptbale).

However, as I said EAC "guarantees" accuracy, so if you like total control and want to make sure every single bit is exactly right even in those few 0.0001% of cases where another ripper might get a few bits wrong then its the tool for you.

One final note on an actual weakness in ECDDA.  As I found in another thread current ECDDA versions don't build a seektable in Flac files when encoded.  This isn't a huge loss since the Flac plug-in automatically inserts seekpoints at 10s intervals on playback, but it is "better" to have a seektable than not since it means less work on the decode side (as has been pointed out to me by Mr. Coalson in another thread).

Good luck,
rt

Best method to rip entire music collection

Reply #29 –
Thank you for the info.  You know after a bit of extracting I definitely prefer ECDDA.  It's just easier.  Will I ever realllllly know if the music I extract is not 100 digitally perfect?  I doubt it.  I like how it automatically makes the flac file instead of going to wav and then flac.  The audio converter is very very useful to, since when I'm done with my 300 cd collection I will need to convert those back for use on my iPod and Rio.  My cd drive still takes about 15 minutes to extract a CD to flac.  Is this expected??  I have a TDK Veloci CD 52x drive.  It doesn't get much past 4x for extraction.  I just thought it would be a bit faster for this drive  Maybe I need a Plextor or a better drive??

Best method to rip entire music collection

Reply #30 –
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For me the downside with EAC is that:

1.  It is a command line encoder with a horrible interface (just a PITA to use I've found)

2.  It doesn't rip encode straight to a codec like Flac.  It rips to WAV and encodes to the format selected, meaning you effectively double the time to rip an album (my collection isn't even that big and it took me weeks, so double the time was unacceptbale).

However, as I said EAC "guarantees" accuracy, so if you like total control and want to make sure every single bit is exactly right even in those few 0.0001% of cases where another ripper might get a few bits wrong then its the tool for you.

Let me add couple of comments to your points:

1. EAC is an audio extraction tool (not encoder) and has had graphical interface for as long as I have been using it (couple of years and I'm not sure it ever had a command line interface). So, what program are you using then and making comments on? 

2. Why would ripping to WAV first double the time needed? It requires more working space during the conversion process but on modern computers saving data to WAV and reading from WAV takes much less time than the compression - so it's almost negligible. You can even configure EAC to start encoding after each track it rips, so you save some time on that (EAC -> EAC Options -> Tools -> On extraction, start external compressors queued in background)

3. Accuracy is dependent on the drive doing the extraction. EAC tries to do its best on all drives and that's why people recommend it. Some other rippers may fail miserably depending on the drive.

4. Lot of this stuff has already been discussed here. Try search, knowledge base, stickies, ...

Best method to rip entire music collection

Reply #31 –
Chaddc:
Most "accurate" rippers won't go beyond 6x since at higher speeds you would start getting problems in the results.  At least that's what I've found after trying numerous rippers on a couple PCs.  If you watch you'll generally see that ECDDA increases the rip speed as it progresses, kind of like it slowly eases into a little over 5x or 6x on good CDs.  There was a glitch with some older versions of ECDDA related to ripping speed on certain cd-roms, but you shouldn't see any issues now.  I find about 12 minutes or thereabouts is what it takes me.

I also like the maxss converter.  I used it to convert my 250+ CD collection from FLAC to OGG for use on my Karma; just dropped the directory in, let it load, hit convert, and came back a few days later (I did the conversion over my network on a slower PC).

Schuberth:
I'll reply to each comment in turn.

1. EAC is a command line tool.  Yes, it has a "GUI", but I think anyone who has used it would more or less support the statement that the GUI is a one off that isn't friendly to the non-techno-cabal at all.  If you want evidence just look at all the people who can't figure out WTH to do with EAC or how to use it for batch encodes, etc., once they have it.

I'm not saying I don't like EAC or that it isn't a good ripper dude, so don't take offense.  What I AM saying is that EAC is like Linux; it is a tool designed by and for technically adept people with little interest in making the tool more "noob friendly."  Like Linux users, EAC users LIKE the command line for control and command (notice ever post in response to EAC questions includes a set of command line instructions for the task) and hence have no reason to expand or better architect and design teh GUI.

2. It really depends on the PC at hand.  However, because you can't rip the next album while your converting the current one (without potentially crashing or freezing many computers) it takes longer.  Double the time might be ean overstatement on my part, but it was NOTICEABLY longer for me.  As the post I replied to stated (he mentioned 30 minutes) I was seeing really long times even in non-secure mode ripping.

3. VERY true.  I had major problems when I was off site temporarily and tried to use the drive in the base station of a Dell x200.  It wasn't NEARLY as good or as reliable in the rip result as my the ujda740 in my Toshiba Satellite 2430-s255.

However, EAC's claim to fame IS that it "guarantees the rip" by rereading questionable sections of the CD until it is SURE it got whatever was possible or exactly what it should from the track.  Secure mode is the selling poingt everyone always points to with EAC, so I don't know if your arguing that or not but it seems to be an invalid argument.

4. I don't have anything to look up, but thanks for the 411.  I simply provided my thoughts on EAC and ECDDA.  As has been laid out above my comments on EAC weren't slanderous or off-base.

Best,
rt

Best method to rip entire music collection

Reply #32 –
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If you watch you'll generally see that ECDDA increases the rip speed as it progresses, kind of like it slowly eases into a little over 5x or 6x on good CDs.

AFAIK this has nothing to do with ripping programs. Audio CDs are usually read at a constant angular velocity (CAV), which implies a higher linear velocity and a higher data rate towards the end (outer edge) of the CD.
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1. EAC is a command line tool. Yes, it has a "GUI", but I think anyone who has used it would more or less support the statement that the GUI is a one off that isn't friendly to the non-techno-cabal at all. If you want evidence just look at all the people who can't figure out WTH to do with EAC or how to use it for batch encodes, etc., once they have it.

While I agree that EAC is not very user friendly, it still is NOT a command line tool! Where did you get this idea? EAC actually has very limited command line support. You can not use it properly if you just use the command line options.
Maybe what you mean is that encoder options are set using command line options? This is actually a great thing because it lets you use any command line encoder there is - and it could be noob-friendly as well (I think) if only Andre hadn't hidden all relevant information on it in an obscure FAQ that nobody ever looks at.
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However, because you can't rip the next album while your converting the current one (without potentially crashing or freezing many computers) it takes longer.

I'm doing this all the time on a Celeron 400. If this makes your PC crash, then there's something seriously wrong with it.
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Basically if you are anal or just nervous EAC gives you peace of mind, but in 99.99999% of cases you get the same result with any quality ripper/encoder, including ECDDA.

But, as schuberth already pointed out, not with any drive. I have an old CD writer (LG 8080b) that gives me unacceptable results with any 'burst mode' ripper even with unscratched CDs - lots of pops + clicks. EAC simply re-reads the suspicious positions until it gets a sensible result, but that does the trick. Perfect rips with a really bad drive.

Best method to rip entire music collection

Reply #33 –
I've wanted to archive my CDs in a lossless format for some time now.  Fortunately I just got a new computer with ~400 GB of storage, so now's the time. :-)

I've spent the last couple of days reading the forums here and each time I learn something new I have to delete all my old rips and start over! (Today I found out my choice of cuesheet format wasn't right for my choice of gap handling.)

So, having plenty of disk space for the moment,  what I'd like to do is rip the CDs to one-WAV-per-CD -- a CD image, if you will -- so that when I realize that I want to slightly change the way I process the files I don't have to haul the CDs back to work (where my computer is) and start over.  Eventually, of course, I'll delete the WAVs, but for these early days when I change my mind every-other-day, it would be exceedingly convenient to not have to physically re-rip the CDs every day.  :-)

Currently I use EAC to rip the files one-WAV-per-track and then use FLAC Frontend to convert them to FLAC format.

I haven't noticed a way with FLAC Frontend to read a CD Image and have it be able to split the file up into one-FLAC-per-track.

What tool or tool-chain could I use to take a CD-Image in WAV format and split it up into individual FLACs?  Or individual WAVs and then FLACs?  Of course I'd like tag-generation somewhere along the way. :-)

-- Rick
------- Rick -------
--------------------

Best method to rip entire music collection

Reply #34 –
i noticed throughout your discussion, no-one mentioned WMA9 Lossless Format.  I have been researching the best format to rip my 300+ cd collection for about 3 hours now, so im somewhat of an expert on the subject 

sadly it seems this is like every other new technology these days, everyone reinventing the wheel and defining proprietary standards instead of focusing on one format and everyone contributing to that.

The debate for what (lossless) format to use seems to be based not on quality because providing DAE is done correctly, they should all render identical.  The selling point for the format to use then should compromise of something like:

*platform support (windows, linux, mobile devices, hardware audio systems, etc)
*ease of converting (i have 300 cds to convert, i dont want to mess around with some convaluted 50 step process for each cd, and i want to convert any new cd's i buy with ease too)
*performance (not a big issue, as differences are negligable )
* compression (not a big issue as differences are negligable 2:1 or 3:1 on average)

from all this i believe FLAC is the way to go, using some scripts to ease the conversion process, the only downside being the limitation of media players, but all these formats have that problem.
 

Best method to rip entire music collection

Reply #35 –
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The selling point for the format to use then should compromise of something like:

*platform support (windows, linux, mobile devices, hardware audio systems, etc)
*ease of converting (i have 300 cds to convert, i dont want to mess around with some convaluted 50 step process for each cd, and i want to convert any new cd's i buy with ease too)
*performance (not a big issue, as differences are negligable )
* compression (not a big issue as differences are negligable 2:1 or 3:1 on average)

I agree on most of your points. However, performance is a big issue for mobile devices. There are restrictions on cpu power and battery capacity.

Ofcourse, especially when taking performance into account, FLAC is a strong contestant.