Thanks for the great feedback everyone. Let us know how your tests turn out Kiwi.
It's been a fairly slow process so far. I'm just collecting the data now. Following the
procedures I created the test CD and have attempted to rip it. I started out first with the "Secure" mode on both MC and EAC, but after 5 hours on MC (with it making no progress for 4 of them) and 8 hours on EAC, I gave up on the test.
{Note, I was much happier leaving EAC running since it has a feature that will note use the drive for N minutes every X minutes.}I am now performing the tests in their "error correction" on setting, but not secure. EAC didn't have a problem with this. MC is currently running.
I will then perform the same tests with just the Digital Large Buffer on each.
Once these tests are performed, I will remove the black mark that is part of the tests and see whether or not MC or EAC can handle just the scratches that are in the disk, as they should have "damaged" a far smaller portion of the disk. I will post all of the information, including log info when I finish the test.
Depending on time, I will also perform any of the tests that are different on my DVD drive to see whether or not the drives have an effect. I may also try slowing down the read speed; as in the results section of the above link, decreasing the speed on some drives allowed their error correction to be far better. On that note, EAC says that it will automatically slowdown to reread data in secure mode. I don't know whether MC does this, but it would seem to be a logical thing to do.
Version 10 should be right on "cue" with some new features.
Yeah, an "Advanced Advanced" set of settings would probably fix any of the complaints that people have between EAC and MC. Hopefully the tests above will complete and will give me at least some ideas on MC vs. EAC when ripping a cd with errors.
I was thinking about trying a similar test and using sand paper to scratch up a known area of the disk and see how both rippers handle that.
That said, (again) from looking at the results in the above link, there is quite a bit of variance between drives and that may or may not have more of an effect on one's ripping output.
A features that I can think of are (or have seen mentioned and think are good):
- Having a cool down time for the CD Drive.
- Having a max time for any track (maybe in multiples of the track time)
- At the very least, having multiple settings for different drives, at best, being able to rip from two devices at the same time. (right now, it appears that you can queue up rips on different drives, but that they run sequentially. You may do some of all of this already.)
- Creating Cue sheets for recreating CD w/ exact timing
- Offset Correction (if it's an issue. I don't know how much of an issue it is, but would love it if someone could comment one way or the other, or more likely, probably both ways...)
I guess that some questions that I have w/ regard to ripping with MC are how it deals with C2 Error Information? How are offset differences dealt with? I guess that knowing a bit more about the secure ripping process would give me more cofidence in it. And/or imperical tests that show that data ripped from MC is as good or better than EAC (or any other ripper out there.)
If my tests work, I'll happily try to explain the whole testing procedure so that others can perform the test as well. Then we might be able to get some more data to make informed decisions with.
I've seen several references to this ability of EAC to rip several tracks into one file, but when running EAC, I don't see where this option is. How do you do it?
I've never done this, but I imagine that if you select the tracks that you want and then play around with the different actions available in the action menu "Copy Selected Tracks", "Copy Range", "Copy Image and Create Cue Sheet" and "Copy Selected Tracks, index based". I don't know what they all do, but there are lots of options. The other thing you could do is rip the CD as one track and then split it up as you want, as opposed to trying to join afterwards. (it might also be easier to rip to wav, join the wav files and then convert to MP3.
MC is always caching-drive safe because of how it is designed. In this respect, it is as good or better than EAC.
This is the sort of information that helps give confidence to the ripping capablilities.
I don't want you guys to expose any secrets/tricks that you use, that could give competitors advantages, but where ever possible, it would be great to have information and/or tests to help determine ripping quality.
THanks, sorry about the long post.
kiwi