INTERACT FORUM

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  
Pages: [1]   Go Down

Author Topic: Flac ripping  (Read 2395 times)

BenAlex

  • Recent member
  • *
  • Posts: 11
Flac ripping
« on: September 14, 2012, 01:26:37 pm »

Not sure if this belongs here...

Sometimes when I'm ripping a CD that is a bit scratchy, and the process takes forever to rip due to retries, MC will report that a certain percentage (about 1 to 3 percent) of the data were unsafe (or something like that). Right, but in these cases I can't actually hear anything notably wrong with the end product. I'm I deaf or does these narrow margins for error actually have any significance at all?
Logged

gvanbrunt

  • MC Beta Team
  • Citizen of the Universe
  • *****
  • Posts: 1232
  • MC Nerd
Re: Flac ripping
« Reply #1 on: September 16, 2012, 02:15:40 pm »

FLAC is supposed to 100% lossless. It should produce an perfect representation of the audio. If i'm not mistaken when ripping to FLAC it reads the disc as data and that will not tolerate any data being questionable. The errors come from the OS level and not MC. In other encoders such as MP3 I believe it reads it as audio and as such it will happily "jump over" bad sections and interpolate data.
Logged

MetalHOE

  • Recent member
  • *
  • Posts: 11
Re: Flac ripping
« Reply #2 on: September 16, 2012, 02:40:34 pm »

FLAC is supposed to 100% lossless. It should produce an perfect representation of the audio. If i'm not mistaken when ripping to FLAC it reads the disc as data and that will not tolerate any data being questionable. The errors come from the OS level and not MC. In other encoders such as MP3 I believe it reads it as audio and as such it will happily "jump over" bad sections and interpolate data.

I would not be absolutely sure about that... Even when using dbPoweramp in ultra-secure mode with proper settings, there could be a CRC mismatch sometimes => I always rip EVERYTHING twice in ultrasecure to ensure myself that it is for 100% percent accurate, using different drives for both rips.
Logged

gvanbrunt

  • MC Beta Team
  • Citizen of the Universe
  • *****
  • Posts: 1232
  • MC Nerd
Re: Flac ripping
« Reply #3 on: September 16, 2012, 04:14:02 pm »

My answer was to your question. I believe the encoder in MC reads the disc as data. Therefor it can timeout and retry many times to get proper data from the disk and won't proceed until it does. That doesn't mean other products do this. They could be reading it as audio and that would not care about small errors and would result in CRC differences between rips without any retries or delays etc.

I'm not sure about this, but I thought I remembered reading it here at some point.
Logged

Vincent Kars

  • Citizen of the Universe
  • *****
  • Posts: 1154
Re: Flac ripping
« Reply #4 on: September 19, 2012, 06:19:17 am »

Rippers can employ different strategies.
The simplest one is reading the data as is.
If a CRC occurs, they simple accept the interpolation offered by the drive.
Another option is not to accept this but re-read the sector a couple of times and try to establish the best possible representation of the data.
Rippers like dBpoweramp calculated the MD5 and compare this checksum with the Accuraterip database.
If your results are in agreement with those of others, it is likely the rip is perfect.

gvanbrunt
To the best of my knowledge, there is no relation between the audio format and the results.
A ripper simple reads data in Redbook format (audio CD).
As far as I know, you can’t read it in a different way.

The output is raw PCM.
This it is converted to the file format format of choice by the user.

Small errors are in general not audible, the interpolation of the drive compensates for it.
Logged
Pages: [1]   Go Up