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[lemonpie]

Hi there!

After ripping about 300 CD with MC12 in FLAC, I had to realize, that by listening them, some "clicking sound" exist with some FLAC files. This behaviour is only available with a few of the FLACs (I know about 2 or 3 FLACs right now). 

This was reason enough for me, to check, how I could get more "perfect FLAC rips".

As I knew before I began to rip my CDs, the bottleneck in my system could be the CD/DVD drive. After some research, I bought one of the best drives for audio-CD Ripping, the Plextor Premium II.

The last to days I could test some issues regarding audio CD reading and FLAC ripping. Let's have a look on some points:

Different FLAC files from the same drive:
It was very interesting for me, that I did not get the same FLAC files on two different PC with the same CD drive. Of cource I used on both systems the same MC version (12.0.198) whith the same FLAC Plugin (and the same settings!).
One system creates about 3MB larger FLACs than the other system (from a 61min album: 428MB vs. 431MB).
Converting those different FLACs to WAV, results in exactly the same WAV files.

Conclusion: It's not the way to compare FLAC files directly, but after converting the files to WAV, it's possible to compare the audio data.

Different results whith different CD-drives:
My suspicion could be approved, that different drives results in different audio files. With the brand new Plextor Premium II drive I don't get exaclty the same audio files (WAV) as whith the two DVD drives I ripped the 300 CDs.

Conlcusion: It's essential, two have a very good CD drive for ripping CD (if you would have an exact copy of the CD).

MC vs. EAC vs. PlexTools:
There are some people, who allege, that the ripping tool EAC (Exact Audio Copy) should be the best ripping software available.
I compared the result from EAC and MC (Media Center) and got exaclty the same WAV files.
EAC might be the cheapest (for free) good ripping tool, but there is no disadvantage to use the much more featured MC for ripping. There are many more posts regarding comparison of those two tools in this forum (e.g. http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=33554.0).

The Plextor Premium II drive comes whith PlexTools Professional. This is a nice tools to check the quality of CDs an a lot more. It's also possible to create extract digital audio files to WAV, FLAC and other formats.
Surprisingly I did not get exactly the same WAV files with PlexTools Professional as with MC and EAC. Does someone know a reason for this?

Conclusion: I will proceed to use MC for ripping my CDs in secure mode. Priority is clearly quality and not speed for me. It isn't a problem for my right now, that I didn't get the same WAV files with PlexTools. The reason could be one of the many settings in PlexTools. - MC and EAC get the same WAV files, so I will continue trust MC for future ripping in combination with the Plextor Premium II cd-drive.


Well, that's all for now

Cheers!

[JimH]

There are solutions to similar problems in both the FAQ listed above and in this thread:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?board=3;action=display;threadid=24031;start=0

Also take a look in scthom's thread on FLAC on the Third Party board here.  Please post any FLAC specific comments or questions there.

[InflatableMouse]

Thanks for doing the research.

I have done a similar test. For me its a big advantage that my Plextor 716A is 3 times faster in secure mode with MC12 than EAC in secure mode (on the same machine, same drive of course).

I wonder though why the Pioneer 111D only gets 4x and the Plextor 15x.

[Listener]

I've been away on vacation so my post is rather late.

> Surprisingly I did not get exactly the same WAV files with PlexTools Professional as with MC and EAC.
> Does someone know a reason for this?

Plextools uses C2 error info provided by the Plextor drive to correct errors. (Plextools is designed specificly for use with Plextools drives.)

EAC doesn't use C2 info in that way.  I recall that someone from JRiver saying that MC doesn't use C2 unfo since it is not implemented uniformly by CD and DVD drives of different manufacturers.

EAC in its (test & Copy mode) and MC read an audio CD more than once.  The results of reading each chunk twice are compared.  If they aqree, the data is assumed to be correct and accepted.  If the results don't agree, those chunks are re-read more times to get a consensus.  This nethod has three benefits:

1. If your Cds are clean and unscratched, most will be read correctly and YOU WILL KNOW IT.  So you ripped the CD and you are confident of the quality of the result.

2. If a portion of a CD wasn't read correctly (as shown by comparing results of two reads) YOU WILL KNOW IT.

3. The technique of re-reading the CD to get a consensus often provides reliable audio data that you can accept with confidence on problem CDs.  It takes longer but you get accurate results. In a few cases, neither EAC or MC can produce reliable results.  I've ripped about 2000 CDs with MC and have only 4 or 5 CDs with any chunks that MC or MC can't read.  If you have lots of scratched or dirty CDs, expect more problems.
 
> It was very interesting for me, that I did not get the same FLAC files on two different PC with the same CD drive.
> One system creates about 3MB larger FLACs than the other system (from a 61min album: 428MB vs. 431MB).

I can think of two possible causes for the difference in size:

1.  The level of Flac compression might be different on the two PCs.
2. The metadata (tags and others info) is different because of different settings in MC.

> Converting those different FLACs to WAV, results in exactly the same WAV files.

This means that there is no difference in the actual audio data.  Relax and stop worrying.

Bill