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[Karrma]

I, along with a few others, are learning about JRiver prior to getting our PONO digital music player in a few weeks.  I asked on the PONO community forum about whether I need to check the quality of my computer CD player to see how well it rips CDs and got this answer:

  "What your CD player needs to be able to do is to produce a bit perfect rip. With dBpoweramp you can have it calibrate your CD player using one of your CDs (which is checked against the Accuraterip database). Once it does this, it sets up an offset, a calibration especially for your CD player, which is then used for all the CDs you wish to rip in future. dBPoweramp also uses its massive database to check all your CD rips to see that they conform with rips made by other users of each particular album.

Does JRiver do the same? I have no idea, but perhaps other members here have. "

If someone can point the way here, on whether JRiver has this cabability, and how to do it, I can both learn, and help promote JRiver on the PONO community forum by posting how to do it there also. 

[JimH]

JRiver has excellent CD ripping.  It's easy to try MC's trial version.

The Accuraterip feature may have been important a decade ago, but modern CD drives made it obsolete, in my opinion.

Audiophiles often recommend DBPoweramp, mainly because other audiophiles have recommended it.  It's a fine program, but it offers no advantages compared with MC's ripping.

[Karrma]

So if I can paraphrase what I think you said, is that "all CD player/rippers in newer computers will give a perfect file copy" so there is no need to test this."  Our computer is fairly new to me, about 5 years old, but to some that would be an antique.  About what year of CD player/ripper do you think is good enough?  Ten years is a decade, so is 5 years ok?  

And the other person was not recommending a particular program, they were just stating what their experience was.  I debated keeping that information in, and chose to, just because I am ignorant enough to know I may goof things up when paraphrasing.  

[mwillems]

So if I can paraphrase what I think you said, is that "all CD player/rippers in newer computers will give a perfect file copy" so there is no need to test this."  

MC uses a secure ripping algorithm to confirm that the data read during a rip is correct, it just doesn't use accuraterip as part of that integrity check.  There are a number of different ways to skin a cat when it comes to verifying data integrity, see: http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Secure_ripping#What_is_Secure_Ripping.3F

Accuraterip is one method, but it's not a failsafe; all accuraterip does is compare your rip to someone else's rip.  If the rip in the accuraterip database contained errors, then you'll get the false positives (not likely because the database often contains multiple identical rips, but it's possible especially with obscure releases). A more common scenario is that some CDs have multiple international commercial releases that are slightly different, which can result in false positives.  

MC's approach relies on re-reading data on your actual CD to ensure correct data transfer.  Jim's right, modern drives are much, much better than drives from the 90's, but some error correction/detection is desirable even with modern drives for dealing with damaged discs, and JRiver's secure ripping deals well with that issue.  

A case study: I had a disc that shipped with a large scratch on the outer edge, which I did not notice immediately.  

I initially ripped it in Windows Media Player (before I discovered JRiver), and WMP happily ripped the disc and spit out ten files with no error messages or other commentary.  When I went back and listened to the rip, the second to last track contained audible skipping, and the last track was virtually unplayable because of how much stutter/corruption was in the track.

When I used JRiver to rip the same disc, it re-read the second to last track repeatedly until it managed to get a "correct" reading, and produced a file that had no audible artifacts.  For the last track, JRiver tried repeatedly to rip it, but ultimately provided an error indicating that the track was unreadable.  That's when I noticed the scratch  

When you're ripping a large collection, you want to know when something went wrong with the rip because you may not test each individual track as you rip it, and JRiver's secure ripping has been more than adequate to alert me when a disc has problems.  Nine times out of ten, JRiver can get a solid read by re-reading, and the rest of the time, it's good to know when a disc is damaged.