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Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping

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Re: Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping

#131

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

SloopJon wrote: post #41
accrual wrote: post #3

This is pretty cool, it's like a Python and *nix version of Exact Audio Copy (EAC) for Windows. I enjoy the ritual of perfectly ripping a CD. I can spend an hour or two scanning the artwork, verifying the track names, performing the rip, losslessly compressing (I prefer FLAC), generating .cue files, checksuming everything, then sitting down to experience the best possible digital copy of a physical item I can self pr…

Years ago, I had most of my music ripped to AAC in iTunes, easily accessible, browsable, and shuffleable. I now rip each of my CDs to a single FLAC and cue sheet (using XLD on Mac), on the theory that it's the most accurate way to archive a disc. However, I haven't found anything that offers the same accessibility to such a collection as iTunes did. I look through folders, and drag a few cue sheets at a time into Foo…

You rip one CD to one unsplit FLAC file? I use EAC to rip each track to FLAC with a cue sheet for the CD and Plex to play it.

It seems like a lot of extra steps to play music but when my library started getting huge it was becoming a pain to organize and sync between devices.

Re: Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping

#132

Post by CharlesW »

BennyInc wrote: post #113

Can anyone recommend a (currently market available) USB drive that produces good results? Back in the good old times I had a Yamaha CRW F1 which many still say was the best for accurate rips, as it supported many advanced modes required to read even scratched CDs better than others.

From the dBpoweramp CD Ripper forums, "CD Drive Accuracy 2019": https://forum.dbpoweramp.com/showthread.php?43786-CD-Drive-A...

Also mentioned elsewhere in this thread: https://pilabor.com/blog/2022/10/audio-cd-ripping-hardware/

Re: Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping

#133

Post by rsync »

thebrid wrote: post #37
lern_too_spel wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would I use this over abcde, another cdparanoia frontend that is packaged for every major distro?

My understanding is whipper is more paranoid than abcde. whipper does a couple things to ensure a perfect rip: * Rips tracks twice and ensures the checksums match (retrying if they do not) * Compares the track checksums against the AccurateRip database I think this gives much more confidence that the result is correct. The tags seem a lot more detailed with whipper too.

What I appreciated most about 'abcde' was that just prior to the rip it would open up the CDDB output in 'vim' and allow quick and easy edits to what are, sometimes, horrific titling and track entries ...

It's a very nice workflow and avoids a lot of cleanup ...

Re: Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping

#134

Post by ataylor32 »

accrual wrote: post #3

This is pretty cool, it's like a Python and *nix version of Exact Audio Copy (EAC) for Windows. I enjoy the ritual of perfectly ripping a CD. I can spend an hour or two scanning the artwork, verifying the track names, performing the rip, losslessly compressing (I prefer FLAC), generating .cue files, checksuming everything, then sitting down to experience the best possible digital copy of a physical item I can self pr…

Do you do anything to handle "hidden tracks" (i.e. the last track has some audio, then some silence, and then some more audio)?

Re: Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping

#135

Post by rsync »

SloopJon wrote: post #41
accrual wrote: post #3

This is pretty cool, it's like a Python and *nix version of Exact Audio Copy (EAC) for Windows. I enjoy the ritual of perfectly ripping a CD. I can spend an hour or two scanning the artwork, verifying the track names, performing the rip, losslessly compressing (I prefer FLAC), generating .cue files, checksuming everything, then sitting down to experience the best possible digital copy of a physical item I can self pr…

Years ago, I had most of my music ripped to AAC in iTunes, easily accessible, browsable, and shuffleable. I now rip each of my CDs to a single FLAC and cue sheet (using XLD on Mac), on the theory that it's the most accurate way to archive a disc. However, I haven't found anything that offers the same accessibility to such a collection as iTunes did. I look through folders, and drag a few cue sheets at a time into Foo…

"... on the theory that it's the most accurate way to archive a disc ..."

I won't argue with this but I think there needs to be a qualifier - the most accurate way to archive a disc while using compression ...

Given that an audio cd is encoded in WAV/PCM and we have a WAV file specification, I think ripping to a WAV file remains the gold standard:

"... digital audio extraction software can be used to read CD-DA audio data and store it in files. Common audio file formats for this purpose include WAV and AIFF, which simply preface the LPCM data with a short header ..." [1]

I like the idea that ripping to a WAV file means I never have to rip that disc again.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc_Digital_Audio

Re: Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping

#136

Post by dmitryminkovsky »

criddell wrote: post #68
victorvosk wrote: post #5

I love how this software would have been legend in the 90s/00s but now you are just a weird audiophile nerd for messing around with physical CDs.

Audiophile nerds have moved on to digital formats that are much higher res than CD or have gone 100% analog.

There is a commercially available digital format/medium that has higher res than CD? Like, there are 96kHz discs being sold out there? And there are labels out there mastering and producing these discs? Sorry this is news to me! I thought 96kHz encodes were upsamples or homemade rips from analog formats.

Re: Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping

#137

Post by andy_ppp »

asveikau wrote: post #102
rlv-dan wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transferring from disc to system via a laser is analogue and error prone. What if there is a scratch? What if the cd wobbles?

That's what the CRC is for. Granted, it's not perfect...

But then the CD should skip right or reread the bits - maybe it doesn't maybe it guesses to keep the music playing...

Re: Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping

#138

Post by rsync »

cogman10 wrote: post #95
acidburnNSA wrote: post #84

That's a nice package. I use some of the components on the command line to get my CD data to the music server. Extract data to wav: cdparanoia -B Compress all wavs to mp3 (in parallel, takes like 1 second, crazy!): parallel lame --preset extreme {} -o {.}.mp3 ::: *.wav Clean up folder rm *.wav Import into mopidy library and lookup/apply metadata with beets beet import . sudo su - mopidy -s /bin/bash -c 'mopidy --conf…

Why MP3? It's simply not a great codec to target. If you have a music server, then why not flac? If space is an issue, then why not Opus (which almost everything supports now) or HE-AAC which has nearly as much support as MP3. You can target the same MP3 bitrate and end up with a more transparent encoding. You can decrease the bitrate and have the same quality as your mp3 encode with a smaller bitrate. I honestly don…

"Why MP3? It's simply not a great codec to target. If you have a music server, then why not flac?"

I still encode to plain old 128k mp3. Here's why ...

First, I keep the WAV originals and those are what I listen to on my music system, in my music server, etc.

Second, if I am using the mp3s it is because I am going to some unknown place to interface with some unknown tool to play these - let's just make life simple and use something that will work everywhere - even the dumb creative audio bluetooth adapter that was in that airbnb that one time ...

Finally, 128k mp3 is typically a 10:1 compression ratio and makes size and space "budgeting" easy. It's easy to remember.

One other thing:

When I export my ripped CD wav collection to mp3 I also compress the filenames - I flatten to ASCII 256 and truncate the filenames to 64 characters, etc. LOTS of car audio interfaces just puke when they hit weird unicode characters or can't display long filenames ... it creates all manner of havoc.

Re: Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping

#139

Post by kkielhofner »

csdvrx wrote: post #120
anamexis wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The post you're replying to gave several reasons why something like Cosmopolitan Python is not sufficient. This is nothing like hello world.

> This is nothing like hello world. Full disagree. Ripping a CD in 2023 should be as complicated as hello world. > The post you're replying to gave several reasons Let's go through them! > Packages are available for just about any distro I use windows. > It's based on python with relatively obscure requirements So include the modules along with the cosmopolitan python > that also calls out to system binaries Put that…

It's only for Linux and they make that absolutely clear. If you use Windows there are plenty of other options referenced in this thread and elsewhere.

This project is at least nine years old with over 1,600 commits. There are 105 open issues.

If you bothered to spend a few minutes to look at the source and open issues you'd realize how complicated and difficult it actually is to enable as many (Linux) users as possible (with cheap, out of spec, and shoddy hardware) to make close-to-perfect rips (with metadata, in multiple formats, etc) of nearly any compact disc produced over the last four decades.

Finally, as someone who has created and contributed to open source projects calling this project "lazy" is downright offensive and completely unfair. Please feel free to spend your personal time and effort to create something better. I'm sure the people who successfully use whipper everyday will be anxiously awaiting and rejoice at the release of your perfect implementation.

Then, when it (never) appears someone like you will be here trashing a design decision or compromise you made. Or, as the saying goes, I'm sure the maintainers of the project would appreciate your pull requests.

Valid criticism and debate is great (and beneficial) but your comment and attitude go way too far.

Please try to put yourself in the shoes of people who donate their time to actually produce something of value and utility (for free) only to have keyboard warriors come out of the woodwork and call them lazy.

Re: Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping

#140

Post by asveikau »

andy_ppp wrote: post #137
asveikau wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what the CRC is for. Granted, it's not perfect...

But then the CD should skip right or reread the bits - maybe it doesn't maybe it guesses to keep the music playing...

And I guess that's why cdparanoia exists - to put hyper-focus on those edge cases and get them right. I used to use it to rip in the 90s or early 2000s but never looked deeply into how it works.
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