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Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping

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Re: Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping

#201

Post by dirkt »

exitb wrote: post #22
coopl wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait what? How does this work? Which CDs had music stored before the start of the first track?

Every audio CD has a list of tracks with their respective start times, so you can jump to specific songs. The first song also specifies a start time, which does not have to be zero. If it isn’t, the player will skip some of the audio, but you can still reverse back into it. It’s funny how a CD is more like a tape with contiguous content and an index, rather than a file system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_al…

It's actually more like an analog record than a tape. It's even layout in a spiral (instead of circles, like for a DVD, or like tracks on a floppy or harddisk).

Re: Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping

#202

Post by dirkt »

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.

We just used cdparanoia back then (on Linux, on Windows you used EAC). Actually, this Python app uses the cdparanoia library for the ripping itself.

Re: Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping

#203

Post by dirkt »

andy_ppp wrote: post #75

So why would ripping CDs result in less than perfect copies - I thought digital information would almost always be read correctly?

As early CD players were intended for audio playback, your CD player can lie to the software. It doesn't tell if it's reading at the exact beginning of a sector (because timing information is multiplexed into the audio stream, and some CD players were not byte-exact when interpreting this), and it also doesn't tell you when it silently corrects some errors. Because for a human listening to the audio won't notice.

But of course it makes a difference if you want to make high-fidelity copy.

That's why there always have been copy apps (cdparanoia on Linux, EAC on Windows) that do overlapping reads, and then detect and compensate these problems.

Re: Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping

#204

Post by leonroy »

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…

I did the same - ripped all my albums to iTunes but after it slowly became more unpleasant to use for my use case I moved to Roon.

It’s expensive but Roon does this at a level far beyond iTunes: https://roonlabs.com/

Re: Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping

#205

Post by dusted »

LarryMullins wrote: post #159
LeoPanthera wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike DVDs, CDs don't have sector information. They're just a long continuous spiral of bits, so there is no easy way to tell exactly where on the spiral the head is pointing, especially as many CD players, when you tell them "go to here", will miss slightly. To compensate for this, data CDs include intermittent data on the spiral that says "you are here", but audio CDs don't do this. The only way to ensure that you…

The real question is why you'd ever need a bit-perfect copy of an audio CD when CD players never gave bit-perfect playback in the first place and nobody could tell the difference. Edit: honestly I don't get it. Do you export all raw images from your camera to PNG too? JPG is good enough, and single-pass CD rips are just fine too.

> Do you export all raw images from your camera to PNG too? JPG is good enough, and single-pass CD rips are just fine too.

No, i keep them in RAW and develop a few for albums and print and such.. No, JPGs and PNGs are not good enough, the loss is REAL when you try to actually develop the picture.

I must admit I _REALLY_ don't get this "good enough" mentality.. Like.. Here's this way to get a more precise representation of the music you bought, and you'll go "nah, that's not for me, I prefer whatever random data I happen to get on the first go".. for what? why ?

If you really want to have a different product on every playback, I guess vinyl is the way to go :P

Re: Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping

#206

Post by pc2g4d »

Very recently decided to try getting off Spotify, so I'm in the CD-ripping workflow lately, after about 10 years off. (Also buying a bunch of direct download albums off Bandcamp.)

I like to think it's a trend?

Been using Asunder to rip, encoding as FLAC with max compression.

Playing back usually with Amarok but it's buggy for me these days so I'm not satisfied. Rhythmbox is good, too, but failed me by not inhibiting sleep during playback. I don't have a really solid go-to music organization / playback app right now but open to suggestions.

Re: Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping

#207

Post by pontifier »

rsync wrote: post #135
SloopJon wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've done a little bit of testing with flac and wav files. It is actually possible to convert a flac file back into an identical, bit exact wav file.

Re: Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping

#208

Post by heresie-dabord »

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…

Storage is cheap, hurray! Another solution: you can archive a music CD using cdrdao and play the result using mplayer.

    # $1 = output file
    # /dev/sr0 is assumed

    cdrdao disk-info
    cdrdao read-cd --with-cddb --device /dev/sr0 --read-raw --datafile $1.cdrdao.bin $1.toc
    dd conv=swab if=$1.cdrdao.bin of=$1.bin

    # To play the BIN: mplayer -demuxer rawaudio BIN"
I'm not an "audiophile" (perfectionist seeker of equipment) but I enjoy listening to classical and (some) jazz compositions and performances as they were conceived, not as "tracks".

Re: Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping

#209

Post by LarryMullins »

dusted wrote: post #205
LarryMullins wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real question is why you'd ever need a bit-perfect copy of an audio CD when CD players never gave bit-perfect playback in the first place and nobody could tell the difference. Edit: honestly I don't get it. Do you export all raw images from your camera to PNG too? JPG is good enough, and single-pass CD rips are just fine too.

> Do you export all raw images from your camera to PNG too? JPG is good enough, and single-pass CD rips are just fine too. No, i keep them in RAW and develop a few for albums and print and such.. No, JPGs and PNGs are not good enough, the loss is REAL when you try to actually develop the picture. I must admit I _REALLY_ don't get this "good enough" mentality.. Like.. Here's this way to get a more precise representati…

> I must admit I _REALLY_ don't get this "good enough" mentality.. Like.. Here's this way to get a more precise representation of the music you bought, and you'll go "nah, that's not for me, I prefer whatever random data I happen to get on the first go".. for what? why ?

The purpose of music is to be perceived. There is no perceptible difference, therefore there is no difference. CD Paranoia/etc are a waste of time, these tools make ripping a CD take several times as long for no tangible benefit.

Re: Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping

#210

Post by pwg »

kosherhurricane wrote: post #199
ericbarrett wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, but if that is the definition being used, neither does WAV store that data either. I meant versus a raw binary dump of the CD.

Audio CDs have less error correction than CD-ROMs. When you rip an audio CD, the drive is doing the error correction, and may give you PCM data different from what was written on it. Software like ExactAudioCopy tries the best it can, but that’s exactly that. Reading CD-ROM data is different. You can get an iso image of a data cd, but not an audio one. This was done to both increase play time and discourage copying.…

> This was done to both increase play time and discourage copying.

I doubt copying figured into the decision process (at least not a deliberate "anti-piracy" thought process).

The CD was released in 1982 [1]. This was only one year after IBM had released the original IBM PC, which came with one or two 320KB 5.25 inch floppy drives. The IBM PC did not have an official "hard drive" variant from IBM until the PC XT [3] released in 1983 (one year after the CD) and the hard drive option was a whole 10MB. When the target was replacement of the Vinyl LP player and compact cassette deck, and when their target customer base might have had 10-20MB of total storage in their personal computers (if they even had a personal computer), it would seem unbelievable to Sony and Phillips that those customers might even be capable of copying a disk holding somewhere upwards of 850-950MB of digital audio data.

And of course in the above I am overlooking that in order to "copy a CD" (as in make a digital copy) one first requires a CD drive that can interface with a PC in a digital way, and such drives did not appear until some years after the CD's release.

So with an amount of data on each disk that exceeds end users available storage by orders of magnitude, and no "CD drives interfaced digitally to computers" at the same time it seems unlikely that Sony or Phillips ever even considered that end users would be able to digitally copy CD disks.

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer_XT

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