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Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping

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Re: Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping

#171
post #155
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 an…

I'm really sorry for dogpiling on your setup here, but why keep wav files rather than flac? Flac files are lossless compression, so you can always get the exact same wav out of them, they take less disk space and they can hold Metadata. Flac support is also really common these days.

The only argument I’ve heard that makes me go “OK, fine!” in favor of FLAC is that they forced a standardization of metadata.

FLAC is well-supported. But, PCM RIFF WAV files are triv-i-al. Any CS101 student can write a parser. They don’t need decoding.

2:1 lossless compression is nice. It’s quite a technical feat.

Meanwhile, as an old software engineer, I focus pretty hard on technical simplicity. And, the complexity ratio of PCM vs. pretty much else everything is a a very, very small number. Very small :p

Re: Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping

#173

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.

I mean, that's literally what RAW files from cameras are, and there are uses for them. I don't know if a multi pass CD rip is quite as useful as a RAW image, but your analogy is not as strong as you think it is.

Re: Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping

#174

My go-to audio CD ripper is this: https://www.exactaudiocopy.de/

Agreed. I mean, great that people make alternatives, but this was a solved problem long ago. Also EAC is a lots more user friendly that some python software.

> Also EAC is a lots more user friendly that some python software.

User friendly is a matter of opinion.

Re: Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, obviously, its called SACD and its a couple of decades old. Even DAT is better than cd, if you're only comparing sampling rate. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Audio_CD

Also DVD-Audio, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-Audio.

Re: Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping

#177
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always makes me sad remembering what was lost when What.CD went offline.

And Oink before it. But the torch has been passed to the next community, not all has been lost

While not all has been lost, I strongly feel that every time the community migrates from one platform to another, the long tail of small time users gets cut off. Ties are severed, people fall out of reach, etc. I initially joined a few sites that popped up after What, but since I didn't find any of the users there that I used to talk to regularly, I don't visit much ever anymore.

Re: Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping

#178
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…

Just in case anyone was wondering, EAC works without a hitch with WINE on Linux.

Highly recommended for anyone using EAC (from a mirror of the what.cd wiki): https://web.archive.org/web/20161123061955/http://whatcdinfo..., https://web.archive.org/web/20161123062018/http://whatcdinfo...

Or XLD: https://web.archive.org/web/20161123023617/http://whatcdinfo...

Re: Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping

#179
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…

I suggest looking, maybe, at ALAC as well, even though it is generally slept on. It is open source now just like FLAC, and actually has built-in support in Windows and many Linux music players despite being an Apple format, making it somewhat more universally compatible than FLAC (which isn’t supported in iOS or macOS).

In my school days I was able to add FLAC support to an iPod Touch 4th gen with a quick Cydia module(?) download. I'm skeptical of your claim that macOS doesn't support FLAC. I'm sure mpv and other programs can play it fine. Do you just mean support in the default-installed macOS software? That seems like pretty limiting criteria. I wouldn't expect something like Windows Media Player to cover all that much either.

Re: Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping

#180
post #87
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no obligation to support every distro on the planet.

If you’ve run an open source project you will get these bug reports. It’s also not obvious if it’s a bug in your code or a dependency many times so you’re going to want to debug it. As an example alpine has a smaller default stack size. It’s not obvious if that stack overflow is expected or not.

Sure, you might get them. But you have the option to ignore them, preferably with a friendly message back to the reporter, stating that, say, Alpine Linux is currently not supported.
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