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Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping

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Re: Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping

#191

Post by ericbarrett »

pwg wrote: post #149
ericbarrett wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does FLAC preserve the exact bytestream of the CD tracks? (As an analogy, PNG is "lossless," but it won't natively preserve the metadata of a raw digital camera image.) The audio will be preserved but there might be interesting details on the CD like easter eggs, copyright text, etc. and I'm not sure FLAC would capture those.

> Does FLAC preserve the exact bytestream of the CD tracks? (As an analogy, PNG is "lossless," but it won't natively preserve the metadata of a raw digital camera image.) No, but if that is the definition being used, neither does WAV store that data either. > The audio will be preserved but there might be interesting details on the CD like easter eggs, copyright text, etc. and I'm not sure FLAC would capture those. F…

> 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.

Re: Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping

#192

Post by LarryMullins »

Niksko wrote: post #173
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.

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.

So you archive RAWs, not just JPEGs? I get that professional photographers do, but I never would. And I think they do it to preserve byte depth or whatever, but FLAC from a single pass CD rip has all the bit depth of the original, even if it has a few bits wrong you'll never notice it.

Re: Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping

#193

Post by gjsman-1000 »

opan wrote: post #179
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m talking about stock macOS, yes.

> something like Windows Media Player to cover all that much either

Well, in Windows 11, Windows Media Player does support ALAC. Heck, it will even rip your CDs and encode them in ALAC.

Re: Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping

#194

Post by filmgirlcw »

JTon wrote: post #21
Etheryte wrote: post #17

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

I miss OiNK all the time. So much music that wasn’t available anywhere else. Sigh.

Re: Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping

#195

Post by justsomehnguy »

Moru wrote: post #190
rsync wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"... 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…

An audio CD can be done in a way that your wav will not represent the full data on the disc. If you want an exact copy, you need to do a disc image with preserve empty space or something similar. The CD can contain both audio tracks and data tracks. Some audio tracks can be hidden from normal play and a ripper might miss those too. So if you really want to save an exact copy of the CD, you will have to find something…

,ISO can't store Audio CD at all.

Re: Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping

#196

Post by zamadatix »

LarryMullins wrote: post #192
Niksko wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So you archive RAWs, not just JPEGs? I get that professional photographers do, but I never would. And I think they do it to preserve byte depth or whatever, but FLAC from a single pass CD rip has all the bit depth of the original, even if it has a few bits wrong you'll never notice it.

I mean I do keep the RAWs but the use case there is a bit different anyways, even the JPEGs aren't a simple matter of "the compressed version" it's also "the preprocessed version". OTOH it takes no more storage to back a CD up correctly vs incorrectly so why be keen to add a generation of loss? You can lower the quality whenever you like but you can never add it back.

Re: Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping

#197

Post by merlyn »

dstaley wrote: post #150
dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #136

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.

Most hi-res audio is being sold as digital downloads. I don't think there's a currently-sold physical medium that contains digital data that's higher quality than a CD.

SACD, HD-Audio, Blu-Ray Audio.

I own music only discs in each of these formats. I think the last Blu-Ray Audio disk I bought (Yello Point Dolby Atmos release) was shipped in 2021.

Granted, they are fairly sparse. That disc was an import.

Re: Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping

#198

Post by ibz »

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…

cmus [1] is the closest I found to foobar2000. It is my main music player now, after years of disappointment. It supports FLAC and they claim they support CUE sheets, although I haven't tested your particular scenario. The way I use it is I have all my library in it at once, iTunes style. It has good search & playlists, but no drag&drop, since it's just command line...

[1] https://cmus.github.io/

Re: Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping

#199

Post by kosherhurricane »

ericbarrett wrote: post #191
pwg wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does FLAC preserve the exact bytestream of the CD tracks? (As an analogy, PNG is "lossless," but it won't natively preserve the metadata of a raw digital camera image.) No, but if that is the definition being used, neither does WAV store that data either. > The audio will be preserved but there might be interesting details on the CD like easter eggs, copyright text, etc. and I'm not sure FLAC would capture those. F…

> 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.

So since you’ll never get the raw redbook data off a cd, there is no reason to prefer WAV over FLAC for CD audio.

Re: Whipper: Accurate Audio CD Ripping

#200

Post by kosherhurricane »

corysama wrote: post #171
ripdog wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If enough time or technology has passed that someone has to write a wav parser, how do you expect them to mount your file system, assuming it has survived?
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