CD Ripping

Monday, 5 February, 2007

I have been extending my mp3 collection of late by ripping some more of my 400 odd CDs. I should say that I buy all the music I am interested in as albums (CDs) and subsequently rip them for listening too; I’m not a fan of illegal copying (or, for that matter, Orwellian DRM schemes dreampt up by money grabbing music executives. No one in mind… Sony).

Anyway, if you look carefully at the CD-audio specification you will realise that it is very different from PC based media. Principally in that the are no sectors and no error correction. In essence your PC will not know what is where on a CD which makes the accurate ripping of CDs quite a challenge. The main software I use for ripping is called Exact Audio Copy and it approaches this problem in two ways. Firstly it analyses your CDROM and works out how it operates. Secondly, it works on the principal of repeated samples; if you copy a “sector” of the CD twice, they should be the same. If not, then there is a read error. EAC also plays CDs, burns CDs, links to freedb for track information and many other “niceities”. Its also small and can run from a USB stick.

EAC has recently added in support for a AccurateRip. This extends the idea in EAC to a social network through the use of check-sums. Once a track is ripped, create a checksum and upload that to an online database. When someone else rips a track they can compare their checksum to the one in the database and, if they match, it is probably a good rip. The more checksums submitted the greater the accuracy. And it all works rather well.
doesn’t come with any encoders so you need to grab these yourself. Lame is probably the best open source encoder and you need to download binaries for Windows. You can then use either the DLL or standalone EXE file. I go for the former as it is quicker and easier, but hasn’t got the same flexibility, I set EAC to rip at 96k/bit stereo CBR. I tried listening to a variety of bit rates at both CBR and VBR and this was fine for me. It only gets used on my Palm so this offers a good trade between file size and quality.

AccurateRip is principally designed to work with dbPowerAmp, but is also supported by EAC. It only comes as an installer and you need to point it at your EAC installation directory where it sticks one DLL file. Unfortunately if you have already installed dbpoweramp before some funny things seem to happen to the registry and AccurateRip within EAC will always give the error “This key disc cannot be used for offset detection.” In this instance you need to need to delete all registry keys for AccurateRip (by searching through the registry) and then try it again. Should work fine then!

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