[fordgtlover]

I stumbled across this interesting assessment of a few CD ripping applications. I found his result quite interesting.

CAS 5: CD Ripping | Design w Sound

 

[Pale Rider]

I use Apple's lossless codec, and have been quite satisfied with it, so bit perfect rips were not my goal, but this was indeed a very interesting article. Thanks for posting it.

 

[krmathis]

Imo not. For two main reasons:
* It don't support Mac OS X.
* It don't support ripping and direct encoding to Apple Lossless.

 

[Jigglybootch]

I'd still rather use EAC. iTunes is too bloated has a crappy mp3 encoder.

 

[Slogra]

Let's see if there are any problems with that article:

- First of all, they don't tell if they used a new CD or a scratched CD. They probably used a new CD which will give good results with any ripper. But what would happen with a scratched CD?

Quote:

And even if a badly scratch disc that cannot recover the data, it will produce a log sheet telling where the problems are. This method is really important in the early days when PC CPU speed is around 166Mhz, 128Mb Ram.

- So a faster CPU and more memory are gonna help reading a scratched disc? I don't think so, it doesn't make any sense.

- EAC is not configured for most accurate results. C2 should be off.

- Comparing by staring at waves... How will you ever find any differences when there are 44.1k samples in a second. He talks about inverting waves and then compare. But why didn't he actually subtract the waves in the wav editor? That would've shown differences much better.

 

[Twitchy_one]

You could use VMware Fusion on the Mac to run EAC and/or Wavelab. One thing I like about EAC is that you can plug-in the desired encoder. For instance, I've been using the P4-compiled oggenc command line encoder for ogg files (9 quality) & it's very fast.

 

[Zarathustra19]

Personally, I'm a fan of EAC, the article may or may not have some good points, but they are essentially moot because for the most part you have perfect rips in either program.

I use EAC for several reasons:
1. Many more options for ripping, so I feel like I have more control over the quality of the rip, and the rip will be more tailored to my personal taste.
2. iTunes is a very resource heavy program, for reasons I can't quite grasp. It takes forever to load and hogs a good deal of my system resources. I use it only for transferring music.
3. I've always had a better experience with EAC, just overall. Ease of use, ripping time, it just performs better in my experience.

For the record, I rip my cd's with EAC and then use DBpoweramp to convert to ALAC. It works quickly, and I feel like I have a more accurate and secure rip.

Cheers!

 

[DefectiveAudioComponent]

For me EAC always worked better, but that could also be because it's on my PC and the MAC dvd/cd drives always breaks down. (Has anybody ever seen a working mac dvd drive on a laptop? Didn't think so...)

 

[Currawong]

It was discussed in another thread, but basically consider this:

CDs are used for software, where if even a single bit is out, then the CD is as good as a coaster. The bit-perfect extraction of data from CDs and DVDs is achieved by error correction, but it is of a sufficient grade that it takes pretty severe scratching for it not be able to correct errors. There's no reason that basic level of error correction shouldn't produce a perfect rip of almost all CDs, just as it would the data on software CD that has to be bit-perfect. Thus EAC would only be beneficial if ripping a fairly scratched CD, probably because it has options that can control aspects of the drive that would otherwise pass over errors beyond a certain point in audio CDs since they aren't required to be bit-perfect for playback.

 

[FasterThanEver]

Quote:

Originally Posted by fordgtlover /img/forum/go_quote.gif I stumbled across this interesting assessment of a few CD ripping applications. I found his result quite interesting. CAS 5: CD Ripping | Design w Sound

It's nice to see some experimental results rather than just talk.

However, that's an extremely cumbersome way to compare ripped audio files. EAC provides a command to compare 2 WAV files directly. If iTunes fill with leading zeros the same way that EAC does, it should enough.

I've compared ripped audio from J.River Media Center and EAC and found no differences for CDs either one could rip with confidence. I've done the comparison for rips that rip without extra re-reads and for CDs that need extra reads. (I've also compared results for both with dBpoweramp.)

If your CDs are in good shape and your CD/DVD drive works well for marginal CDs, you should be getting perfect results in a single pass for 97-99% of the disks. You need to do comparisons on more disks than in the cited experiment.

Bill

 

[fordgtlover]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jigglybootch /img/forum/go_quote.gif I'd still rather use EAC. iTunes is too bloated has a crappy mp3 encoder.

x2

Of course, the point of the post wasn't to discuss whether EAC is a better application than iTunes.

 

[melomaniac]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Twitchy_one /img/forum/go_quote.gif You could use VMware Fusion on the Mac to run EAC and/or Wavelab. One thing I like about EAC is that you can plug-in the desired encoder. For instance, I've been using the P4-compiled oggenc command line encoder for ogg files (9 quality) & it's very fast.

well, I tried the Fusion-EAC combo on a Mac. didn't feel it was worth it in the end. using MAX on apple os x will yield good results, and for the most part my iTunes rips work okay too.

 

[milkweg]

I've used EAC but now I just use Windows MP because to my ears I do not hear a difference. That's just for MP3 though and not lossless.

 

[krmathis]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Twitchy_one /img/forum/go_quote.gif You could use VMware Fusion on the Mac to run EAC and/or Wavelab.

Or you could simply use Darwine, and hence don't need to own MS Windows as well. Or stick with a native ripper, like Max, XLD, ...

 

[moodyrn]

For unscratched CDs, prolly no difference. There is IME, a huge difference using scratched CDs.