[aos]

As a sort of continuation of the thread on someone else's problem with iTunes and AirTunes that turned out to be the CD extraction quality - I realized that I'm having the same problem actually. I ripped several hundred CDs using iTunes a few months ago, and stored the files as losless AAC, on a USB hard drive connected to a linksys NSLU2 ethernet network storage. Then I used custom firmware for it to install iTunes music server so that it can server all that music to any machine on the network, which can then stream it wirelessly to my airport express.

I have not listened too much to it until now - I just got a new iPod and sync'ed with iTunes and that library. And then noticed that there are very audible scratches or other types of major sound flaws in some of the CDs. And it's not too few of them either! Now this obviously worries me a lot, and makes me question the quality of ALL the music that's now there - even if there's no obviously audible defects, how can I trust that it's well extracted? I didn't expect EAC-class perfection but this is, well, really terrible.

The question is, what can I do about it? Even if I were to re-encode EVERYTHING (which would take many tens of hours), how could I automate the process? I mean, if I were to use EAC - which is what I normally use, offset corrected and all - I used to be pretty anal about bit perfection - it would do me no good because I want losless AAC in order to maintain ID tags in the files as well as keep them served by the linksys thingy. Were I to manually extract wav's and then manually encode them in iTunes and set their tags, it would take months. Is there something I can do - a plugin for iTunes, a third party AAC losless encoder, anything?

 

[drminky]

Sorry for the obvious questions but just to establish where the problem lies, as I have not noticed a problem with iTunes rip quality before;

Are you on windows or Mac? What cd drive are you using?

Did you have error correction enabled in iTunes importing prefs when you ripped your cds?

Are the cds in question in generally good condition? visible scratches? Do you give them a quick wipe before ripping?

Also, are these glitches that you are hearing only on the ipod? or also when playing directly from the computer (non-streamed)

...- my ipod will sometime glitch when playing lossless files (buffer underrun?)

 

[jpr703]

You need to make sure that turn on the Error Correction option in iTunes before ripping. When this is enabled and you use a good quality CD drive, iTunes is a very capable ripper.

 

[DukeTogo]

iTunes (Windows) simply is not as capable a ripper as EAC.

I know because I similarly experienced glitches in my audio that made me question "What?" when listening to my music. Then I'd carefully listen to the CD through alternative sources to determine if the problem was the recording or perhaps the CD-mastering, or my rip from that CD. I found that *even with error correction on* in iTunes, that it would happily rip a track that had obvious errors on it. EAC did a much better job and at least does reporting when done extracting so you know what the results were.

My CD drive is a mini Lacie Porsche USB drive (uses NEC mechanism) which yeah I know it's no Plextor but I needed something small. My discs vary from "it couldn't be more perfect" to "wow, looks like you used steel-wool to polish this one!" I generally clean them with an optical cloth and some cleaning solution before I rip.

I am in largely the same boat as the original poster (got many 1000's of tunes ripped by iTunes) and my strategy right now is to re-rip using EAC. It's definitely tedious:

rip using EAC (secure) + AccurateRip to \tmp as WAV
import folder into iTunes library from \tmp
delete files from \tmp
search library for WAV's (ie. only the tunes I just ripped)
Apply basic tags for album (Artist/Album/Track) to those WAV files
I also put an tag in the Grouping field. EAC(version number)etc.
limit library to just that album
(now I see only the original ripped album and the new one at the same time)
sort by track
sync up the Star Ratings on all tracks
get info on each track
copy per-track details (Song Name etc) on original track #N
paste those details on new track #N

when done, delete all original tracks
empty trash
convert all WAV's to Apple Lossless
apply album art (which fortunately I've always retained as Artist ; Album.jpg)

NEXT!

Honestly it's giving me a chance to ensure that all my tags are correct, which I largely thought they were, but some people must be morons when they enter things into FreeDB. Even eyeballing it as I ripped with iTunes the first time around, I see I missed the odd thing.

I could probably script this with AppleScript to some extent if I was on a Mac OS X, but I'm not sure what my options are under Windows. Maybe I'll look at what I can do improve the setup... I hate Windows cmd shell though, maybe I can do some stuff with scripts via Cygwin (pseudo-UNIX shell for Windows). Not optimistic


Maybe I'll get a new Mac! Man so tempting...
This would be a useful tool perhaps in that case:
http://www.omino.com/~poly/software/qt_tools/

Used it once before for video conversion, very useful for that.
Haven't tried it on audio. Quicktime Pro might also be useful
If you're handy with XML, that's all the Library is...

 

[Wodgy]

Quote:

Originally Posted by jpr703 You need to make sure that turn on the Error Correction option in iTunes before ripping. When this is enabled and you use a good quality CD drive, iTunes is a very capable ripper.

Yes, turning on Error Correction in iTunes is a necessity, even on the Mac version. With Error Correction turned on, iTunes is pretty good, almost as good as EAC. There's a guy here who did a bit-by-bit comparison of EAC and iTunes on two different computers. Here are his results:

"Anyway, I brought a PC laptop home this evening and have been comparing results of various ripping methods on that, using the compare wav tool in Exact Audio Copy (which seems a lot more effective than home-brew solutions using diff!). I ripped the same 10 minute track (to wav) in EAC, your port of cdparanoia on my G4 desktop, and iTunes with and without error correction on my desktop and G4 laptop.

The results are quite interesting - I have them collated in a pdf, but in summary all the samples differed at the start (I presume this is due to different offsets when starting the rip), the EAC rip and the G4 laptop iTunes rips were otherwise identical (with and without error correction - unless perhaps it had cached it after the first rip), and on the G4 desktop iTunes had only 3 single byte missed samples with error correction turned on. Without error correction it was another story - it had 3 single byte misses plus one 14 byte and one 11 byte miss."

 

[aos]

I use Windows and my CD drive was SCSI Plextor 40X Max at the time, which used to be a gold standard.

I had error correction on, however it is possible that it was off for a part of the extraction as I was experimenting with the settings.

Almost all of the CDs were used only a few times so they shouldn't have been scratched. However the one I noticed was badly extracted yesterday was indeed used a fair bit so it is possible that it wasn't perfect. Some of the others though should've.

I guess the question is if there is a possibility to do this AAC losless encoding process more reliably than iTunes. Now I don't trust a single CD extracted in there any more...

 

[aos]

Quicktime pro eh? That actually may work - if you can encode into losless AAC with QT Pro by calling it from command line. EAC is capable of calling any kind of script and pass the ID info as arguments, at least I think so. If plain .bat files aren't good enough, there are always other options to bring UNIX like functionality to Windows.

 

[aos]

Ack!!! I just purchased QT Pro - for $45 Canadian - and only then found out that it DOES NOT let you encode audio in AAC losless!!! Unbelievable!! It was really impossible to tell from Apple website so I took a chance... bad move.