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Re: Apple Lossless vs. AIFF

Posted by pburke (A) on May 18, 2004 at 10:44:57

In Reply to: Re: Apple Lossless vs. AIFF posted by Jsterritt on May 17, 2004 at 16:46:49:

there should not be the need for error correction on a proper rip unless the CD is seriously scratched. I have used EAC to duplicate most of my CD collection to black media, and withing about 500 CDs, I have had only 2 CDs that needed any additional "investigation" of suspect areas. One of these CDs was a crappy pressing (Russian made) with a visible hole in the reflective layer, the other had been completely scratched up by children so that no regular player would even load it anymore. All other CDs were extraced with 100% confidence in overlapping reads.

Perhaps Itunes calls the overlapping reads error correction, while in EAC the error correction is a very time consuming process. I think each suspect sector will be read up to 80 times before it fills in some data it extracts, or fails.

Another thing I noticed is that you really need a CD reader that is well suited for the extraction. Among the 12 odd PCs I have access to, only those with very recent MSI or LiteOn CD-ROMs were really good, while some slightly older drives lacked some features EAC likes to see for good extraction. The good drives will rip a CD at about 8-11X (these are generally 52x drives) while the bad ones will spend 1+ hour on the same CD and report tons of errors.

Read up on what EAC does - Itunes is cute for MP3 ripping, because it does have a great CD database that knows pretty much every CD I ever fed into it. However, it's rather fuzzy about what it really does in terms of quality extraction. I may do a test one day and do a binary comparison of an EAC-ripped file with a file Itunes pulled. One thing I didn't see in Itunes was the ability to rip into an image file with cue sheet to then write the CD as a perfect dupe, not having to spend any time on gap times between songs, etc. Since I don't create samplers from my CDs, rather dupe them to better media, Itunes remains a computer-only type tool for me, creating compressed files for playback on crappy computer speakers or headphones. Don't really care about lossless or rip quality when I listen there.

Peter

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