If I may weigh in with my experiences on Linux and cdparanoia. As I understand it a lot of the best rippers on Mac and PC are based ultimately on what was cdparanoia.
The ripper I use is kaudiocreator which in turns uses cdparanoia. Using this very popular ripping engine I get identical rips on either of my machines which each have different CD/DVD ROM brands in them. The only difference is the drive "offset" which is a variable that is different for each drive. It determines when a track begins and ends. Hence different drives might begin a track a fraction of a second sooner or later depending on the offset. I believe EAC on PC fixes this. Also, if you know your drive offset you can run cdparanoia with the offset parameter to the same effect. (Day to day I don't bother with offsets myself, I'm just after sound quality.) The point is, supplying the offsets for my drives just for a test, with cdparanoia I get identical rips on my disparate machines/drives. It is important to note that it is not just the size in bytes of the ripped WAV file that is significant. It is the contents of those bytes. You need to do a checksum on the contents. On Unix this is done with the cksum command. I used this to confirm my rips were identical. The fact is, cdparanoia-based ripping is very reliable. The "reading off the disc part" is an engineering problem that has been solved. Everything that is wrong with digital audio these days - which apparently is still a lot - happens after the reading off the disc. Darren -- darrenyeats ------------------------------------------------------------------------ darrenyeats's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=10799 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=36362 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
