On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 02:12:48PM -0700, Lan Barnes wrote:
The fact that cdparanoia has paranoia makes me wonder how necessary it is. While the time waiting for one's tracks to rip is slow, the time ripping bad tracks quickly is wasted. and one wouldn't know without trying them all.
When cdrom drives first came out (think 1X), they basically were audio CD players with some extra hardware processing the output. Each audio frame contains an additional layer of ECC and includes the sector address, when read as data. But, to read the direct audio, the addressing information doesn't come through. Issuing the command to read raw audio would return audio data starting approximately where requested, but it wasn't precise. Programs like cparanoia were needed to recombine the audio data (basically doing overlapping reads and figuring out what the overlap was). It's been completely unnecessary for about 10 years now. Any drive that reads at a higher speed isn't just a modified audio player, and will have accurate addressing. Most now use that addressing information to read audio data precisely. If you rip with cdparanoia -Z it will either work fine, or you'll get massive amounts of skipping. It is unfortunately still necessary, because there apparently are still plenty of cdrom drives with broken firmware. The cdparanoia faq gives some useful information <http://xiph.org/paranoia/faq.html>, especially why getting the accurate positioning is hard for the drive to do. David -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
