> If you really are going for the "best sound possible", > you should re-rip your collection using EAC -> FLAC.
I've never seen test results showing that iTunes produced different bit streams (in WAV files) for CDs than EAC did. ErikM, I'd suggest that you do your own comparison on a few CDs before you plunge in. > EAC is the "paranoid" ripper ... it endeavors to make a > bit-perfect copy, even if it takes hours to burn a single disk. > (That's an extreme case of a damaged disk and a sub-par cd rom > drive) But in the end, you'll end up with a file that is a > perfect archival copy of your original source. I think that jeffluckett meant "rip" rather than "burn". And I think that this claim is too broad. Some damaged CDs are missing enough data to defeat the error correction information on the disk. In the damaged spots, the CD drive is never reading actual data. I have two kinds of damaged CDs where the metal (or dye for a CD-R disk) has been corroded away: - Bronzed disks. The ink used on the label side passed through the polycarbonate and attacked the metal. Some CD pressing plants in Europe produced CDs that developed the bronze color and eventually became unreadable. The company that ran the CD pressing plants offered replacements for some years. I got all of the affected classical CDs replaced but I missed some jazz CDs. I tried ripping one of those CDs tonight. - Glued on CD-R labels. I bought some limited production CD-Rs a year or two ago. This summer when I ripped some of those Cds, I got errors. The vendor replaced the disks. EAC didn't provide any magic bullet for either of these cases. I tried. On some other damaged disks, EAC gets sync errors and is never able to read some tracks with confidence. When EAC takes hours to rip a disk, it is re-reading portions of the disk where the first two reads did not produce the same results. If it gets a certain level of agreement between the data returned by different reads, it accepts the data produced by some majority of reads as correct. If EAC can't find agreement after 16 re-reads, I won't have much confidence in a agreement reached after 200 re-reads. Bill -- Listener ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Listener's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2508 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=28829 _______________________________________________ ripping mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/ripping
