What's The Purpose of Accuraterip

[mrcd]

Someone asked this on a blog...

What's the purpose of Accuraterip? What difference does it make whether a CD I own is error free or not? What difference does it make if a CD I own and have ripped matches with someone else rip? Do not CD's with errors sound the same with those that don't? If no metadata is collected from the CD how do you know what CD has been ripped? Does every single track from every CD have a unique code or number?

Seems like the creator of AR could better answer it..

[garym]

SDo not CD's with errors sound the same with those that don't?

huh? Of course it depends on the nature of the error, but I've had CDs ripped with errors that sounded terrible with pops, skips, dropouts, etc. It is not subtle. No offense, but if a person on some blog doesn't understand the purpose of ACCURATERIP, they're certainly ignorant of how digital music works. But the good news is that there is already info available on the internet re: ACCURATERIP to educate the person and reduce their ignorance on this topic. We all had to start somewhere. ;-)

[mville]

What's the purpose of Accuraterip?

To get bit perfect, error free rips of an Audio CD.

What difference does it make whether a CD I own is error free or not?

With CD players, error correction tries to repair any errors but is not always successful, due to the extent of these errors. Some errors result in the CD not playing back at all, some errors result in the CD skipping during playback, some errors are audible pops/glitches, some errors are not audible at all.

With CD/DVD drives, my aim is to get bit perfect, error free rips of my CDs to play the audio files in my software player. AccurateRip helps achieve this, or at least informs me of potential problems. If the rip has errors, it may be audible and that matters to me.

What difference does it make if a CD I own and have ripped matches with someone else rip?

The probability of a bit perfect, error free rip increases with more matches.

[garym]

Let's say there are 8 matches in ACCURATERIP. This is equivalent to having 8 different copies of the CD, ripping it on 8 different computers (using 8 different drives), and yet having the exact same bitperfect digital copy of the music. This is very different from ripping the SAME CD multiple times on one's own computer and getting matching data. There could be consistent errors getting through because of the CD drive in the ripping computer, the CD itself, etc. So the real beauty of ACCURATERIP in ripping is that you're able to be almost infinitely more confident that your rip of a CD is in fact a bit perfect copy.

p.s. Note that even without ACCURATERIP, and using a nonsecure ripper that doesn't even check for errors (a basic itunes rip for example), one is very likely to get a bit perfect rip. That's because most of the time, for most rips, all this doesn't matter. But for those of us that care, we want to make sure that we get good rips for all our rips, not just 98% of our rips. The 2% error rate matters to us.