Recommended Ultra Secure Ripping Settings?

[Phil Friel]

Hi,

I'm new around here, having recently registered dBpowerAmp Reference R12.

My main objective is to get the highest quality rips, even from CDs with scratches. From the options I have Ultra Secure selected in the Secure Ripping section. So far so good.

I have a question to ask about the Ultra Secure settings:

Do I enable Interpolate Unrecoverable Frames and Vary Drive Speed Each Pass? Or do I leave them unchecked? Will doing either adversely affect the quality of my rips?

Any and all help/suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

Phil

[Spoon]

Re: Recommended Ultra Secure Ripping Settings?

What is your drive?

I generally have 2 profiles a quick secure mode which relies on AccurateRip, and a more indepth error recovery mode with ultra passes for singled out difficult cds.

[Phil Friel]

Re: Recommended Ultra Secure Ripping Settings?

What is your drive?

I generally have 2 profiles a quick secure mode which relies on AccurateRip, and a more indepth error recovery mode with ultra passes for singled out difficult cds.

Hi Spoon, nice to be here, at last (remember me from the HydrogenAudio Forums?).

I have two drives, both LG. The one I most often use for ripping is the HL-DT-ST CD-RW GCE-8400B. The other is a HL-DT-ST DVD ROM GDR-8161B.

With these two drives, should I have the "Interpolate Unrecoverable Frames" and "Vary Drive Speed Each Pass" options selected (or unselected) in the Ultra Secure ripping options?

Do you think it could help doing different passes on both drives? Maybe one drive might get a more secure reading on a problematic track than the other one did? Would overheating on the drive adversely influence the rips? I could adopt a policy of a 15/20/30 minute break between each CD, to let the drive cool down (how long would you recommend?). The Ultra Secure ripping does make them overheat quite a bit.

I have lots of old disks with scratches. And, as my collection of CDs is so big, I intend to rip each CD only once, and do it properly first time. So I'd like to have the Ultra Secure settings at their highest/most optimal level before I start.

The way I plan to work for each CD (once I find out what I need to know about the Interpolate Unrecoverable Frames and Vary Drive Speed options) is:

Do a first pass on the CD-RW drive

All tracks with a successful AccurateRip symbol do not need to be ripped again
On CDs not present in the AccurateRip database (quite a few), all tracks with a "secure with a tick" symbol do not need to be ripped again

Select all tracks with a "secure with an i" symbol and all tracks with an "inaccurate" symbol (luckily none of those yet), and do several more passes, this time on both the CD-RW and DVD-ROM drive, in the hope that some of the tracks get more secure rips.

After all that, with CDs containing inaccurate or unrecoverable tracks, try to clean/fix up the CDs as much as possible (what do you recommend?) and try again on the dodgy tracks.

If all of this fails, give up and (if necessary) buy the CD again. :cry: :cry:

What do you think of this approach? Good, anal-retentive/overkill, or just stupid? I'm a newbie at this, and would appreciate all advice on how to get it right straight from the beginning. Ripping my collection a second time would not be an attractive option. The first time will take months (or maybe years), so I'd have no wish to repeat the process.

Phil

[Spoon]

Re: Recommended Ultra Secure Ripping Settings?

Do your drives support c2 error pointers?

[Phil Friel]

Re: Recommended Ultra Secure Ripping Settings?

Do your drives support c2 error pointers?

Yes. Both drives support C2 pointers.

[Spoon]

Re: Recommended Ultra Secure Ripping Settings?

I would not use interpolation, or the vary drive speed.

[Phil Friel]

Re: Recommended Ultra Secure Ripping Settings?

I would not use interpolation, or the vary drive speed.

Thanks for that info. This saves a lot of unnecessary work.

I've been duplicating interpolated/non-interpolated passes, on both drives, and making multiple passes on the few tracks that did not come up as AccurateRip (if in the database) or Secure (if not in the database).

Luckily it's only been on a couple of CDs so far, 'cos it's taken hours, but I've finally got AccurateRip/Secure rips for all tracks, on both drives, and in both interpolated and non-interpolated form. A lot of patience is needed for those stubborn tracks that require multiple passes.

Now that I can stop doing the interpolated passes, my ripping time will be cut in half. I can also free up some disk space by deleting the duplicate interpolated tracks.

[Phil Friel]

Re: Recommended Ultra Secure Ripping Settings?

Spoon,

Just out of curiosity, does using interpolation interfere/mess with the C2 pointers? I'd like to learn more about this sorta thing.

[Spoon]

Re: Recommended Ultra Secure Ripping Settings?

No

[RipTheWorld]

Re: Recommended Ultra Secure Ripping Settings?

I understand the order of rip quality goes as such:
Accurate Rip
Secure Rip
Inaccurate

So would the following be true:

Accurate Rip - Has matched in the Accurate Rip database so assuming 3 or more matches it is statistically impossible for it to be inaccurate

Secure Rip - The track is deemed to have been ripped perfectly, but has either not matched to the accurate rip database or isn't in the database. It is still essentially a perfect copy (or extremely close to perfect).

Inaccurate - Is not a good copy.

The issue I have is finding out how inaccurate a particular rip is. A particular track may not have ripped perfectly, but it still may be of a quality where you would rather have it than not. Is there a way to automatically remove tracks that are below a certain level. And at what level do noticeable errors such as pops and clicks occur?

Are there any settings that I may have missed that would allow me to do this?

Let me know if I'm being a total idiot and have missed something pretty obvious.

[EliC]

Re: Recommended Ultra Secure Ripping Settings?

Secure Rip - The track is deemed to have been ripped perfectly, but has either not matched to the accurate rip database or isn't in the database. It is still essentially a perfect copy (or extremely close to perfect).

The only time I really do not trust this is if the rest of the disc is listed as accurate with AR>1. I wish spoon would add a bit of extra power in the decision making tree. While accuraterip is done on a track basis, it does not make any sense that every other track on a CD would have an AR confidence of 5 and one track would be secure. Note, I have never had this problem with dbpoweramp, but have with EAC.

[bhoar]

Re: Recommended Ultra Secure Ripping Settings?

The only time I really do not trust this is if the rest of the disc is listed as accurate with AR>1. I wish spoon would add a bit of extra power in the decision making tree. While accuraterip is done on a track basis, it does not make any sense that every other track on a CD would have an AR confidence of 5 and one track would be secure. Note, I have never had this problem with dbpoweramp, but have with EAC.

A possible additional factor would be that you have either configured the cd ripper with incorrect secure-related settings for your drive (fua, cache size, c2 support) or the drive's implementation of these is not reliable and yet you turned on the features (perhaps the device passed the feature tests?). That could potentially result in a mix of AR and "Secure" results, when really the "secure" results were incorrect.

(is that a good description of the issue, spoon?)

-brendan

[Spoon]

Re: Recommended Ultra Secure Ripping Settings?

A track can be labelled as secure and still have errors, depends on drive (c2 helps reduce this), it is called a consistant error, which do happen.

>The issue I have is finding out how inaccurate a particular rip is. ....And at what
> level do noticeable errors such as pops and clicks occur?

Many drives will interpolate errors, so if there was an error it is silenced out, you will never hear a pop, but you might hear silence on a badly damged cd.

If you enable c2, that will catch most errors, a badly damaged cd is going to take a long time to rip (in comparison to a lightly damged cd), that would be the basis for determining quality.

[EliC]

Re: Recommended Ultra Secure Ripping Settings?

A possible additional factor would be that you have either configured the cd ripper with incorrect secure-related settings for your drive (fua, cache size, c2 support) or the drive's implementation of these is not reliable and yet you turned on the features (perhaps the device passed the feature tests?). That could potentially result in a mix of AR and "Secure" results, when really the "secure" results were incorrect.

-brendan

Either way, if 9/10 songs match AR with 5+ matches, and 1 song is listed as secure, I seriously doubt that song is secure, and would like to have the option to flag it that way, especially when using the batch ripper and not watching every rip myself.

[bhoar]

Re: Recommended Ultra Secure Ripping Settings?

Either way, if 9/10 songs match AR with 5+ matches, and 1 song is listed as secure, I seriously doubt that song is secure, and would like to have the option to flag it that way, especially when using the batch ripper and not watching every rip myself.

If the AR matches on the other songs are over 2, I agree.

If the AR matches on the other songs are only 1 (maybe even 2, if the original computer equipment submitted it twice, say after a window reinstall) and one track is listed as secure, then the original submitter might have a badly configured cd ripper and told it to trust dodgy equipment more than the operator should have. In which case, maybe your track was actually accurate...

Can something like the above happen?

-brendan