Question about how CD Ripper works.

[eboyer93]

When I choose to rip to flac does it rip to wav then convert to flac?

[bhoar]

Re: Question about how CD Ripper works.

When I choose to rip to flac does it rip to wav then convert to flac?

As a summary, I give two answers:

1. Technically, no.
2. If it did rip to WAV first then convert to FLAC, the result will be the same.

A more in-depth answer would be:

During the rip, the raw digital audio data is extracted. If it were saved to a WAV file, a small header would be written and this extracted raw audio data would be written to the WAV file.

When dbpa is extracting to FLAC, in to save on disk IO and time the raw audio data is piped* to the FLAC encoder directly in memory, instead of being written to a WAV file and then read back by the FLAC encoder file-IO. The information that would have gone into the WAV file header is passed similarly.

In any case, the result is the same, except faster. No quality loss. And as a bonus: at lower FLAC compression levels and/or using older ATA drives, it may actually be faster to rip to FLAC than to rip to WAV, since less data will be written to disk.

-brendan

* well, technically "pipe" may be the wrong term here, but that's beside the point.