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Hello, I'm just new on using the trial version of dbpoweramp and would like to rip my CDs to FLAC for Roon. However, I came up with the problem on some CDs that needs to re-rip many frames and it takes a very long time to complete. The CD itself is no problem on playing by the CD player or USB drive on the computer. Am I set something wrong or too high on the Secure Ripping Method? Or I need to disable the Ultra Secure function or change to Burst Ripping Method to avoid this problem? Thanks in advance for your assistance.
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Re: Re-Rip Frames Problem
CD players often have built in error "interpolation" routines that essentially skip over errors, often without the listener noticing. But in ripping CDs with a secure ripper like dbpa, such errors are not ignored, and frames are re-read to try to get a bit perfect rip.
I've ripped about 5,000 CDs with dbpa, using ultra-secure. Some CDs rip very fast, particularly if there is an AccurateRip match in the database. Others take maybe 5 to 8 minutes. Some with lots of frame re-reads could take 30 minutes (or more). For these more troublesome disks, you can sometimes speed things up by cleaning the CD and/or trying a different optical drive. I have some CDs that get all sorts of errors on one drive but rips easily on a different drive. And these are all cheap, normal drives, mostly salvaged from old computers.
Ultimately, you want bit perfect rips where possible, and taking a little longer to rip may be the price you pay. But you only have to do this once. Good luck. -
Re: Re-Rip Frames Problem
Hi garym,
Thank you so much for your detailed explanation and help. It's worthwhile to pay the price for the bit perfect rips and glad to purchase dbpa after trial.
By the way, will the sound be better if I set the Lossless Encoding to "Uncopressed"? I'm now using the MBL N31 Module to play the FLAC files.
Thanks and have a nice day.
AmosComment
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Re: Re-Rip Frames Problem
No, you're confusing "compressed" from a lossy point of view (mp3 and m4a) to file size compression in a LOSSLESS file (like FLAC). All FLAC files are LOSSLESS, bitperfect copies of the CD. Compression for FLAC files is just file size. When the file is decoded and played it is identical to CD regardless of the compression level. I suggest you use compression of "8" to get the smallest file size. When encoding a FLAC file (creating it), it does take a tiny bit longer to encode (which you'll only do once), but decoding the file for playback, which happens every time you play is essentially the same time used whether uncompressed or compressed at an '8'. Bottom line: a FLAC file is lossless, and lossless = lossless.
p.s. there are some folks that (mistakenly) believe that a WAV file sounds better than a FLAC file. This is wrong and there is lots of objective evidence to support that this is wrong. But audiophile myths live on in the internet.Comment
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Re: Re-Rip Frames Problem
Another way to think of lossless file formats like FLAC, ALAC etc. is the process of converting a .wav file to a smaller lossless file is essentially the same process when you "zip" a document file or a piece of software. It looks for let us say, a string of 50 "zero"'s in a row and instead of storing those 50 zeros, it stores a code that tells the playing codec to replace the code with the 50 zeros. Right there you replaced 50 samples with possibly a 10 character code, saving 40 samples worth of data. Do that over and over, and the filesize savings can be considerable, whether it is a document you are zipping or a recording you are saving as FLAC. When you unzip your document, it is all there, letter perfect. When you play the FLAC file the codec makes bit perfect audio.
By the way, an "uncompressed" FLAC file is basically the original .wav file with some extra code to make it appear to be FLAC. And as Gary explained, using higher number versions of FLAC encoding just tells the encoding codec to look for more ways of saving bits by (and this is a lousy example but it shows the principle) not only looking at strings of zeros to replace with a code, but possibly strings of alternating zeros and ones to replace with a different code. It takes slightly longer to encode, the resulting file is a little smaller, but it decodes into the original just the same. And the software is written to make all the heavy hitting in the encoding, and keeping the decoding very simple, no matter how much data compression is done.
This is very different from mp3, m4a, etc, which have a different type of "compression". Those files compress the filesize by leaving out parts of the actual audio that (most) people cannot hear, due to the way the human ear and the brain perceive audio, speech or music. This is called perceptual encoding. As you increase the amount of perceptual encoding, you leave more of the original out. The file (or stream) gets smaller, sometimes markedly smaller. At some point, you become more likely to notice the reproduced audio doesn't sound as good as the original. But that depends on knowing what the original sounds like and the conditions under what you are listening. You probably will think that some heavily perceptually compressed piece of music may sound fine in your noisy car listening on the highway, but playing the same file in your home listening space, the artifacts of the perceptual compression may be very obvious. However another file of the same source using less "aggressive" perceptual encoding, usually a larger file or higher bitrate stream, will be, to most people, indistinguishable from the .wav or FLAC original.
There is a place for perceptually compressed audio, where smaller filesize or streaming bitrate is more important than audio quality. People listened to scratchy records and cassettes with wow and flutter and limited frequency response, because it was the only thing available or because it was convenient, and were happy enough with it to purchase many millions of copies each year. I have about 125,000 tracks of music in my collection. Several terabytes of FLAC files on my home server, mostly bit-perfect copies of CDs or equivalent quality copies of other non-digital media or my live recordings. I have some mp3's there when nothing else was available. But I do most of my listening in my car while driving. I don't have space or the dollars for a giant server in my car. I have a one terabyte micro SD card in my phone with all my music encoded as reasonable quality m4a files, and the card is only a little over half full. Convenient and practical with a decent quality to play on my car "infotainment" system (radio), or on headphones elsewhere. A minor compromise to make portable listening possible.
But my master files are not (except when nothing else is reasonably available) perceptually encoded, they are lossless. Why? in addition to getting better quality reproduction over the home playback systems, I'm future proofing. If in a few years there is a better codec than the m4a, that will have better quality in let us say, half the storage space, I'll have the high quality "bit perfect" originals to be able to make a copy encoded with that new codec. Otherwise, I'd have to rip those thousands of CDs all over.
I know there is a lot to digest here, and you may have further questions, but it is probably worth your while to understand why many of us make the decisions we do concerning our music.
There is an additional reason to save your music as FLAC and not as .wav, and that has to do with metadata. Having good, accurate, retrievable metadata is vital if you want to be able to search your collection for particular attributes, a particular genre, all the songs by a particular artist including those on compilation albums, songs from a particular date range, etc. And there is no real standard for encoding the metadata into .wav files. They were standardized by Microsoft before people realized the need for metadata. You can add the metadata to your .wav files, but it is a crap-shot whether your player will be able to read it, as there is no one way to encode it. But FLAC was developed with metadata very much in mind. Any properly written software can recover the metadata from any properly encoded FLAC file, there is a standard.Comment
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