Preferred CD reader for CDs with minor scratches.

[Jackie Treehorn]

I plan to convert my CD collection to FLC but the first few discs I tried had a few tracks my Liteon 40X drive couldn't read. Is there a better CD reader or something I can do to prepare the CDs prior to converting them?

[schmidj]

Re: Preferred CD reader for CDs with minor scratches.

You really want several different drives by different manufacturers. As many of us will tell you from experience, you will find that there are CD's that will read perfectly in one drive but not another, and different drives. The firmware and mechanical tolerances vary. In general, but not always, I find the full size drives better performers than the compact (either external or laptop built in) ones.

I've had pretty good luck with the SH-224, Samsung and others same model, same drive reading scratched disks cleanly that other drives had rerips on, but when it can't read a disc it slows down to a stall. Other drives will do rerips on those discs which sound OK to the ear, sometimes. That drive, the last I looked, perhaps a year ago, was still for sale at Microcenter, under $15. It works fine with at least some SATA to USB converters/power supplies sitting loose outside your computer, desktop or laptop.

Also it goes without saying that cleaning the disks is always the first step after a bad rip. Fingerprints don't read well...

Others on this forum have had good luck salvaging old CD/DVD drives out of old defunct computers, usually for free.

A PS, visibly scratched CDs that won't read may sometimes be salvaged by buffing out the scratches. DIY, very time consuming. But many computer game stores have machines to do it for you. I've never tried. My usual next step after a failed rip is to go to EBay and try to find a cheap used copy to buy.

[Oggy]

Re: Preferred CD reader for CDs with minor scratches.

Hi Jackie,

Agree with everything that schmidj wrote.

You may want to read this thread: Best DVD drive for reading scratched discs - TEST RESULTS / ON-GOING
which probably shows there isn't one perfect drive for every scratch or imperfection.

The Plextor PX-230A drive that drcain mentions is highly desirable, and goes for serious money, whilst working best on old pre-Sata ide internal interface.

As my Lite-On drawer usually needs help opening, I tend to use three drives, the HP from the laptop, the Samsung SH224 and Pinoneer DVR-111DBK.

On certain CDs the laptop drive occasionally comes up with multi-thousand frame errors, which the other two different not have. The Samsung is very good on certain scratches, and the Pioneer copes with HTOA and more copy protection than the other two drives. BUT, no drive is consistently the best on all discs.

After occasionally cleaning a CD, or on a very scratched s/h disc the use of metal polish, centre to outer radially, one of the three drives will nearly always work. The percentage of discs with even a single frame with errors, is closer to 1rather than 2%.

If a track has more than 30 frames needing re-ripping, I tend to abort, try cleaning the CD, or a different drive. Others may have different working methods.

Good luck!

Oggy

[Oggy]

Re: Preferred CD reader for CDs with minor scratches.

Can this thread be moved to a more appropriate area please?

Will just add that a couple of friends who use the Lite-On ihas124-14 (F), still get good results, and that none of us use c2 pointers.

[Jackie Treehorn]

Re: Preferred CD reader for CDs with minor scratches.

Thanks for all your assistance. This does bring up another question- although I'm planning to use a Chromecast Audio to stream my music from a NAS drive to my home stereo system I'm thinking I should convert all my music to 24 Bit/192KHZ versus the 24 Bit/96KHZ that Chromecast supports since i can replace the Chromecast as soon as another inexpensive streaming device is introduced that supports the higher sample rate. If I'm doing these conversions in dbPoweramp should I be concerned that outputting them at the higher 192KHZ rate won't even play on Chromecast since it's 96KHZ max, or will it simply play it at the 96KHZ rate?

[mville]

Re: Preferred CD reader for CDs with minor scratches.

Why not leave the flacs as they are and stream at 16-bit, 44.1kHz?

[garym]

Re: Preferred CD reader for CDs with minor scratches.

Thanks for all your assistance. This does bring up another question- although I'm planning to use a Chromecast Audio to stream my music from a NAS drive to my home stereo system I'm thinking I should convert all my music to 24 Bit/192KHZ versus the 24 Bit/96KHZ that Chromecast supports since i can replace the Chromecast as soon as another inexpensive streaming device is introduced that supports the higher sample rate. If I'm doing these conversions in dbPoweramp should I be concerned that outputting them at the higher 192KHZ rate won't even play on Chromecast since it's 96KHZ max, or will it simply play it at the 96KHZ rate?

Do you understand that CD music is 16/44.1. Converting these files to 24/96 or anything other than 16/44.1 simply makes the file size much larger but does nothing to the audio data (essentially a bunch of zeros are added).

[Dat Ei]

Re: Preferred CD reader for CDs with minor scratches.

It is essential to understand what happens if you rip a CD. If you rip a CD you read the digital audio data which are stored on the CD. This can be compared with reading a word document which is stored on a harddisk. During this process no digitizing takes place. So the maximum you can get from your CD is the original audio data, which is stored with a sample rate of 44.1 kHz and a bit depth of 16 bit per channel.

If you transform those data into data with a higher sample rate or deeper bitdepth you generate data with null information (like Gary said) or you invent data which haven't exist before (fake data). So or so - this is no improvement of the sound quality.


Dat Ei

[Jackie Treehorn]

Re: Preferred CD reader for CDs with minor scratches.

Thanks for the info on the original CD 16/44.1 quality. I do understand the quality can't be improved from that original source so I'll begin converting in 16/44.1. I know the files will be smaller in size, should I also expect the conversion of the WAV to FLAC to take less time?

[garym]

Re: Preferred CD reader for CDs with minor scratches.

I know the files will be smaller in size, should I also expect the conversion of the WAV to FLAC to take less time?

Not likely less time. But conversion is so much faster than ripping a cd that it is not really important.

[Jackie Treehorn]

Re: Preferred CD reader for CDs with minor scratches.

I guess my last question will have to do with the music player/manager I pick to run this whole show once the FLAC files are all created. I'll have everything loaded onto a NAS drive hooked via ethernet to my Wifi router and I'll run everything off my iPad feeding the stereo system. I really want to force my guests to choose a full album instead of jumping around from track to track so I'd like to have a way to just offer in the player/manager app a copy of the album cover and basically offer PLAY without any choice of individual tracks. Does anyone have any suggestions about where I might start with this? I've been told in Apple apps I'd probably want to use Clementine or VLC and in Android maybe Google Music?

[Spoon]

Re: Preferred CD reader for CDs with minor scratches.

You need to try:

Asset UPnP on your NAS: https://www.dbpoweramp.com/asset-upnp-dlna.htm

Mobile Foobar 2000: http://mobile.foobar2000.com/

You can browse: Artist >> Album and play the tracks in the album, no program will hide tracks at an album level, as people like to skip and browse what is in the album.