Repeatability

[dragonne]

I am evaluating dbPowerAmp to use in reconverting my CD collection which has more than 1,000 CDs. Many of which are very old and thus probably not in AccurateRip. I plan on ripping them twice, on different machine and then do a binary compare to make sure that I have a good copy. Binary repeatability is essential.

When I do not save tags, this works ok for .wav and .flac. And I get the same .wav files as with EAC. However, when I save tags there are several problems. First, the exact set of tags that I select for saving is NOT what is saved. For example if I choose album artist and genre and nothing else that is what I should get. That is not true. Second, if I turn on tag saving, but turn off ALL tags I should not get ANY tags saved - but have and empty INFO area. dbPowerAmp forces a bunch of tag settings back on. Second, different machines are saving the tags in different orders rather than in a canonical order (such as alphabetically or any other fixed order) and that prevents binary comparision. Also, the tag display apparently does not display ALL tags saved in the files.

Finally, lame has a problem with repeatabiltiy across different machines when using assembly (I have reported this as a bug), so I need to use non-standard lame options. I want to use the option set

-q 0 -V 0 -b 64 -B 320 -t --noasm mmx --noasm 3dnow --noasm sse

which I cannot find a way to configure. Also, dbPowerAmp appears to be using obsolete lame options in any case. The strength of dbPowerAmp is supposed to be working with tags and automatic conversions. However, if I cannot control the tags and conversion flags I possibly would do as well using EAC, flac, lame and other utilities. I would rather not do that though. It seems like dbPowerAmp is so close to what I need that I can taste it.

Is there any way around these problems?

Thank you,

Michael Lee Finney

[Spoon]

Re: Repeatability

Wave LIST tags are limited in what tags they can support, that is why dBpoweramp write LIST and id3 tags to wave, but not all applications can read.

[dragonne]

Re: Repeatability

I'm sorry, Spoon. That answer has no relationship with what I asked.

I am asking about ripping the same CD on different machines using identical options and getting bit identical results when including tags. I get bit identical results when NOT including tags.

1. The tags for the .wav file are not written in the same order which prevents repeatabiltiy. And then when the .flac is created the difference in the .wav file propagates to the .flac file so it too is not identical.

2. dbPowerAmp is not honoring my selection of tags to be written. It is writing tags that I disabled.

3. Due to a lame bug, I need different lame options. I do not see how to do that.

Thank you.


Michael Lee Finney

[Spoon]

Re: Repeatability

Sorry got the wrong end of the stick. Doing MD5 on audio tracks is not the right way to go about it, instead use the [Calculate Audio CRC] from the utility section of Codec Central.

If you install R14.2 (from the beta section of this forum) there should be no issues with disabling tags.

To use your own Lame CLI you have to install the CLI Encoder codec.