Optical Disc Drive Hardware Question related to CD Ripping

[Bespin1138]

Out of curiosity, I have a hardware related question when it comes to the types of optical disc drives used to rip CDs. My computer has two optical disc drives installed. One is an LG M-Disc Blu Ray optical disc drive and the other is an LG M-Disc DVD optical drive. Unfortunately, I do not have the model numbers on me at the moment. The reasons why I have two optical disc drives are so that I can speed up my ripping process because of the large number of CDs that I have and if one optical drive is having trouble ripping the CD, I can use the other optical drive to try and rip the CD. I have saved the CDs that could take days to do their bit-by-bit rip tasks for last. Due to my suspicion that the mentioned days-long ripping tasks may be draining my computers processing resources when I have both optical drives doing those tasks (since other applications that I run during the rips have been running slow), I have limited my ripping process to the one faster optical drive for the heavy rips on one CD before ripping the next CD. Occasionally, I have paused the heavy rips on the CDs, taken them out of the faster optical drive to quickly rip a new CD then put the other disc back in to resume the rip.

I have done some research, but I could not find a definitive answer. Some forums on the web that I looked up stated that when I rip a CD to FLAC, the sound quality on the FLAC file will be identical to that of the CD due to the optical drive using built-in data validations in addition to the ripping software if it has an accurate rip or other music accuracy verification feature. I am not very familiar with all of the technical specs of optical drive hardware, but that is my current understanding. My question is if I ripped the same CD album on my Blu Ray drive and then again on my DVD drive, using both the same dbpoweramp rip settings and other computer hardware (e.g. motherboard, CPU, hard drive, data cables, etc.) would the sound quality and properties of the audio files of that one album ripped from both the Blu Ray drive and DVD drive be identical or would the differences be so miniscule that I would not be able to tell the difference?

Thanks.

[garym]

Re: Optical Disc Drive Hardware Question related to CD Ripping

Yes, when you rip a CD from a disk and create FLAC files, you have a bitperfect copy of the CD. Almost any optical drive will do a good job of this. That's the true benefit of dbpoweramp as a ripper. It uses AccurateRip, and compares your rip with the rips of other people. If you get such a match (even with one other person other than yourself) this is the strongest evidence one can have that you have a bitperfect rip. Some rips won't have AccurateRip info in the database (CD too new or too obscure). In such cases, you'll get a SECURE rip, where dbpoweramp does multiple passes and checks that it gets matching information on each pass.

By the way, if you rip on your two computers, one with DVD and one with BluRay, the resulting digital FLAC files will be identical (NOT simply miniscule difference that you won't notice, but EXACTLY THE SAME SET OF ZEROS AND ONES (THE DIGITAL FLAC FILE).

[Bespin1138]

Re: Optical Disc Drive Hardware Question related to CD Ripping

Thank you for providing an answer and clearing up my confusion.

[Bespin1138]

Re: Optical Disc Drive Hardware Question related to CD Ripping

Thanks again for the previous information. This is just one other curiosity question related to this post that popped in my head based on the information you have provided. I understand now that I would get identical files when ripping from a CD to FLAC regardless of whether the optical drive is Blu Ray or DVD. Now if two computers were using different hardware setups like DVD vs Blu Ray for optical drive, Intel vs AMD for CPU, Seagate vs Western Digital for hard drive, etc., or even a Mac vs PC (If there is a Mac compatible version of dbpoweramp that is) and all the dbpoweramp rip settings were identical, would the FLAC files between these two machines still be identical. I assume they would because it is most likely that Accurate Rip would would be comparing rips from people using different computer setups (e.g. laptop vs desktop, AMD vs Intel, etc). But I just thought I would ask this question as well before I forget. Thanks again.

[garym]

Re: Optical Disc Drive Hardware Question related to CD Ripping

Thanks again for the previous information. This is just one other curiosity question related to this post that popped in my head based on the information you have provided. I understand now that I would get identical files when ripping from a CD to FLAC regardless of whether the optical drive is Blu Ray or DVD. Now if two computers were using different hardware setups like DVD vs Blu Ray for optical drive, Intel vs AMD for CPU, Seagate vs Western Digital for hard drive, etc., or even a Mac vs PC (If there is a Mac compatible version of dbpoweramp that is) and all the dbpoweramp rip settings were identical, would the FLAC files between these two machines still be identical. I assume they would because it is most likely that Accurate Rip would would be comparing rips from people using different computer setups (e.g. laptop vs desktop, AMD vs Intel, etc). But I just thought I would ask this question as well before I forget. Thanks again.

Yes. Identical if ripped to FLAC. Doesn't matter whether it is Windows (any version), Mac, etc. Doesn't matter what sort of computer hardware or type of drive. If these things changed the zeros and ones in digital information, your bank account balance would be different depending on which computer you were logged in on. And the sentences I'm typing in this email would say different things if the reader was using a Mac vs a PC.

[Bespin1138]

Re: Optical Disc Drive Hardware Question related to CD Ripping

Lol. Thanks for the info.