Best settings for lossless rips?

[Decibel2015]

I haven't yet started ripping any CDs but I did open the app for a quick look at it. It's the first such application
that I've used.

Firstly, I see that the FLAC encoding has "Lossless 5" as the default.

Since FLAC is meant to be lossless, I'm not sure why there are degrees of "lossless" in this case.

Just looking for advice on what particular setting I should set my rips for. Yes, I want lossless rips, but if two settings
have the same audio quality but one setting uses a lot more of my hard drive space, well, you'd want to go with the
setting that uses the less space for the sound quality, right?

Also, I see under "Options" at the top of the dialogue box concerning "Ripping method". Again, which is the best option
to choose and why that over other choices?

[BrodyBoy]

It's not degrees of lossless, it's degrees of compression. All FLAC files contain identical audio data, but if you apply higher compression, the encoder will take more processing time to produce slightly smaller files. The default "5" setting is just a trade-off between compression and encoding speed....changing it might change the file size a little, if that matters to you, but it doesn't change the quality of the rip at all.

If space is a serious consideration for you, I'd recommend you rip one of your CDs at the default, check the file sizes, then rip again at higher compression and decide whether the space savings are worth the longer ripping time.

The best ripping method in most cases is "Secure," as it recovers errors and ensures accurate rips on most commercial CDs. "Burst" is faster, but doesn't have error recovery, while "Defective by Design" is mostly for non-standard or problem CDs that can't seem to rip successfully with secure ripping. You can read more about the specific settings for Secure ripping HERE.

[naimconvert]

I have also just started ripping my CD collection and was confused by the different FLAC Lossless settings so I went for Lossless Uncompressed. Are you saying at default 5 setting I will not be able to tell the difference is sound quality but will save space on my NAS?

[Dat Ei]

Hey naimconvert,

the compression in the flac format is like the compression in zip - it is absolut lossless. It is just a question of disk space and the cpu time you need to encode and decode the compressed data. The uncompressed data are still the same, no matter what Level of lossless flac compression you choose.


Dat Ei

[BrodyBoy]

I have also just started ripping my CD collection and was confused by the different FLAC Lossless settings so I went for Lossless Uncompressed. Are you saying at default 5 setting I will not be able to tell the difference is sound quality but will save space on my NAS?

Precisely.

[garym]

Precisely.

...and not only will you "not be able to tell the difference in sound quality", THERE WILL BE ZERO DIFFERENCE IN SOUND QUALITY BECAUSE THE FILE BEING PLAYED BY YOUR PLAYER IS BITPERFECT NO MATTER WHAT COMPRESSION LEVEL IS USED.

[Spoon]

People claim to be able to hear a difference between compressed and uncompressed because the player is doing the uncompressing and working harder.

[garym]

People claim to be able to hear a difference between compressed and uncompressed because the player is doing the uncompressing and working harder.

respectfully, "people claim" is the key phrase here. And is quite different from "people document with rigorous testing". There is a lot of FUD in the audiophile world. I suppose at least using uncompressed FLAC is better than WAV and satisfies the phobia that some have regarding even lossless compression.

[BrodyBoy]

respectfully, "people claim" is the key phrase here. And is quite different from "people document with rigorous testing". There is a lot of FUD in the audiophile world. I suppose at least using uncompressed FLAC is better than WAV and satisfies the phobia that some have regarding even lossless compression.

Seriously! It's amazing the stuff people are willing to believe. (There are people who think the coating on the metal prongs on the power cord on their amplifier impacts the "spatial dimensions" of the music they hear.....) It's very telling that you virtually never see true double blind testing of these things that people claim they hear.

The notion that a player works harder because a decoder decompresses data before feeding it into a DAC....at the exact same data rate, mind you, regardless of compression....is somewhat akin to expecting a document that was opened from a zip file to be a little bit blurrier than one that came straight from the word processor.

[garym]

I very much enjoy reading the testing done by archimago, a forum member at the squeezebox forums (among others). He does very nice work. One has to click on the years/months to see all the various extensive testing he's done on almost all things digital.

http://archimago.blogspot.com/search...max-results=10

[Decibel2015]

It's not degrees of lossless, it's degrees of compression. All FLAC files contain identical audio data, but if you apply higher compression, the encoder
will take more processing time to produce slightly smaller files. The default "5" setting is just a trade-off between compression and encoding speed....changing it might change
the file size a little, if that matters to you, but it doesn't change the quality of the rip at all.

If space is a serious consideration for you, I'd recommend you rip one of your CDs at the default, check the file sizes, then rip again at higher compression and decide whether
the space savings are worth the longer ripping time.

The best ripping method in most cases is "Secure," as it recovers errors and ensures accurate rips on most commercial CDs. "Burst" is faster, but doesn't have error recovery,
while "Defective by Design" is mostly for non-standard or problem CDs that can't seem to rip successfully with secure ripping. You can read more about the specific settings for
Secure ripping HERE.

Thanks for that. I've set my option to "Secure" as per your advice. All the options in "Accurate-rip" are ticked by default, it seems. Any other settings in there which I should
have as default? re "Defective by design" setting...what do you mean by "non-standard" CDs? By "problem CDs" I assume you mean audio CDs which may be in less than pristine
condition and so are buggy in some way, play-wise?

That leaves me with what option to go for in the Encoding section. Ok, so ALL options are lossless. Are there practical reasons to choose one option over another, apart from storage
space? E.g. would an uncompressed library pose difficulties for lower specced computers or something? If not, what exactly is the problem (if there is one?). If you want to imagine that
you're going to be an audiophile ripper, what setting would you choose? What would be the difference between the default setting's ripping time vs uncompressed? Is there a consensus
on what the default should be? What is it?

[Decibel2015]

I very much enjoy reading the testing done by archimago, a forum member at the squeezebox forums (among others). He does very nice work.
One has to click on the years/months to see all the various extensive testing he's done on almost all things digital.

http://archimago.blogspot.com/search...max-results=10

I glanced at your link, it seems similar to something that I found a year or two (or three back) which may also interest you:

https://www.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

Some interesting comments from that include:

"there is no point to distributing music in 24-bit/192kHz format. Its playback fidelity is slightly inferior to 16/44.1 or 16/48, and it takes up 6 times the space".

The author also points out that such high performance settings are really only relevant at the engineering stage of the recording but can be dumped when the
final mix is in.

I have read some hifi magazines where you get people writing letters and saying that they are scientists and that such and such improves the sound quality of
playback. Usually the response is that that there is no science to back up the claim but the counter is that maybe we just haven't devised a suitable test to
measure these perceived differences in quality.

[schmidj]

For playback from a "fixed" system, where storage shouldn't be a problem (as opposed to a phone or portable device) I'd want a lossless compression, the playback audio will be as good as the original source file. I'd stay away from .WAV or AIFF as neither are standardized for metadata, and you will discover sooner or later that the metadata is as important, maybe more important than the audio quality.

I personally use FLAC, if I was an Apple devotee, ALAC might be a better choice. Both are lossless. You do need to see what your playback device (renderer) will work with. WMA won't play FLAC without a third party codec, obtaining that can be problematical now, as most of the codec sites seem to package them with malware, or at least spyware. There are other issues with WMA also. Itunes also has its issues, and the default settings can make a mess of your file system and tags. There are several decent versions of playback software/renderers/controllers out there, including Foobar 2000, Media Monkey, Kinsky and even VLC Media Player. What is your playback system?

You also have to think about how you want to organize the music files and folders, a separate issue from tagging them. Getting that set up the way you want particularly for compilations, multi-disc sets and Classical collections can take some trial and error. Depending on your storage system, you may have issues with file names that are too long for your software/operating system. I'd rip a number of albums you listen to often, then stop and use them, before doing hundreds or thousands of CD's and then doing it a second time because of organizational problems. Been there, done that.

There are a lot of issues in doing this, I've been at it several years and am still discovering things. In the end, it should give you a very high quality and flexible playback system.

For portable devices with limited storage, you will have to use lossy compression, unless you have a very small library. How lossy depends on a tradeoff between how much audio you want to store and how lossy it gets before you find i
listening objectionable. Some of the newer codecs such as m4a (AAC) can compress to smaller file sizes with less noticeable artifacts than older codecs like mp3. I have two sets of files of my rips, FLAC for home and moderately high quality m4a for my portable devices. Can I hear the difference, usually no, but sometimes very much.

Defective by design is an attempt at allowing rips of some copy protected or other non-standard discs, not damaged discs. As you may know, burst ripping just encodes whatever it rips from the disc with no error checking/correction above that which the drive does by itself. If you can't get a rip at all using secure rip, try burst and listen to the result. If you are lucky, the errors won't be audible. Otherwise, get another copy of the CD. You can try Defective By Design, particularly if the CD plays OK in a portable player but not in a computer, but I've only run into a couple that played with that setting out of a couple thousand CD's I've ripped.

I have my secure ripping set with Enable Ultra Secure Ripping, minimum passes 1, maximum passes 4, end after 2 clean passes, vary drive speed checked. I have maximum re-reads as 100 which is probably high. If set too high, you may get random "good" reads which really aren't, I've seen that happen fairly often. I'm suspicious of anything that requires re-rips, even if the result is "secure" I try cleaning the CD and ripping again, often with a different make CD drive, if still bad, I listen to the recovered audio to see if it sounds OK to me. It usually sounds OK.

This may take a while to digest, dBPoweramp is very powerful software, IMO, the best available, but there is a steep learning curve because there are so many issues involved. Stick with it, it will all be worthwhile in the end.

[BrodyBoy]

Thanks for that. I've set my option to "Secure" as per your advice. All the options in "Accurate-rip" are ticked by default, it seems. Any other settings in there which I should have as default? re "Defective by design" setting...what do you mean by "non-standard" CDs? By "problem CDs" I assume you mean audio CDs which may be in less than pristine
condition and so are buggy in some way, play-wise?

Defective by design is one of those things you only monkey with when nothing else works. It may become necessary for messed up CDs, ones with troublesome copy-protection, things like that.

That leaves me with what option to go for in the Encoding section. Ok, so ALL options are lossless. Are there practical reasons to choose one option over another, apart from storage
space? E.g. would an uncompressed library pose difficulties for lower specced computers or something? If not, what exactly is the problem (if there is one?). If you want to imagine that
you're going to be an audiophile ripper, what setting would you choose? What would be the difference between the default setting's ripping time vs uncompressed? Is there a consensus
on what the default should be? What is it?

The only considerations when choosing a lossless compression level are (1) processing time, and (2) file size. There is no "audio" or "audiophile" consideration, as we are talking about the exact same, perfectly identical audio data.

Here's an analogy, with something that may be more familiar: I don't know if you ever use file compression programs to archive stuff on your computer....I have and use both 7zip and WinRar. So let's say I want to archive of all my AmEx statements from last year. I select all twelve .pdfs, then I use one of those programs to put them into a compressed package (that I'll file away on some backup drive somewhere and never look at again! ) These programs have settings that allow me to prioritize/balance between speed and file size.....on the one end, the slowest setting makes the most compact file but it takes noticeably longer to do it, and at the other end, the fastest setting is very speedy, but the file it creates is definitely larger. But the point is, if I ever need to open up the .zip or .rar package and access those files, the .pdfs are identical to the originals. They're not less clear, less sharp, less complete, they didn't drop a word here and there. They are the exact same files as the original .pdfs, irrespective of which speed vs file size settings I used when I archived them.

This is the nature of lossless compression, for both data files and music files. Nothing is lost in compression. Any player that plays .flac has an decoder that knows how to open the .flac file and feed the audio bitstream into its digital-to-audio converter for playback. The package it arrived in is irrelevant. (This is also why all lossless codecs have the same audio quality....once the package is opened, the audio bits fed into the DAC are indistinguishable from the original CD.)

I don't have to imagine....I do consider myself an "audiophile ripper" , and I just leave it on the default. I'd only consider changing the compression setting if I were really squeezed for storage space or if I had a huge number of disks to rip.* I'm well past that now, and seldom have more than a handful of disks to rip in any one sitting. And I have abundant storage space. So lossless compression levels just aren't on my radar as something to worry about when ripping music.


*Even then, faster ripping wouldn't speed up the process, as metadata processing is usually the bottleneck.

[Decibel2015]

I'd like to hone in on these two bits of advice from two respondents here and hopefully synthesize them:

I have my secure ripping set with Enable Ultra Secure Ripping, minimum passes 1, maximum passes 4, end after 2 clean passes, vary drive speed checked.
I have maximum re-reads as 100 which is probably high. If set too high, you may get random "good" reads which really aren't, I've seen that happen fairly often.

I don't have to imagine....I do consider myself an "audiophile ripper" , and I just leave it on the default.

A lot schmidj's discussion didn't take into account that I did say that I wanted to have lossless audio. Maybe I should have said that I want to rip to a PC where I have
plenty of space (at the moment)...i.e. at the moment I'm not looking for portability of my rips.

I did click another hyperlink in the menu which brought up the stuff that schmidj mentions, re "ultra secure" rips as well as maximum number of re-reads. Ultra secure isn't
ticked by default and the re-reads is set to x34 by default. Any consensus on settings here?

e.g. we're happy with the "Lossless level 5 (default)"?. As I said, I have no issue with storage space on my PC.

Good to tick the "ultra secure" option?

Default maximum number of re-reads adequate?

Sort of related, on AccurateRip section, mine states that it's "unconfigured (waiting for key disc to find offset)". What's that all about.

I do see more hyperlinks in the menu...truck loads...default okay?

Almost lastly, I was asking about lossless etc not so much because of space considerations but more because I was wondering if any of these default settings or
changes to them might make the PC work harder to play them. Not sure if that is a real issue or not.

Lastly, I did post a reply to the guy with the link above, yesterday. My reply isn't up yet. I also posted a link. Is that post getting up? Nothing suss about it.