CUETools/EAC/Foobar verifying old rips Options

[timalina]

I have noticed that when I convert an album of flac files into a single wav file using the Foobar function, it is marginally smaller than if I'd ripped it to a wav/cue image with EAC. I have a load of old rips that are in flac tracks, and I want to be able to confirm that they are perfect using CUETools/AR, but CUETools is saying that they're not on the AR database, when I am using the original cue file. Is there a way to configure CUETools to account for this change in size of the wav image, or do I permanently lose some data when I rip to individual flac files?

[mjb2006]

I have noticed that when I convert an album of flac files into a single wav file using the Foobar function, it is marginally smaller than if I'd ripped it to a wav/cue image with EAC.

foobar2000 shouldn't be losing anything; all the samples in the files should be concatenated into the single WAV. You could verify this by looking at the properties of the files (right-click on each one in the playlist editor) and check the # of samples in each.

If the original CD has a gap before track 01, then there's going to be audio missing from the beginning of track 01's file, because when you rip to individual files with gaps appended (doesn't matter what ripper you use; this is the standard method), there was no preceding track to append to. That particular gap is normally just a very short span of silence (like half a second). CUETools shouldn't have a problem with this, as the AR database is based on tracks with gaps appended. So I don't know what's going on.

It sounds like you have the original CD the FLACs were made from, so why not use EAC to rip to a WAV image and then use EAC's WAV compare function to see what if there's just an offset between that WAV and the one created from the concatenated FLACs? That will help us diagnose.

[greynol]

If the original CD has a gap before track 01, then there's going to be audio missing from the beginning of track 01's file, because when you rip to individual files with gaps appended (doesn't matter what ripper you use; this is the standard method), there was no preceding track to append to. That particular gap is normally just a very short span of silence (like half a second). CUETools shouldn't have a problem with this, as the AR database is based on tracks with gaps appended.

If this isn't accounted for in the new image then CUETools will definitely have a problem since the starting location of all tracks has a bearing on the disc ID (the first track does not begin at 00:00:00 when there is HTOA).

This post has been edited by greynol: Dec 9 2010, 07:53

[timalina]

Thanks. I'll follow what you've said and report back after the weekend.