AccurateRip 10 years old Options

[spoon]

Time really does fly...AccurateRip has now been running for 10 years and has processed 143 million discs over those years and has been used by almost quarter of a million people, it is satisfying to know that there are this many people who care about the quality of their rips.

Here is to the next 10 years...

[pdq]

Congratulations spoon! Well done!

[Eli]

Here is to the next 10 years...

... and to ARv3!

Great product spoon. Thanks as always!

[ZhuGeLiang]

Thanks spoon for all the hard work! It really is a great product.

[BFG]

I only discovered AR about a year ago and already don't know how much time it's saved me on my 1200 CD collection. Thanks spoon!


Someone mentioned an ARv3 above - is one actually coming?

[Engelsstaub]

spoon, you're awesome and your work is greatly appreciated

[Elbart]

Hip, hip, hooray.

[funkyblue]

Congrats

Glad people are still purchasing your software.

I remember the days when this place started...Good old r3mix

[jkauff]

Spoon, in my opinion you and Andre both deserve the gold medal for your contributions to truly secure ripping. Too bad the CD medium itself is in decline--someday soon no one will be ripping anything. Fortunately, you still make the best trans-coding software, too, so you'll never be out of work.

Congratulations on 10 great years.

[funkyblue]

Spoon, in my opinion you and Andre both deserve the gold medal for your contributions to truly secure ripping. Too bad the CD medium itself is in decline--someday soon no one will be ripping anything. Fortunately, you still make the best trans-coding software, too, so you'll never be out of work.

Congratulations on 10 great years.

That is my biggest frustration. CD's are indecline and being replaced by crappy lossy iTunes and MP3's. If only iTunes provided a lossless version

[jkauff]

I assume you mean the iTunes Store, since iTunes supports ALAC. I don't think you'll have to wait too long. The Apple Media Guide that was released several months ago requests content providers to provide remastered-for-hi-res 24/96 source files to Apple for the iTunes Store. Rumor has it that they're going to adopt the HD-AAC codec, which allows for having one hi-res lossless source file (up to 24/192) from which you can extract or stream lossy AAC and/or downsampled 16/44 lossless files (I don't know if these would also be HD-AAC or transcoded to ALAC for compatibility). Expect to see HDTracks-type prices, especially now that HDTracks is offering ALAC files for the same price as FLAC.

I would guess that spoon is looking into how much it would cost to license HD-AAC for dbPoweramp. Personally, I'd pay more for the Reference version if it supported HD-AAC.

This post has been edited by db1989: Jan 3 2013, 14:34

Reason for edit: deleting unnecessary full quote of above post

[funkyblue]

Yeah that was what I meant.

I do not want remastered, special iTunes formats. Just give up standard 16bit ALAC unencrypted.
Easy to convert to FLAC then.

This post has been edited by db1989: Jan 3 2013, 14:34

Reason for edit: as above

[Kohlrabi]

I don't think you'll have to wait too long. The Apple Media Guide that was released several months ago requests content providers to provide remastered-for-hi-res 24/96 source files to Apple for the iTunes Store. Rumor has it that they're going to adopt the HD-AAC codec, which allows for having one hi-res lossless source file (up to 24/192) from which you can extract or stream lossy AAC and/or downsampled 16/44 lossless files (I don't know if these would also be HD-AAC or transcoded to ALAC for compatibility). Expect to see HDTracks-type prices, especially now that HDTracks is offering ALAC files for the same price as FLAC.

You're making this sound as if this development was a good thing. Pointless overpriced hi-res downloads (especially if tied to a certain piece of software or vendor) will not improve anything, the next big step would be to offer multichannel audio.

This post has been edited by Kohlrabi: Jan 3 2013, 14:02

[Engelsstaub]

...Rumor has it that they're going to adopt the HD-AAC codec, which allows for having one hi-res lossless source file (up to 24/192) from which you can extract or stream lossy AAC and/or downsampled 16/44 lossless files...

You're making this sound as if this development was a good thing. Pointless overpriced hi-res downloads...

If the average price of an iTunes "album" is about 10 USD and the average price of a CD in the US is 15 USD, how pointless is paying a few extra dollars for a "hi-res" iTunes version that can at least be the same quality as the CD?

I don't think that (the fact that a subset of people believe they hear the difference between "hi-res" and Redbook) obscures the fact that there are indeed obvious benefits to be had from obtaining a lossless source for my money.

The foremost and most obvious benefit is having a lossless source to make our own lossy encodes from...something the OP is more than willing to help us all out with I personally don't care if they market it as "sonically superior" or "better than 16-44.1" to the masses. This forum will likely still exist as a bastion of reason for those who don't seem to understand the Nyquist Sampling Theorem.

It may not be better than Redbook, but it certainly shouldn't be worse.

This post has been edited by Engelsstaub: Jan 3 2013, 14:44

[Kohlrabi]

If the average price of an iTunes "album" is about 10 USD and the average price of a CD in the US is 15 USD, how pointless is paying a few extra dollars for a "hi-res" iTunes version that can at least be the same quality as the CD?

You don't know anything about the quality until you listened to the tracks. Mastering practices affect audio quality far more than technical details like hi-res or even lossy encoding. I'd be even more unwilling to spend more money and more time downloading something which will likely sound just as bad as before. Masterdisk has proven (with I'm with You by the RHCP) that "Mastered for iTunes" is just a marketing tool. Audio formats are highly unimportant if the master itself sounds horrible.

I don't think that (the fact that a subset of people believe they hear the difference between "hi-res" and Redbook) obscures the fact that there are indeed obvious benefits to be had from obtaining a lossless source for my money.

The foremost and most obvious benefit is having a lossless source to make our own lossy encodes from...something the OP is more than willing to help us all out with I personally don't care if they market it as "sonically superior" or "better than 16-44.1" to the masses.

Lossless downloads already exist, but the benefit is really minimal. MP3 (and even AAC) support is ubiquitous today, and will likely be for a long time, the need to transcode to other formats is negligible. Also, see my point above, audio formats hardly matter.

But I understand the often mentioned sentiment that hi-res might "by accident" lead to better mastering practices again. If that's the case, I will likely also favor it, but specifically not for its technical merits.

This post has been edited by Kohlrabi: Jan 3 2013, 18:11

[Engelsstaub]

...Mastering practices affect audio quality far more than technical details like hi-res or even lossy encoding. I'd be even more unwilling to spend more money and more time downloading something which will likely sound just as bad as before.
...

Obtaining the best possible master is something I value too. That's why I got back into vinyl where one still has a decent chance of getting current recordings before they crapped them up and destructively normalized them for CD and iTunes.

Lossless is by no means universally available aside from the CD (if we're calling that lossless these days...beside the point.) Websites like Bandcamp, that offer FLAC, have nowhere near the selection as iTunes.

...and I would still be willing to pay a CD's price for a lossless copy that I can do whatever I want with. Even the most tech-illiterate amongst us can figure out how to make our own lossy encodes.

I'm with you on the mastering though. I'd gladly take a lossy copy of something that hasn't undergone current levels of dynamic range compression over a lossless piece of crap like that brickwalled RHCP album you mentioned.

[2Bdecided]

Congratulations spoon - thank you for a great tool.

[OliP]

And who invented and administrates the database??? Where is ist stored? I can´t find information about it.
Seems for me always to be kind of "secret project" .......

And why do still so few programes use AR?
FreeDB has also gotten around...
And AR is not less usefull !

This post has been edited by OliP: Jan 7 2013, 23:08

[db1989]

And who invented and administrates the database???

Illustrate, including spoon.

Where is ist stored? I can´t find information about it.
Seems for me always to be kind of "secret project" .......

How exactly does the company not sharing proprietary details about their database equate to being overly secretive?

And why do still so few programes use AR?
FreeDB has also gotten around...
And AR is not less usefull !

Not enough people know or care about the limitations of CDDA and ways to extract it accurately, I guess, on either side of the fence.

[spoon]

It was invented by me, it is operated these days by Illustrate.

I think all the serious rippers use AccurateRip, just to name a few (and in alphabetic order):

Cuetools
dBpoweramp
EAC
Foobar
Media Monkey
XLD

missing are only iTunes, WMP (these 2 for obvious reasons), CDEx no longer developed, Audiograbber (same)

[Nessuno]

And why do still so few programes use AR?

And considering the ever increasing percentage of users running different OSes than Windows, is there any plan to allow programs different than dBpoweramp and EAC, that already use AR verification (e.g. XLD for Mac), to submit entries?

Anyway, thank you very much Spoon... from a read only but affectionate user!

This post has been edited by Nessuno: Jan 7 2013, 23:26

[spoon]

There are more new submissions now than at any time, it is difficult to quantify how many MAC users there really are who would submit (to justify the effort in getting submissions into say XLD)

[db1989]

I don’t think this the place to debate paradigm shifts in civilisation, so let’s not bother trying.

[funkyblue]

There are more new submissions now than at any time, it is difficult to quantify how many MAC users there really are who would submit (to justify the effort in getting submissions into say XLD)

I would love a Linux program.

Windows 8 was the death of Windows for me and the only version since ME I have not purchased.

Keep up the GREAT work.

[soundping]

I use and add to the AccurateRip database.