here it comes.............

ok the one thing we all have in common whether we are encoding mpc, ogg, aac, mp3, mp3pro, wma, vqf, etc... is getting audio ripped from cd. but most all of the info that can be found on the net is on encoding to various formats & ohh btw using EAC before you do that seems to be a common theme. O.K. i have no problem with that, Exact Audio Copy is the most accurate, thorough, configurable, but reasonable?

i am runnin Xp on 2 AMD 1200 cpus, 512mb ram each, geforce2 vid cards, sb live platinum w/xp drivers, current hardware firmware, 4in1 driver, dma enabled, forceaspi, etc.... it's all installed properly. and my ripping drives are 2 of the best a plextor on one unit & a teac on the other.

but the fact remains AT LEAST 1/3 of the cd's I rip stall out in EAC. i'm ripping my cd's, other people's cd's, club cd's and they have scuffs, scratches, smudges, etc. lets be honest, unless you
don't really rip many cds or mommy & daddy buy you brand new cds every week - anyone who has used EAC has had it lock up trying to read a disc while heading to 0.0x and probably more than once - or it significantly slows and can take more than an hour to do one disc many-a-time. maybe some people can afford this luxury of time, but its not reasonable for most, there needs to be an acceptable, understandable alternative. im just looking for solid options on something that seems fairly important but hasnt completely been dealt with.

because i personally am undertaking a massive project (like i imagine others are doing or planning on doing as well) and would like to get it as close to "quality" as possible without losing a mind trying. (thousands of cd's) for starters maybe someone can suggest ways to physically attempt to repair discs or clean them safely. things you've done, heard of or seen on other websites.

ok back to ripping.........
take this example on the whole ripping process (and this does happen). assuming cdex is good enough to use - how does it make sense when on a disc being ripped by EAC comes to a screeching halt & reports errors throughout on certain tracks and cant even rip & then the same cd is ripped using CD DAE, but it also reports the errors on the same tracks as EAC. yet i can close those out, pull up cdex, rip that same disc in full paranoia mode and get O.K. on all tracks, and to my ears they sound ok cranked through my stereo system (my ears are fine) what gives? at what point is another program acceptable, at what point can you say the process is good enough? where is the cutoff, and how do you measure it? thats completely the information i am after, for myself & others. any ideas, suggestions?

the toys.........
i think it is fair to say that these are the top rippers given that they promote error checking and/or secure ripping & are popular, or not. but they do seem to be the best of what i could find out
there. if i missed one then please correct me. just dont tell us to add some phony crapass program that promotes itself through speed without secure ripping & being oblivious to error checking. what we're all after here in this community are quality solutions. (ahem)

Exact Audio Copy http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/
CDex http://www.cdex.n3.net/
Audiograbber http://www.audiograbber.com-us.net supposedly will rip secure soon
CDP32 http://www.compactgear.com/
CD DAE http://www.cdspeed2000.com/go.php3?link=cddae.html
Feurio http://www.feurio.de (could spend a night figuring this one out)
Easy CD-DA Extractor http://www.poikosoft.com/

sorry if this was long but i know of no better place to get these questions answered. im just looking for the clouds to clear, to make way for the parting of the red sea on this one.

thanks for listening, hopefully there is some good insight to this, i just hope there aren't 0 replies lol. it seems a valid predicament. it all comes down to i just want to make the best quality music
possible, but within reason. or should we just encourage everyone to go back to using xingtech's audiocatalyst! ;/ (w/encoder).


dave

need more quality out there on the net. the crap amazes me.

http://www.digitalinnovations.com/ and take care of them to begin with

I sometimes get CDs from the library and more often than not they're severly damaged. Maybe people glue them to the bottom of their car tires and drive cross country or something, no idea how they end up in such conditions. Sometimes EAC handles them without a hitch, but often it fails. Unfortunately EAC isn't a miracle worker. When EAC fails in secure mode I try my other two drives. If those don't help I switch to CDex which to date has never worked in Full Paranoia mode any better than EAC's secure mode. Basically if it fails for me in EAC secure mode, it'll fail in CDex paranoia. For a last resort I'll use a CD repair kit or manually even out the gashes. If that doesn't work I give up, I don't care how much I like a song, It'll bug me too much to have skips in it. That's of course worse case scenarios, I mostly only rip my own good condition CDs which mommy and daddy didn't buy, so EAC breezes through them. Basically if you have a lot of damaged CDs to rip, you're really going to want a CD repair kit or as some people have recommended fine grain sandpaper and a little sanding block.

I tried that SkipDoctor product once, and all it did was make the bottom of the CD look dull; it didn't help with skipping for me. I followed the directions as closely as I could, but I didn't get any results.

Perhaps it just takes someone with more skill to use

Response to the original post:

With the semi-scratched CD's I've seen, if EAC doesn't rip them cleanly the first time through, just wiping the CD on my shirt will often just barely do the trick; EAC still reports unrecoverable errors, but the pops are no longer audible to me. I don't know why wiping the CD has anything to do with the scratches, but it works for me.

Other CD's are hopeless; they are usually the ones with a scratch through the reflective layer. I just skip those CD's, since I've never been able to recover the data from them.

My CD-ripping strategy: set error recovery to low, and tell EAC to cancel extraction for a track if it gives read errors. That way, I don't have a CD grind away for hours in the drive if I leave my computer unattended. I clean the CD's that don't rip right the first time through and re-try the tracks with a higher error recovery. If EAC gives some errors but eventually finishes, I listen to see if I can hear any pops; sometimes I can, sometimes I can't. If EAC starts stalling big-time, then I just cancel it; there's nothing more I can do.

Unless the CD is scratched on the label side (destroying the reflective surface that actually has the data), I've had incredible success using a good clear carwax. None of the colored stuff obviously. The car wax helps fill in the scratches and transfers the light quite well. It doesn't make things perfect, but it does make things so they don't stall and die.

Like I said, the only time things do stall and die is when the data is destroyed and at that point, nothing on earth, except a new CD, will fix the problem. I've never had a heat damaged CD, but I imagine that would make waxing the CD pointless too.

To me, if EAC can't rip the disk, it's time to get a new disk. I want the actual recorded information, not some error correction's guesswork at what it was intended to be. I've not tried it myself since I take such good care of my disks, but supposedly a heavily scratched CD sounds different from a mint condition CD, usually not in a good way.

Me too. I thought I was the only one...

I can't remember how many CDs my skipdoctor has saved, it works great! There are times when the CD is scratched so bad that I have to run it through the skipdoctor half a dozen or a dozen times to fix the really bad ones, but eventually it has always helped. The only time it hasn't is when there has been damage to the label surface and the reflective layer, which obviously won't be helped by sanding out scratches (which is all the skipdoctor does, it's just a radial wetsander).

>just dont tell us to add some phony crapass program that
>promotes itself through speed without secure ripping & being
>oblivious to error checking. what we're all after here in this

Looking at your list I would say only 2 of the CD Rippers have error checking....

For the worlds most popular (as in most used) check out freedbs stat page:

http://www.freedb.org/freedb_stats.php?typ...y&topic=clients

I've experienced that using burst mode in EAC sometimes does the job (without pops or other hearable errors) when secure failed. It's always worth a try.

i use azuradisc which is this huge machine that uses sanding discs to shear off all that unwanted cd plastic.

it really does look BRAND NEW afterwards.

but, the machine is a couple thousand $$$ US.

obviously i don't own it.

later
mike

Hi. What I ususally do is repair the cd itself. If you go to an automotive finishing store, they will sell you 1500, 2500, and 3500 grit emery paper.

Make yourself a little sanding block and wet sand with the increasing grit numbers radially. One or two minutes per grade is lots.

Then you just buff hard with a piece of felt. They turn out near perfect, often 100% track quality is reported by EAC and they rip at full tilt.

None of this works with label side damage of course.

I have done this with at least 100 cd's now from yard sales etc. Absolutely unrippable with EAC then bingo, they work perfectly.

yeah, I wish that skipdoctor device had a coarser and a finer sanding wheel available so you could deal with bad discs more quickly and give them a finer finish afterwards. Some devices handle the fixed discs better than others, and I think a finer finishing wheel would do the trick there.

yup...


just to add. more sulutions to this topic...

toothpaste.. (with teflon)

these seem to be some odd solutions... and maybe i dont really understand whats being discussed... well whatever

as far as ripping slowly in eac secure versus other things... what i would do is rip a track in secure mode then try the same track in burst mode or in some other program such as cdex or paranoia or cdrdao or something and compare the tracks with eac's compare function...

if they are the same then bingo i would use the faster option... it would be a lot faster and easier.