Usual objective.... 1:1 bacup i.e. I should always be able to recreate a bit perfect cd from the backup. Which translates to: "I am not going to rip my collection twice"...
Usual tools as well: cdparanoia+cdrdao+flac+cddb.
Here are my questions, arguably some of them quite stupid (please be forgiving):
- Is the Single_File (e.g. cdparanoia "1-" or cdrdao read-cd) good enough to achieve 1:1 backup? Does it include pre-graps, hidden tracks etc...? Particularly, isn't the "1-" option in cdparanoia dangerous for hidden tracks (don't they start before track 1? I noticed though that 1- = sector 0) ? I assume it is ok, just need a confimation.
- Is the mapping Track_Files <-> Single_File bidirectional? E.g. using cdparanoia -B "1-" (or equivalent) can I join the individual tracks later on and get back the same file I would get if I ripped in one file? Assuming the relationship is bidirectional, do I need to merge them back at all before restoring the cd in case of damage? ...Maybe the tracks#.wav+toc file are enough for cdrdao...
- What are the main differences between cdparanoia/cdda2wav/cdrdao_read-cd when using the paranoia library? Do they use the same library? In cdrdao it is embedded in the code, it might not be identical... Which one is reccommended?
- I read that there might be problems with cdparanoia when using cd drives that cache data. How can I detect if I have such device?
- I need to log any ripping error. On the web (http://www.xiph.org/paranoia/manual.html) I noticed that cdparanoia has an --output-info flag. Exactly what I need, unfortunately, I do not get that on my distro package (Gentoo, cdparanoia III release 9.8 March/3/2001). Is this functionality active? If it isn't how can I reproduce it? Redirecting stdout to file won't do since the progress statistics create a huge file by adding a line at each screen refresh. It looks to me that stderr does not contain enough info, I will need to test it on a scratched cd. Same thing for other rippers, how do you get a useful log (see --output-info)?
- What exactly is --read-raw option in cdrdao for? If I use cdrdao read-cd don't I get a raw file to begin with? And yes... I read the man, and... I do not understand it.
- If I use flac to encode a .bin file, when decoding can I get back directly a wav file or do I always get back a .bin file which then needs to be transcoded to wav?
- Can I detect in a script little/big endian, signed/unsigned settings to pass to flac?
- I use cdrdao to extract a toc, but toc2cue does not seem to work, it creates an empty file. Any suggestion?
