First of all, hello all! I am sure here are some of the good old faces still around. My focus hasn't been on the audio issues for quite some time, so I come up with this rather noobish question.

Just got my self decent headphones at the office, and went on copying some of my favourite CDs to DVD as .APEs, but in the process of doing that I found out that some of my CDs produced some read errors. Therefore I got the idea of backing up the collection losslessly compressed and burning them to DVDs.

What is currently the best method to produce .CUE/.APEs? (or FLAC, etc..).

I have a few drives to use (Yamaha F1, Pioneed 110, Litey 1653, Plex 716UF) and I presume that the Plex is best for the job.

I was about to do it with Plextools, but for audio CDs it only allows non-standard .PXI image format. EAC with C2 disabled is a bit slow - after all there is quite a many discs to backup.

Any new innovations in this field recently?

Personally I don't care much about the ripping speed, but this may be interesting for you. I guess you should do some tests youself - with some damaged CDs - to check if it's also safe to disable the cache on your 716UF.

Heya cd-rw.org, welcome back.

I think EAC is still prefered amongst most people. But you can now rip with foobar2000 too and it's certainly worth checking out.

Has anyone done any comparisons yet?

Edit: Thread started here


If you intend on using Monkey's Audio and embedding the cuesheet my adapted version of Tag or Wapet may be useful to your ripping process.

I'm switching from Monkey's Audio to WavPack, mainly due to better error handling.

High-Quality Audio Archiving
have a look there to the Lossless section.
To speed up EAC, you *can* enable usage of C2, due to some misunderstanding, it can nowadays be assumed, that c2 is safe to use for most drives.
Try the EAC built-in tests for cashing, c2 etc.
If you use only Copy instead of test & Copy, you get a doubled speed boost, too, of course some lowered guarantee, that rip was bit-perfect.

my preferred Loslsess codecs are either wavpack 4.22 switch -x -m
or flac -8
Roberto's recent test has shown, that only those 2 formats can be considered safe against errors in the stream.
wavpack -x -m has better compression than flac -8.

And for convienience, I rip to single tracks, not image. if done like described at guide, you can burn later CD perfectly, eg. in nero you need only to set gaps from default 2s to 0s (besides gap of 1st track, which has to be 2s by red-book), or by cue sheet (non-compliant in eac eg, see guide for details, though cue isn't necessary).
I burn to DVD+R myself my albums, use MAC 2.93 to browse my music, single tracks are really good then.

Yes, it appears that still one should not generally trust C2 capability of a drive in EAC, even when EAC says the drive supports C2.

I did a quick test of my new LG DVD drive ("HL-DT-ST - DVD-ROM GDR8163B") with a few very old CD-Rs and a few lower quality pressed CDs.
The discs were in good enough condition - EAC could rip them in secure mode, with some error correction happenning here and there.
However ripping some of the discs with "C2 On" and "C2 off" produced different rips.

Ripping the same disc several times with "C2 off" produced the same CRC every time.
Ripping the same disc several times with "C2 on" somtimes produced totally mismatching CRCs, but often it consistently produced the same CRC (but different from "C2 off").
This means that using "C2 on" is not a good idea with this drive.

The worst case was this:
with one disc (a factory-pressed disc, but obviously low some quality press) the "C2 off, cache On" option produced matching CRC OK, but ripping this disc with a different drive consistently produced different matching CRCs.

Now that I have two drives, I think a more secure way of ripping would be to rip every CD on both drives (either burst mode or secure) and make sure that both CRC match.
I think I am going to use AccurateRip as well. I found some of my discs in the database, so apparently it has grown quite big for the last couple of years.

By the way, EAC is not really needed when ripping with two drives, except for convenience.


P.S. Recently my good old mpc collection was pretty much lost in a harddrive perturbation, thanks to my sheer stupidity and/or bad luck. So it seems I'm facing this road too - backing up my CDs to lossless.

Ouuuu-kay.

Good tip the cache thing. I copied a slightly damaged 8 years old CD-R cache enabled and disable = copies were identical.

Then I tried once more disabling the C2 error reporting. Copy did not match with the first two.

oh, a couple of EAC tips from me:

1)
when two drives are connected to the same computer (my drives are),

one can run two instances of EAC and change all options in them independently,
and then EAC can do the ripping from both drives simultaneously.
Rather cool!
It works fine here, no problems so far.


2)
using profiles in the new EAC -- for various groups of options such as only drive options, only extraction options etc -- also very cool!
One can swtich between profiles with one click.
(e.g. I made four profiles for the drive options: drive1-burst, drive2-secure etc)

You'd better not rip to the same hard drive, though; you would be putting some serious stress on it (the heads in particular).

BTW, recently Poikosoft announced that Easy CD-DA Extractor 8 is finally supposed to perform secured rips, with or without C2. I have personally asked for this many years ago, and now it is implemeted.

Easy CD-DA Extractor 8 (latest version, direct download)

The error reporting looks like this:



And Easy CD-DA can also rip to single file w. .CUE and has internal support for FLAC and APE.

Could this finally be a (shareware) contender to EAC? I have always like the GUI of the software, and I think it way above CDEx at least.

Any hard drive is plenty fast enough to write two data streams at the rate that a CD drive can rip. Compressed, lossless, or even pure wav, doesn't matter. The fastest possible CD data read is a small fraction of the speed a hard drive is capable of.

Check out the link in my sig for my guide for single files, but it sounds like you plan to go with images

In any case, when I ripped with the two CD-drives with EAC, it was ripping "Copy" only from one drive and doing "Test" with the other. So there is no problem of stressing the HDD.


But Never_Again may have a point here. Let's see:
maximum speed of Audio CD 52x = 52 x 1.411 Mbps = 8.75 MB/s
Copying files between my older laptop HDD and external USB-drives I get speeds of about 10 MB/s, up to 20 MB/s. Sometimes lower speeds on the laptop (needs defragmentation perhaps). So it may be pretty close.
I'm guessing that a better newer system/HDD should show higher speeds.