About EAC. What is the exact meaning of 'Peak level' and 'Track quality' showed in the status report window?

With my Sony DVD/CD-RW combo drive, the 'peak level' never reach 100% but the track quality varies between 99.5-100%. I can make all tracks reach 100% by re-encoding again and again until it comes out at 100%. But I wonder do I really need to do this?

Thank you.

Search the CD Hardware/Software forum for "peak level"

I don't think so. I've also had this with several CD drives. I think track quality <100% just means that EAC had to re-read some passages, but if it says "Copy OK" or "No errors" in the report, it means that re-reading led to consistent results. To be 100% sure, you can compare the checksums of two tracks with <100%, they should be the same.

And peak level just tells how loud is the loudest sample, so actually it's good if it's not 100% (less clipping risk), you should worry only if peak level is 0% (which means that nothing was extracted - silence).

The way I've always understood it is that the track quality % number is the ratio between read operations that are needed to rip the track and the actual total read operations performed on the track.

100% - Only the needed read operations were performed
Less than 100% - Some rereading was needed.

So you're still getting an accurate copy even if the log shows track quality of less than 100%, as long as EAC doesn't report a suspicious position or a read/sync error.

Correct.

False. There may still be wrong sampes, although no errors have been reported. If you worry about that depends on how anal you are. If you're extremely anal like me you perform a lot of additional rips with various options and methods then.
for the normal user:
drive properly configured (cache clearing if needed and C2 capability yes/no) and secure mode + test&copy. And some even say when using secure mode, you don't need test&copy.

Thanks for the correction. Guess that means my "answer quality" was only 50%.

Interesting. Do you know any threads/links that confirm this?

I don't remember one in particular, but I know for sure there are some.

The next time that you have the red error correction lights lighting up until the third of the five rows or so but no suspicious positions, rip the same track a second time. Compare with EAC's wav compare function. You'll possibly get some "different samples" positions.

and AnEnigma: Don't mind.

question i got a couple of cds from ebay recently (very cheap) and both were quite dirty/scratched so i made flac rips with eac and both had suspicious position's but playing back the tracks they happen during they seem fine, what should i listen for? i meant to say that one of the cds did skip when played on a normal cd player but the other was fine.

And AccurateRip is an additional security that comes cheap in terms of configuration and processing speed.

@landy: Your rips have inaudible errors. Most of all errors are inaudible. If the audio player skips, use the rip.
In my experience EAC+good drive is even better for secure extraction than the audio player.

Yes, accurip offers the great advantage of comparing rips from physically different CDs.

i have been using a LG GSA 4120B with c2 off as on my test cd's (badly scratched aphex twin - come to daddy and nightmares on wax - smokers delight which looks to be in decent condition but still cant be ripped) the c2 test in eac says my drive cant do it but from looking around on the net i have seen claims it can, the chart in this thread for example.

can anyone clear this up? what sort of cd should the test be done with one thats in perfect condition, one that gives errors but is extractable or an unextractable cd?

i would rather know how to perform the test properly myself than just be told if my drive has that feature or not as i will be replacing it once LG release there new drives and i may not be able to find reliable info on them on the internet so being able to do it myself would be best.

These two I think. For EAC's basic detection (configuration wizard) use the perfect one. For the additional test (in the drive options) use the scratched one.
Anyway, to be safe you can always disable C2 capability. It doesn't hurt (that is, lower the rip's security) if the drive is C2 capable and you disable that option. Only the speed is slower than it could be.
The same applys for caching. Clearing the cache doesn't hurt although the drive doesn't cache.

Thank you for the replies. If only the 'lower speed' is the result for not using C2 error feature, then I'm not interest in using it anymore.




Please excuse my stupidity but what is 'test&copy'? Is that one of EAC's features?

You can find it in Action menu, if used it extracts the audio twice, first virtually (without writting to disk) and then normally, then it displays CRCs of these 2 extractions - if they match you can be 99.999% sure that the extraction was secure, if they don't match then it means that extracted data was different (there were some unrecovered errors in one or both extractions).
It doesn't make much sense to use it in secure mode, only in burst mode (or if you're paranoical you can test&copy in burst mode and compare with CRC of secure mode - if all the 3 CRCs match you can be 100% sure that extraction was secure).