I've had a look through this forum, and see the same kinds of arguments swirling around, how burning audio will generally degrade the quality due to jitter.

As far as I can tell, you could rip a cd in CDex/EAC, then losslessly compress it and burn that to a CD. As it's data, there won't be such a problem with jitter as data has better error correction? (hence you being able to fit 750mb of music on a 650mb data cd?)

So, where does ripping and burning a CD Image fit into this? By using something like CloneCD, you can create *perfect* backups of your data-cd's, down to the in--built copy protection... so can it do the same with an audio cd, copying it without causing errors?

Sorry if this has been asked before (i couldn't find it with the search)

I will try my best to answer your question... since my self has asked the same question b4 when i was a beginner.... ( Although i am still no expert... )



This is in theory correct. And by compressing it losslessly you could have more music on your CD as well!!!



No... clone Cd only handles Data in CDs only. I.e Most of the times Clone CD will not make perfect copy of the music CD.

Jitter as discussed in the sound of CDRs is always granted as generating zero errors anyway.

http://www.digido.com/jitteressay.html

http://www.digido.com/jitterletters.html#anchor5822151

To be honest I'm confused then...

In the backlash against Audiophiles "reasons why I'm giving up on MPC altogether" I remember seeing this posted :



I tried reading up on it, including the links to pages about jitter, but in amongst them it was stated that unless you have a crap CD writer & brand of cd's (i have an LG writer and unbranded cdr's) then you won't have any problems ripping the audio from your cd-r?

So I don't honestly understand why there is an argument against it?!?


But I thought, when creating an image from a music CD in CloneCD, it is treated like data, not ripped to wave files as with EAC/CDex? If it's data, it is made sure that it's copied perfectly?

Wondering here myself.

If CloneCD, BlindRead or whatever can extract subchannels, handle bad sectors and virtualy any perverted protection mechanism there is, what can stop them to actualy clone your audiocd whether by writing on another cd or making backup image.

You can easily feed your image then to any cd emulator. DaemonTools even supports analog audio output, don't know what for though.

Take a CD and clone it, then clone the clone - after many clones you would have an unusable CD, reading data off a CD is not always 100% accurate, hence all the error correction stuff built into Data and Audio CDs.



Just someone talking rubbish because the world has found something better than the holy mpc...

What could make you do such things?



Not always, but I believe there is some probability you will manage to produce working copy one day. At least I hope so. Still, I agree, perfection isn't achievable.

Remark.
I had once problems with copying large amounts of data from whatever source to HDD. It was caused by corrupted RAM I bought.
So I learned that if the hardware isn't functioning properly, you won't get exact copy by any means.

Shame on him, he doesn't use EAC



The data / audio kind in into the CD, not into the software. Audio has weaker error correction codes on the CD, so whatever is done, there are no CD-ROM error correction data available.

About the reading mode, since I was not sure, I asked : http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?s=...&threadid=47958

The answer is that some drives can use special commands to read audio (old Teacs ?) but most use the MMC standard, and the way to read is raw (Disable ECC/EDC in hardware and return data to PC (uncorrected)). This is the standard command to read audio, used in EAC, CDex, CloneCD, etc. What is special about CloneCD is that it uses also the same command to read data. Therefore the error correction codes are read "as audio", and the software can handle them in order to copy CD ROMs that has some tampered error correction data.

So it can't read audio as data. It actually reads data as audio !

Hahah, that's a clever way to do it! Thanks for finding out Pio!

So then... It seems just as good to rip the songs in CDex, then burn as audio in Nero at 4x. I just want to get my head around this (what should be a simple thing!!) because I wanna do it properly!

Heh, first off I need to defrag the hell out of my hard disk.. it can barely cope with Windows, so I don't trust it to rip and play with gig's of data happily anymore

Yes, it is even better. For most CDs, however, EAC is better tha CDex because it checks C2 pointers, or double reads in order to ensure that there is no read error. But for bad CD, CDex is maybe better than EAC, because EAC slows down very much as soon as a little problem is encountered.
You can use both, but beware that EAC can detect many errors that CDex can't see, even in full paranoia mode (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?act=ST&f=20&t=3164 )

hey, a funny thing happened. I was about to start a thread on this topic, but did a search first, only to find that this discussion was going on right now!



ok, from what I've read here, it seems that audio CDs can be ripped and burned *very* reliably/accurately with the right software. So you've reached a good conclusion, as pointed out by Pio2001. So now I have a question (for Pio2001 or anyone else that knows):

Is there any disadvantage, in terms of reliability/accuracy, if you were to save the music as data (e.g., FLAC) instead? It seems to me this would save you having to use ripping software to get the music back on your hard drive. And it would be a little faster and save some CDs.

edit: then again, what's the point of making such a backup if you have the original CD. And if you don't have the original CD than you may as well burn an audio CD so you can play it in your stand alone.

The only disadvantage is hardware that will play FLAC, in terms of reliability a data CD has a stack more error checking & correction and as such are much better than an audio CD. But remember a data CD is all or nothing, either it can read it 100% acccurate or it will fail to read it, an audio CD will read and return errors that can be heard in the audio.

To clean up the misunderstandings of why clonecd and why EAC is good.
Clonecd's reproduce eaxctly how the disc looks; with all the errors there might be. This is because many (fx. safedisc2) use errors for the copy protection. Clonecd will reproduce these errors.

EAC does NOT wish to reproduce these errors as there should be no errors on an audio cd (some copyprotections used for audio cds use errors anyway) and it tries to correct any errors as they should have been cause by damage to the cd...clonecd will not correct these errors and if you rip a none perfect cd you can get clicks and pops. Clonecd will be just like burst mode...

Yes, there was little misunderstanding about copying purposes, i guess.
My fault.

So is following correct:

- if for some reason I need exact (in 'paranoid' way: with subchannels, copy protection, existing errors etc.) copy I'll go with some raw read/write duplication app.

- in all other cases I'll use EAC.

There is one more possible misunderstanding to be cleared, though.



Well, there are drives which will simply ignore (or cause error) if software tells them not to use ECC/EDC. At least I own one.

So another conclusion (not to be taken as statement):

- EAC still uses hardware error detection (other thing that audiocd format has less EDC info than data cd's);
- and CloneCD uses (can use) raw mode (no ECC/EDC) to emulate copy protection.

Oh yes, if you're not going to play the CDs, go for data, it's much more reliable.



Nero CDSpeed can detect errors in the CDROm before it gets unreadable.


It can't read audio CDs ?

It surely can.
And it seems audiocd's are in fact being read in raw mode.

I don't agree. If you clone it the right way you will always have a 100% accurate copy. But if you are cloning an audio or an copy protected CD then you might run into problems. But it is always possible to do a perfect copy of a standard unscratched data CD.