i want to store my cd's on my pc and hd-space is not a problem.
i searched the forum and found that there is actually a difference between the
original cd and the ripped wav files.
currently i rip with cdparanoia to wav files, is there another program/format
that is considered to be better? (read something about raw format but i don't know what
is is)

thnx

EAC is considered the best (most secure) program for ripping, it's not too easy to set-up though.
Since hd-space is not a problem, you'll probably want to rip to WAV format (to keep things easy), or some other lossless format if you want tags for example, plus CUE eventually.
You'll find a lot of info here & here.

hi,

i allready read something on this forum about EAC, but from what i've seen it seems
to be only for windows, and i'm looking for something to use in linux.
anyway thanx for the info&links, they are very helpful!!!

The post reads, to me, as though there is a belief that wav format is somehow defective or deficient. If the concern is actually that the extraction program being used in Linux is not accurate enough, that is a different matter. Having no experience with music on Linux I can't comment.

However, if the concern is due to the fact that encoding on CD is not the same scheme employed on hard disk, there is a mis-understanding. That encoding difference is as relevant to the sound one hears when the music is played as is the orientation of the printed label on the CD's surface to oneself when one puts the CD into a CD player.

Oh, you didn't mention that you're on linux. EAC is for windows only, I know nothing about linux, but I heard something that EAC works under wine (some kind of windows emulator for linux).
The problem with ripping audio CDs is that they have rather weak error-robustness, and some special care must be taken while ripping them to detect & correct the errors. It doesn't matter much to what format you rip (as long as it's lossless). As for linux rippers, perhaps others will tell you if there's anything better than cdparanoia.

I'm also on Win32 only, but i know that frodoontop has made a secure ripper for linux called Rubyripper, which is a rewrite of his previously released Pyripper with a Gtk2-based GUI.

Rubyripper v0.1 :
http://rubyforge.org/projects/rubyripper/

This appears to be the key sentence in the original post to me.

Can you either point us to the thread(s) in question, or explain in what way they are different please?

i thought that the information in a wav file was somehow inferiour to that on an audio cd



so this was exactly what i thought, and reading some post here on HA made me think
this was true, however after rereading those posts now i can see that they were actually
about flaws in the ripping process



so, as i understand, if you can do a perfect ripping process, the information in the
resulting wav file is exactly the same as on the audio cd?
is there any way i can test ripping programs or at least compare my ripped wav to
the original audio cd (in linux).
i know i could rip twice and do a bit-by-bit comparison of the two files, would this be an
apropriate method, or am i missing something here?




@Synthetic Soul: so there is a difference in encoding scheme, but what exactly is that difference? The difference they talked about in the posts i originally mentioned are differences caused by a bad ripping process, that's solved by AndyH-ha: if you do
a perfect rip then there is no difference in the audio information between the wav and
the original cd. But now i wonder what the encoding difference is between an audio
cd and a wav (maybe stupid question, i dunno)

@AndyH-ha: thnx for the anwers, rather direct

This is probably an appropriate method yes, but help testing this assumption by trying out rubyripper. See if mulitple rips of the same cd's result in the same output.

<edit> Spelling mistake corrected. Thanks for noticing! </edit>

I do not know how the audio data is stored on a CD, and I don't really want to. All you need to know is that a 16 bit, 44.1KHz, stereo WAVE is the same quality as an audio CD. If your ripping process is accurate you have the same audio data that is stored on the CD.

I don't use *nix, but I have heard the name cdparanoia often, and assume that you've made a good choice there.

If you rip each track twice and then do some sort of CRC/MD5 check then you are basically emulating EAC's Test and Copy mode, which should be a good indication of whether you have an accurate rip.

Edit: Sorry, started writing long before I submitted (got called into a meeting!) so I kinda posted over frodoontop. I've just read the docs for Rubyripper and the logic seems to make sense. It's not as intelligent as EAC or foobar I guess, but better than just a double rip. NB: Rubyripper is an interface for cdparanoia or cdda2wav - I don't know which.

@frodoontop: Spelling mistake in PDF:

It's essentially quite simple - CD audio data is 16 bit integer, 44.1kHz wave data, but without the wave file headers. Track positions are located via the TOC.

The data on the CD is the same as when on hard disk but the encoding of that data differs considerably. The details are covered in many basic technical discussions of digital audio on CD such as in Pohlmann's Principles of Digital Audio.

If Linux has a decent audio editor it is possible to directly test, for CD-R, that you are getting off the CD what you wrote to it. In the audio editor you align the beginnings of the extracted file with the original file from which the CD was created. When the two are mixed on top of each other, one inverted relative to the other, the result is total digital silence if the two are identical.

I've verified my CD-Rs this way a number of times so I know it is possible. If you don't get total silence it means that the extraction was less than perfect, not that something is wrong with the theory.