i am in the process of ripping every CD i own. well i am almost done. i loosely followed this guide except for compression - i ripped everything directly to WAV and then moved all the files to an external hard drive. i thought everything was perfect but then i read about something called AccurateRip. should i re-rip my CDs with AccurateRip or are they fine just the way they are?

i have .log files of all the CDs i ripped. some of them say something like this:


How can the track quality be less than 100% and still have no errors occured?


also there were CDs from a certain band these were the only ones that reported having errors. it says suspicious position x:xx-x:xx a bunch of times. well when i listened to the WAVs i jumped straight to the "suspicious positions" and in those positions i could hear some kind of interference. it sounds almost like chirping but not really. the only thing i can think of is it sounds like my rabbit eating nilla wafers =]] if you guys want to hear i can upload the information and some sound clips. actually i don't know how to take soudn clips; i can upload the WAV files but that's illegal. is that what programs like Audacity are for? if it helps the artist is "The Fall of Troy."

last two questions: im not sure if i understand transcoding correctly. this is what i think it is, please tell me if im wrong: transcoding is when you take one file, say a WAV, and encode it into something else, like an MP3. but can't it also be used in a bad way, like transcoding 96 kbps MP3s to 192 kbps? or are these completely different things? also is dbpoweramp reference version good for converting WAVs to MP3s? it looks good but i really hate buying software and it seems like a shady program/company.

Take a look at FAQ.txt in Documentation directory:


Generally speaking, linear PCM is also a coding method, so you can name WAV -> MP3 transcoding. However, PCM wave files are considered uncompressed, so people are usually referring to this type of conversion as "compressing" or "coding". Transcoding is then when you take one coded file (lossless, lossy) decode it back to WAV and then encode the result to other format (or same format with different parameters, for example bitrate). This process can be done in one step, though.


There's no need to use dbpoweramp for that. You can convert with any MP3 compressor (LAME for example, it's free). dbpoweramp also uses LAME.

No comment

Spoon, the developer of dbpoweramp, is an upstanding member of this community. What strikes you as "shady"?


I should add that I use this freeware to convert WAV to mp3. It's a very simple LAME front-end by Speek.

I'm gonna strongly second odious' statement. dbpoweramp and its developer are as far from shady as is the east is distant from the west. I consider the program to be indispensable myself.

Even if the track quality is 100%, it might still contain errors. I am not sure about the technical details about the reason, but EAC (and other rippers) can only rely of what the drive reports.

I've ripped CDs with Accuraterip, and it told me "Rip not accurate" even though EAC reported 100% quality. I tried again and it got it right. It's not predictable when it happens, but it does happen.

So, long talk, short answer: Use AccurateRip. It simple to install and use and immensely useful, so why not use it?

This is not just about what the drive reports. Drives that do not accurately report C2 errors, or do not report them at all, are dependent on the rightvalue being reported often enough to be accepted by EAC (if just the first two reads agree then this is considered right). If instead the wrongvalue is reported often enough then that will be accepted by EAC as being right. AccurateRip does not suffer from this problem because you are comparing your copy of a CD to somebody else's copy/copies.

An alternative would be if you owned twocopies of a CD then you could rip both of them and, as long as the two rips were identical, know that your rip is perfect. If the rips disagree then you would need a third copy as a tie-breaker, etc.

Which I am going to do in a bit, but my original question is should i RE-rip the ones I already have ripped?

Also I'm sort of worried. What if my rip is accurate but the ones in AccurateRip's database are not, and then I rerip until I get what AR thinks is accurate when in fact it isn't?

I also have one more question. It's about drive offsets. On AccurateRip's site there is a list of drives. I found mine and it said to use + something offset, it was less than 10 but I don't remember exactly. Well then I looked at my EAC settings and it was set to 0. Is this bad? What exactly does drive offset do?

I want to know honestly what big difference it makes. Are things like these mainly useful for those pesky albums such as the Fall of Troy ones that simply do not want to be ripped?

While I would never recommend that someone start ripping their collection without AccurateRip, I don't think it is worth re-ripping your entire collection if you have already ripped with EAC in secure mode. At most, you might look through your logs and re-rip where EAC was having some difficulty.

Once two or more people have ripped a track with the identical results submitted to AccurateRip, the odds that they are not accurate are vanishingly small. Even if there is only one previous result in the database, the odds that both you and the other person got a bad rip but with the same checksum are again vanishingly small. On the other hand, if your results disagree with all of the submissions for that track in the database, that does not prove that your result is incorrect, only that there is no evidence that it is correct.

As far as drive offsets, stop looking at anyone's database. What you need to do is install AccurateRip and then start trying discs until you find two that AccurateRip can use to check your drive's offset. At this point you are fully calibrated for your drive's offset and you can stop worrying about it.

Drive offset is useful for two very different reasons. The first, which many people (including myself) think is quite unnecessary, is so that when you rip a track, and someone else rips the same track, if you both have your drive offsets set "correctly" then your rips will be bit identical, with no offset in the data. The difference, if they are not corrected and are offset from one another, is, in the worst case, not audible (worst case offsets are on the order of milliseconds).

The second, and very important, use for setting the drive offset is so that the checksum that you get for your rip can be compared with the offset that other people get for the same track. In other words, if you do not properly compensate for your drive's offset then AccurateRip doesn't work.

What if the same person rips his 'bad' disc a bunch of times (with no other examples in the database)? Wouldn't this create 'not accurate' results for someone else's good rips? This occured to me when I was ripping an album that had 0 or 1 other result and I tried ripping it a few times and each time test and copy did not match on certain tracks (with the results then going to AccurateRip automatically as usual).