Hi everyone!

I'm trying to rip my music collection using dBpoweramp. My CD drive is about a year old and wasn't the cheapest model available, but it's an LG drive regardless. I'm converting the music into FLAC with the best compression level.

Randomly the songs have this icky tiny crackling/grittiness. It goes on and off. The rip status says OK, and I'm using whatever secure rip options I can find. When I try to rip the same tracks again it can come out OK.

This is pretty frustrating since I've a big collection and I don't want to listen every track through after I'm done ripping and encoding them.

It'll take forever.

The problem isn't present when making .ape or lossy formats. Weird, huh.

Thanks in advance!

Make sure you are using the latest R12 release of dBpoweramp, also make sure that AccurateRip is enabled, if that verified the rip then there are no errors.

You say that Ape does not have the problem. Try this, install the Refernce Codec pack, on the Reference download page, for one track which has a crackling, create also in ape, then select both ape & flac files >> right click >> convert to >> [calculate crc] if both number are the same then the files are identical.

What software are you using to play the FLAC files? Does it do this when using a different media player or playing the files on another computer?

I'm using the latest Winamp with Nullsoft FLAC decoder 2.02.

I haven't tried playing the files with other players since Winamp has always worked out fine with me.

I might consider .ape files because they work without flaws and take less space, but they're so slow with Winamp when you start playing something or jump on the seeker bar.

Awful bother this.

Hence why we are confused at to why this is happening. I recommend using another player like FB2K.

Also take spoons advice about AccurateRip since that can compare your rip to other people that have ripped the same disc. If AR reports it is the same audio data, and you hear this grittiness, then there is something else going on.

I also recommend shntool and test to make sure that the audio data going onto each compressed container is identical.

Try the other players just for troubleshooting. The file might be fine and something has changed with your system. See if the file exhibits the same problem using different players or on another computer.

If you play the file more than once do you always hear the problem and always in the same place. If not then this is a playback problem.