How difficult would it be to add EAC's 'secure ripping' strategy to our akrip-based CD reader? Is this a lot of work? I'm curious, because this could turn fb2k into high-q ripping+encoding solution.

Quick guess: never going to happen unless someone writes a plugin for it. Foobar is intended for an audio playback only application.

This does not really answer my question. It is my understanding as well that it would be a third-party effort. I'm simply wondering on the complexity of such a project.

But we can already rip (insecurely) and encode with fb2k. Simply couple the CD reader with Case's CLI encoder.

Really hard since EAC is closed source.
perhaps cdda-paronia..

True, EAC's code is unavailable, but the method isn't entirely unclear. An excerpt from EAC.TXT:


I'm not sure if this process is fully explained, but it doesn't seem too involved.

The method is about on par with ripping a CD a hundred times, and then compiling the images into a single, final image.

P.S. I've never actually ripped a CD with EAC that sounded better than the CDEX equivalent, and yes, I've actually compared.

Use the cdex src and make a foobar plugin ?

Use EAC or CDEX for ripping and foobar for playing?

That's the way I go about it.

yes, prolly the best solution

Uninteresting.

akrip already has a cheap secure mode, but it is disabled in the CD reader plug-in. What part of "audio player" don't you people understand? Has anyone out there posted their CD ripping desires to the Winamp Wish-list forum? FFS.

I've been using EAC for about 2 years. It's great, but outdated.

Everything I need I can already do with several steps on different apps. But ideally, I'd like to rip, encode, tag, replaygain, and move files automatically in one go.

Maybe EAC's author can be persuaded to create an API for EAC. One can only dream.

This thread does not make any dev requests. But since there are a lot of third-party component developers here, I am interested in their thoughts on the implementation of a secure ripper other than EAC, perhaps one that can take advantage of fb2k's other great functionality.

This is not a wishlist. If you're not interested, don't post. Out of sight, out of mind.

Encoding on the fly also tends to make ripping rather insecure, but maybe that's just my opinion. I also haven't ripped any CDs in over two years. (Nor have I listened to any in that much time, not counting people in other rooms who must blast their music at deafening levels.)

I guess I should not be participating in this topic. By all means, rip and encode with Foobar2000. For some reason, what with this topic, I had you figured for more of a MusicMatch person.

So just because its old its not worth using? Sorry but make yuor arguments more logical, its not like development of EAC has stopped.

Let me clarify: It's a great ripper, but lacks certain features, such as auto-replaygain.

Hey, there's no need for personal insults. I think you've made it clear that you don't like ripping with foobar. Let's leave it at that.

Im sure you could use wapet and replaygain.exe, not something i've tried though.



Well I just don't think it's foobar place to rip songs, it is to play songs, there is lots i could say but i won't bother.

[QUOTE=VLSI,Apr 23 2003 - 08:23 AM] [/QUOTE]
I've been using EAC for about 2 years. It's great, but outdated.

Everything I need I can already do with several steps on different apps. But ideally, I'd like to rip, encode, tag, replaygain, and move files automatically in one go.

Maybe EAC's author can be persuaded to create an API for EAC. One can only dream. [/QUOTE]
1) new version of EAC today! 0.95pb1, see news forum...http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/

2) it is true, you can not replaygain with EAC but you can rip, encode, tag and move files automatically in one go and more more more...
ideally rip with eac and replaygain , masstagger etc etc with foobar.

3) of corse you can persuade Andre to create an API for foobar , but why?

from italian popular sagess:
when one dream, one not take fish!

I think a better solution to this problem wouldn't be a third party component to Foobar, but instead a standalone program.

I've been dreaming of a standalone program that allows quick and easyREX quality rips with a click of the button. The program would securely rip the CD (cdparanoia seems the best option because EAC being closed source), keep a log of any errors or problems that occured, encode to MPC quality 7 (with the commandline encoder most likely, so you could quickly upgrade to SV8 or a newer version), then make a CUE sheet for the CD, make a playlist for the resulting files, calculate the replaygain information, and then create an md5 sum for each resulting file and save that together in a text file. This would all be automatic once you put a CD in, retrieved and checked the tagging information from FreeCDDB, and hit a single button (something like tkcOggRipper).

Another description would be something easy like Audiograbber, only actually providing really really nice results.

Yep, I've played with it. No major new features other than multi-language support.


Moving files doesn't work with absolute paths. My music directory tree is on a separate volume.


What makes EAC formidable is it's secure ripping capabilities. An API would allow others to write front-ends that provide customized automation.

1) eac has all rip features what you want, music match not has the sames.

2) it is not true, you can choose your music directory where you want, go to eac options, directories : for exemple enter d:\dream music\fish
please read before saying noncorrect things.

3)Of corse you can persuade Andre to create an API for foobar...

I don't use MusicMatch and never will. Why are we talking about MusicMatch?


That's not what the 'Naming scheme' tooltip says. You can read it for yourself.


I'll suggest it to him. If he thinks it's a good idea and has time to work on it (though I doubt it), we'll be lucky. If not, I may decide to write my own from scratch. I have played with the ASPI interface before, but not with accurate-stream & c2 stuff.

Isn't the source code for the current CD Player plugin published in the SDK? If so, that'd be a great starting point for a more advanced ripper for FB2K. As for the C2 stuff, I'd forget it. I'm reasonably certain I've read here that few CD drives report it with anything approaching security.

you can choose naming scheme AND directorie , but in a different window , go to eac options, DIRECTORIES.

my directorie d:\muzik
my naming scheme: %A\%A% -%C\%A - (%N) %C - %T

result:
d:\muzik\artist\artist - album \artist - (tracknumber) album - titre

Yeah, I could use the akrip source. I'll need to see whether it's workable, or whether writing a new lib is faster.

Thanks for the tip. I should have known better.

it's not supposed to sound better, it's just supposed to be as identical to the original as possible

There's no point in being truer to the original if it's not a percievable difference. Especially when the track is about to be run through a lossy compressor.

Try the following. Take a PNG file. Add a little noise. Encode both the original and the noised files with JPEG. The noise will typically give JPEG more problems than the un-noised file, be larger, et cetera. The bit-perfect rip will have less noise because there were no errors in the rip stream.

Most of the rip errors will end up being much lower than the loudness of the file if the drive is doing any sort of error correction, and the noise may be masked. But it will still affect the encode, probably negatively. I notice an increase of about 20kbps when I'm encoding MPCs from an AAD (contains analog mastering steps) CD instead of a DDD (purely digital mastering) CD, on similar material. The difference here is in a little (probably imperceptible) noise.

If psychoacoustic models were perfect, your assertion holds true. But they aren't, and the noise confuses them.

I guess it depends on how much noise you're talking about. I still believe that if the noise is below the threshold of hearing, it won't affect the compression significantly. (A good model should throw away noise below the threshold of hearing.)

The way I figure is if your about to encode your music with a lossy compressor (or lossless) for that matter you might as well try to have the most bit perfect original to start with. I use Plextor's Ripper with C2 Error correction on my Liteon for clean CDs (not much scratches) and EAC Secure for scratched up CDs.

I would never use an all in one solution when perfect separate alternatives exist.

voltron

If I had a really scratched CD, I might consider using EAC. (Of course, on a really scratched up CD, the errors are audible.) But I keep my CDs in good condition, so I don't think there's any benefit to using EAC and letting it take three years to complete.

Just out of curiousity, what do you use then?

I don't usually use EAC secure mode anyway, I use burst test & copy. If the CRCs match, it is supposedly more secure than just copy secure (without test). If I don't get matching CRCs on first attempt, I resort to secure mode, but that's only ever on really badly scratched CDs.

Anyway, I agree with voltron, programs that attempt to do everything usually do everything badly.

I haven't ripped any CDs in a while (because my motherboard is borked and can't access my CD drives), but normally, I use CDex. I just extract as wav, compress using Lame command-line, and tag based on the name (using a little program I wrote for that purpose).

I haven't used EAC in a long time now. I never saw any real advantage, so I stopped using it.