Best way to RIP CDs

[justinwynn]

What a pleasure to watch informative videos presented by someone mature who's not trying to impress or be cool. Just straight down the line engineering. You are the duck's nuts of YouTube Paul 👏

[davidtomsett]

WOW I'M FAMOUS :) !!!..this is my request, thanks Paul, if I haven't thanked you already.

[DrinkWater]

If you system is having difficulty decoding FLAC, you have an abacus for a CPU.

[NoName-toxl]

As a computer scientist i can say flac and wav are identical... if you are worried about the size reduction, dont be.
As for the possibility of sounding worse due to the extra processing to uncompress, i see your reasonining, but i see that as an extremely rare case! If that happened to you, your dac has a really really major flaw, because decompressing the flac is super simple stuff, just throw away that dac!

[billdempsey]

What everyone here seems to be missing is the fact that even Paul said the decoded bits are identical. In other words, he agrees with most of these arguments in the comments. I believe the confusion comes from the fact that he is often digressing to address the entire signal path from the media to the speaker output rather than the differences in the file format.

Even though the decoded bits are identical, it is easily possible for the final analog waveform to vary noticeably. The differences people can hear are not due to changes in the bits. Like everyone (including Paul) keeps saying, the bits are identical. The difference in sound comes from other factors. First, there can be minor changes in the amount of time between the bits during the playback. (Not decoding.) These tiny differences actually DO alter the final analog output signal which is created from the bit stream. An extremely accurate waveform comparison between the analog output signals being sent to the amplifier would show those differences. When the width of the pulse changes, the waveform changes. That's the entire premise of Pulse Width Modulation.

Another contributing factor is the hardware and software involved in processing the identical bits. Most audio circuitry does some level of filtration at various stages during the conversion process back to analog. These filters assume that the amount of time between the bits conforms to the sample rate perfectly, which would (in theory) produce an exact replica of the original waveform. This is often not the case. Digital filtration, in particular, is highly timing dependent. If the spacing changes, the effect of the filter will also change. Analog filtration can also change the sound since it is based on the controlled attenuation effect of capacitors and inductors responding to varying frequencies and amplitude within the signal. Then, there is the fact that the actual values of electronic components vary randomly within a specific tolerance range, which will also affect the output.

I'm quite certain that there are myriad other factors along the signal path which can slightly alter the analog output in a way that affects the fidelity of the output waveform to the originally recorded waveform. So, the bottom line is that, although the bits are precisely identical, the output can indeed be physically (and even audibly) different due to the influence of other factors. What really matters is whether you enjoy what you hear, and that is purely subjective. So, why pick on others who love music as much as we do?

[stephent.shearin]

Paul, I can not honestly count the number of free tweeks & improvements you’ve supplied me with! A big Thank You! Sharing is caring.

[glalih]

I intensely stare at the cd for about an hour and then write 1s and 0s in notepad++, save, and rename to wav.

(Edit:2020)
During the lockdown i have mastered the art of engraving CD by hand. I have now achieved replica quality of the original content. If the lockdowns get extended i might go so far to manually magnetize hard drive platters in order to achieve faultless source migration.


P. S. You people are one helluva community <3 im glad to be a part of it.

[TheMB]

Paul has got to be one of the most engaged CEO's I've ever seen. What a great place PS Audio must be to work.

[travis]

The correct answer is FLAC. I really don't think there is merit to the argument that a FLAC will sound worse than a WAV. I don't buy the argument about power supply fluctuations. FLAC doesn't take much more CPU to play than a WAV, especially on relatively modern hardware. Honestly a high bitrate MP3 will be almost indistinguishable from the FLAC or WAV anyway. I wouldn't use ALAC because there's no benefit to that over FLAC and it locks you into the Apple ecosystem.

[GGrev]

I haven’t had a problem decoding flac files since the early 2000s.

[dean]

I use FLAC stored on my NAS drive which I cast to my Chromecast Audio, plugged into my Cambridge audio DAC. I use Hifi Cast on Android to play the files and it's true gapless playback. The lights change accordingly with different sample rates on the DAC.

[jndominica]

Secure ripping is the most important, as the CD was designed to conceal and not report reading errors. For Windows the best program for it is CUETools. It can verify already made copies against other submissions to its online database. Then you can re-rip the ones that do not match with a secure and slow reader like EAC.

Upsampling is best done on the fly, with whatever output requirement you currently have, without inflating the file size on disk.

WAV does have metadata, but it doesn't map quite well to music tags. Sonic Foundry regions and markers seem to be well supported. I had Nero write CD index points from regions that existed in the Wav file. Current players may stick an ID3 block into the WAV file for unlimited metadata. The RIFF format can serve as a container for anything. WAV is a good format for editing. Programs that support compressed files will either convert to WAV proxy beforehand, or be laggy as they do seeking in the compressed file on the fly.

Back in the old days WAV could also be compressed with any CBR codec. That is bad because you can't see in the file manager the codec when all files have the same extension. In the Apple system this still happens, as ALAC and AAC will have the same extension.

For de-emphasis, SoX works well. You can process the CD as a disk image to avoid clicks on track boundaries, remove DC offset and boost the level while in 32-bits accuracy. Old CDs are rather quiet, and theoretically there is a reduction in SNR while de-emphasizing.

[glenncurry]

44.1Khz was selected because originally the audio was processed in one unit and storage was a video tape recorder. Originally 3/4" Umatic. Then 1/2 with Beta being most popular. 44.1Khz fits mathematically with the video signal/ line rate.

[SixDasher]

Don't rip with itunes, argh... Rip with EAC or foobar into 16/44.

[marklydon]

Only problem vaporising inspects is when the cooked bits land in your coffee and you don't notice.

[peter_aka_hamamass]

EAC to rip the CD to WAVE, TLH to convert WAVE to FLAC. Anyone who says they can hear the difference only thinks they can hear it! Don't listen to tech too much, just enjoy the music!

[darinbrunet]

Since we are discussing ripping CD's in this video, I thought I'd give a shout-out to the Linux users. "Whipper" is an excellent cli tool, and flacon is a good GUI tool for Linux (I use Arch) bit-perfect CD ripping. Nice alternative to Sound Juicer.

[marianneoelund]

WAV files are composed of RIFF chunks, and they most certainly do provide for metadata. They also accommodate compressed audio data, although this capability is rarely used. Header, Format and place-holder chunks found at the top of the file are generally quite small, 8-32 bytes.
As a rule, metadata chunks in any audio file format are placed at the end of the file, following all of the playable audio data, as they can be fairly large if they include cover art, etc.

[roygalaasen]

I thought to mention that there is an old file format called IFF that was used on the old Amiga computers back in the 80’s and 90’s, mostly for graphics, but also audio. If you look at the headers of AIFF and IFF, you will see that it is clearly built around the same system, hence it is not entirely correct to say that Apple made AIFF when Electronic Arts laid the foundation with IFF.

[IRo]

Newbie viewer; first-time comment... Enjoy watching your Q&A. I especially valued today's episode having to do with audio codec and sampling rate. Also wanted to say how much I enjoyed the episodes regarding building the new studio and unboxing of the Infinity Reference Speakers. Thanks again, Paul.