Ripping yarns

Ripping... The bete noir of digital audio!

The one thing one needs to do if switching to a streaming setup is rip your CDs, unless your CD player has a digital output, which mine doesn't (thanks Naim!). Obviously, one doesn't want to lose quality or invest lots of time in loading them onto hard disk in a manner which later has to be redone. If it takes 10 minutes to rip a CD, 1000 CDs will take 10,000 minutes or a Bloody Long Time basically, not something that one wants to repeat!

So I've selected

• FLAC as a format for home-ripped CDs; I'll probably accept other formats for HD downloads, but may even convert them to FLAC for easier consumption
• XLD as the ripping tool

Sounds good right? Marv. But...

I started off ripping a couple of CDs. XLD produces a pretty thorough report on the quality of the rip, and it's pretty scary! 000s of block retries, jitter recoveries and the mysteries of AccurateRip!

It turns out that CDs are pretty flakey as a digital medium - which begs the question, "Why don't programs provided on CD fail because they have so many bit errors that the code is defective?". 

Anyway, AccurateRip has a database of hash values for tracks that people have ripped over time. The ripping program looks up the hash it's generated for the current track, and checks to see if anyone else got that value for the specific CD and track. Simples - online voting effectively! So quite a few CDs of mine seem to rip ok, but lots more don't... I end up with a disk with sometimes 0 AccurateRip-approved rips! What's that about?! And what do I do next? I've tried re-ripping, but that doesn't always work although there are sometimes improvements.

XLD does a test rip before the actual rip, and generates its own hash for each, and compares them. It also says if it gets an unrecoverable error, which fortunately none of my CDs has had. So, I basically re-rip the tracks that either don't get an AccurateRip OK or for which the test/live rips have different hash values. That seems to work pretty well, the test/live rip hashes often end up being the same after a few goes (!).  But still no AccurateRip OK. Hey ho. Would I ever get one? Who knows?

Here's a sample log, with my comments in bold:

X Lossless Decoder version 20151214 (149.1)

XLD extraction logfile from 2016-05-04 21:17:29 +0100

Thomas Dolby / The Flat Earth

Used drive : MATSHITA DVD-R   UJ-898 (revision HC10)

Media type : Pressed CD

Ripper mode             : XLD Secure Ripper

Disable audio cache     : OK for the drive with a cache less than 1375KiB

Make use of C2 pointers : YES

Read offset correction  : 102

Max retry count         : 40

Gap status              : Analyzed, Appended (except HTOA)

TOC of the extracted CD

     Track |   Start  |  Length  | Start sector | End sector 

    ---------------------------------------------------------

        1  | 00:00:00 | 04:56:63 |         0    |    22262   

        2  | 04:56:63 | 06:40:59 |     22263    |    52321   

        3  | 11:37:47 | 05:35:47 |     52322    |    77493   

        4  | 17:13:19 | 05:22:69 |     77494    |   101712   

        5  | 22:36:13 | 04:55:73 |    101713    |   123910   

        6  | 27:32:11 | 05:40:20 |    123911    |   149430   

        7  | 33:12:31 | 04:17:43 |    149431    |   168748   

        8  | 37:29:74 | 04:44:23 |    168749    |   190071   

        9  | 42:14:22 | 04:14:71 |    190072    |   209192   

       10  | 46:29:18 | 07:17:29 |    209193    |   241996   

       11  | 53:46:47 | 04:05:74 |    241997    |   260445   

       12  | 57:52:46 | 05:03:24 |    260446    |   283194   

       13  | 62:55:70 | 03:30:50 |    283195    |   298994   

       14  | 66:26:45 | 06:17:29 |    298995    |   327298   

       15  | 72:43:74 | 04:41:62 |    327299    |   348435   

AccurateRip Summary (DiscID: 002b925c-01e9d3d4-0312250f)

    Track 01 : OK (v1+v2, confidence 90/90)

    Track 02 : NG (total 88 submissions)

    Track 03 : NG (total 89 submissions)

    Track 04 : NG (total 87 submissions)

    Track 05 : NG (total 89 submissions)

    Track 06 : NG (total 89 submissions)

    Track 07 : NG (total 90 submissions)

    Track 08 : NG (total 87 submissions)

    Track 09 : NG (total 87 submissions)

    Track 10 : NG (total 88 submissions)

    Track 11 : NG (total 88 submissions)

    Track 12 : NG (total 87 submissions)

    Track 13 : NG (total 87 submissions)

    Track 14 : NG (total 88 submissions)

    Track 15 : NG (total 88 submissions)

        ->1 track accurately ripped, 14 tracks not  <--- Hmm, some work required!

All Tracks

    Album gain               : -3.33 dB

    Peak                     : 0.998871

    Statistics

        Read error                           : 0

        Jitter error (maybe fixed)           : 91

        Retry sector count                   : 100097

        Damaged sector count                 : 0

Track 01

    Filename : /Users/john/Music/The Flat Earth/01 - Dissidents.flac

    Pre-gap length : 00:02:00

    Track gain               : -1.59 dB

    Peak                     : 0.948547

    CRC32 hash (test run)    : 8F33E56F  <--- Hurray!!

    CRC32 hash               : 8F33E56F  <

    CRC32 hash (skip zero)   : 0C3F72AC

    AccurateRip v1 signature : 8D6FA5FD

    AccurateRip v2 signature : A2559C3A

        ->Accurately ripped (v1+v2, confidence 47+43/90)  <--- Even more hurray!

    Statistics

        Read error                           : 0

        Jitter error (maybe fixed)           : 0

        Retry sector count                   : 4   <--- That's pretty low...

        Damaged sector count                 : 0

Track 02

    Filename : /Users/john/Music/The Flat Earth/02 - The Flat Earth.flac

    Pre-gap length : 00:01:04

    Track gain               : -0.36 dB

    Peak                     : 0.998871

    CRC32 hash (test run)    : 7412B32B  <---- I'll take that...

    CRC32 hash               : 7412B32B  <

    CRC32 hash (skip zero)   : 40C7165D

    AccurateRip v1 signature : D2E5494B

    AccurateRip v2 signature : 76A99054

        ->Rip may not be accurate (total 88 submissions).  <-- No AccurateRip hit

    Statistics

        Read error                           : 0

        Jitter error (maybe fixed)           : 10

        Retry sector count                   : 9270  <-- Ooh...

        Damaged sector count                 : 0

Track 03

    Filename : /Users/john/Music/The Flat Earth/03 - Screen Kiss.flac

    Pre-gap length : 00:02:61

    Track gain               : -2.78 dB

    Peak                     : 0.878052

    CRC32 hash (test run)    : 812F557B  <--- Oh dear, think I'll try that again

    CRC32 hash               : 9CF1E8A0  <--- until it's consistent...

        ->Rip may not be accurate.

    CRC32 hash (skip zero)   : 7A14C203

    AccurateRip v1 signature : 283C5FEC

    AccurateRip v2 signature : A86C9E81

        ->Rip may not be accurate (total 89 submissions).

    Statistics

        Read error                           : 0

        Jitter error (maybe fixed)           : 17

        Retry sector count                   : 7771

        Damaged sector count                 : 0

Some inconsistencies found

End of status report