CD Ripping question

Cheapo one will be fine, the data is stored digitally and all CD players will read exactly the same bits from the CD.

I have just ripped 400 CDs to FLAC using EAC and Mp3tag to tidy up where needed. I used a cheap internal drive on my desktop, no issues.

I am not an audiophile but these people are;

https://www.reddit.com/r/audiophile/comments/l1z55o/looking_for_an_external_cd_drive/

Save your money on crystal generated lasers and directional USB cables and spend it on Ti bolts and polymer string spokes instead.

will a more expensive ‘audiophile drive’ yield noticably better results?

I bet the answer to this depends whether you ask a pretentious **** or not 😀

CDs use a digital format. If the CD drive can read the disks, the data that your computer receives will be identical, regardless of the CD drive. The quality will depend on the compression algorithm. However, better quality CD drives might be able to read damaged discs that a cheap one can't (I don't know if this is still a problem, it used to be an issue back when CD-R disks were still new.)

In my experience, Windows will plug and play any CD drive. If you are using a Mac, check that it is compatible. My portable drive was given to me by a friend who has a Mac and found that his brand new CD drive would not work with a Mac.

I guess the only possible answer is a better drive may have a better laser capable or reading through scratches and stuff. Or not. I dunno, I'm making that up base on a conversation I had in a market in Shanghai in about 2003;

Do you want to buy DVD? (Guy selling knock off just released movies)

Chinese DVDs are really, really bad!

LOL. Interesting sales pitch! He was saying I needed a good laser to read his crappy DVDs. I bought neither...

is a better drive may have a better laser capable or reading through scratches

That is mainly handled by two design features:

1) The laser hits the out layer defocussed and is focussed by the plastic surface layer onto the miniscule data bit below, which means that there is good optical tolerance to scratches in the surface. Same as moving a camera up close to a mesh fence, the meshes vanish and you can focus past them.

2) Digital error correction in the saved data, which can correct for a certain number of read errors.

Exactaudiocopy does a bunch of stuff to ensure the ripped copy is perfect.

I'm out of touch with what drives are better these days (I did my collection over a decade ago), but "better" means it can rip accurately, faster. A worse one will just take longer to get there. I have a cheap Samsung external DVD drive in a drawer for the odd disc now, it's slower but gets there just fine.

Yeah I ripped most of my cds years ago when the squeezebox was the only game in town to stream music...it was all on a 1st generation imac G5 which has been lost. Then I sort of gave up with streaming from a local host as services started appearing - why rip when you can use Deezer or Apple music etc

Recently though I've got increasingly disinchanted with the amount of data we give these services and how they remove versions and put remasters in their place etc and feel like I'd like to take control of my own music -  I also don't need Tim Cook knowing what i'm playing and how often. So I have started buying CD's again and thought maybe the ripping world had moved on but it looks like its the same old game....which is fine.

or will a more expensive ‘audiophile drive’ yield noticably better results?

Yes @zilog6128 haha  I realise that a lot of this is snakeoil which is why I put the word in quotes.....however clearly there is a huge difference in normal CD players and it isn't all down to the DAC. I'm not saying I need a sheilded powersupply and an Innuos network switch here, but maybe spending £150 rather than £20 on a CD drive might make a difference and if I'm going to invest a lot of time ripping then i want to do it right

however clearly there is a huge difference in normal CD players and it isn’t all down to the DAC.

I would suggest almost all of it is.

+1 for Mp3tag

Audio CDs are indeed digital and are designed to handle errors all the time so there shouldn't be any real difference between a cheapo and an expensive reader if the CDs are all in good condition.  If they aren't though you might find though that a more expensive reader is able to track the disk better and reduce the amount of work the error correction has to do so you don't get any hard errors rather than just the correctable ones.  I'm not sure I'd want to spend 150eur on one though.  I tend to agree that it is most likely that the more expensive drives have a better DAC assuming that they are designed to actually play the audio rather than just read the drive

Bob Stuart (Meridian Audio - knows a thing or two about this subject) says "ROM drives recover the data from computer discs perfectly. Loading a computer program rarely fails due to the ROM drive. Therefore, extracting the data from a CD or DVD can be done without error".

Seeing as this thread is here... I've been using Exact Audio Copy to rip CDs for a while but at some point fairly recently it seems to have stopped being able to download CDDB information and I've been entering it all by hand.

Is this something that's likely to be fixed by updating my copy of EAC or similar, or is it something that's stopped working generally?

 Loading a computer program rarely fails due to the ROM drive.

As far as I know CD audio on original CDs is written according to the 'red-book' standard.  Computer programs I think are written using 'yellow-book' which is designed for data rather than audio.  I believe, and I may be wrong, that the difference is the level of error correction available as at some point it is good enough on audio to have a click or have the bad data interpolated where with data it needs to be exactly correct, no errors, so you add more error correction.  For the record I'm not an audiophile, just there is a difference between audio and data CDs in the way they are created as far as I know.  There is also an 'orange book' which is for CDs that you write using a writeable CD

You are right. Both can use multiple reads to ensure data is extracted accurately but audio can be interpolated if necessary without significant audible effects (to a point). The audio stream from an audio CD is buffered (i.e. playback is not instantaneous as with vinyl or tape) which means the output can be constructed from multiple reads as with file reads from a data CD.

I think what Bob Stuart is alluding to is that a "standard" CD drive is perfectly capable of extracting data from an audio CD, some "snake oil audio specific device" is not required.

TLDR: If you are using EAC then doesn't matter what drive you are using. EAC aims to produce bit perfect copies of a song regardless of the quality of the cd drive.

Slightly longer version:

CD/DVD drives often make mistakes in reading a CD/DVD, it is not a perfect system. For a disc containing data there are robust error detection and correction algorithms that will ask the drive to re-read a sector if it detects there was a fault, this results in incredibly small amount of faults and errors.

For a disc containing audio there are still error detection algorithms but they are not as robust as the systems used when reading data. With audio you can interpolate the data with reasonable accuracy without having a break in the audio. Those errors that occur when reading an audio cd are pretty small so while some drives are more accurate than others the audible difference is very small. I doubt I could hear any difference...

But when you are using EAC for copying a CD as opposed to listening to the cd live it, EAC effectively applies the more robust error detection and correction algorithms to ensure you have a bit perfect copy of the CD. On a less accurate CD drive this might end up with slightly longer copy times because the drive had to read some stuff multiple times compared to a more accurate drive but the end result means that all drives will produce the same result. Note the extra time taken by a less accurate drive is going to be tiny and negligible.

Personally if I wanted CD rips I'd just torrent it. It's not the 1990s any more. There's little reason to reinvent the wheel and I see no moral issues with downloading something I already own.

Though what I actually did is create a Spotify playlist of all my CDs.

.however clearly there is a huge difference in normal CD players and it isn’t all down to the DAC.

You're going from a digital source to a digital destination, there is no DAC involved here.

Digital audio is data. Data is 1s and 0s. If you are ripping lossless then there is no concept of better 1s and 0s, it's either correct data or it isn't. If you are compressing the data then your quality will hang on the bitrate you've compressed to.

(AIUI, etc etc)

Personally if I wanted CD rips I’d just torrent it. It’s not the 1990s any more. There’s little reason to reinvent the wheel and I see no moral issues with downloading something I already own.

This too. If you've paid for it, you aren't depriving the artist of anything by downloading copies that somebody else ripped.

<cougarbaiting>

I want to rip some of my CD collection to store on my NAS

If it's networked, you are using Cat6 cable, right?

And directional HDMI cables?

</cougarbaiting>

"You’re going from a digital source to a digital destination, there is no DAC involved here."

Yes obviously, thats why I said in my post that its  not ALL down to the DAC and so maybe there may be differences in the quality of the CD transport and laser on a cheaper transport.

"If you are compressing the data then your quality will hang on the bitrate you’ve compressed to."

Not sure thats true - it will however depend on the quality of the software used to rip bit perfect data. Flac is 'compressed but lossless' if I understand it correctly - the files are about half the size of a Wav file

Creating a spotify/Deezer playlist won't work for all the reasons I've outlined above but torrenting it is certainly a viable option - locating the master and torrenting that sounds like a plan......hmmmm

<cougarbaiting>

That really could be taken out of context.

Yes obviously, thats why I said in my post that its not ALL down to the DAC and so maybe there may be differences in the quality of the CD transport and laser on a cheaper transport.

If you're ripping, as opposed to listening, it isn't that it's "not ALL down to the DAC" but rather that it has as much to do with the DAC as it does to do with your toaster.

Not sure thats true – it will however depend on the quality of the software used to rip bit perfect data.

It will absolutely depend on the quality of the encoder yes, but encoding is a mature technology and it'll likely have less of an impact than factors such as sample rate.

If you’re ripping, as opposed to listening, it isn’t that it’s “not ALL down to the DAC” but rather that it has as much to do with the DAC as it does to do with your toaster.

@winston I understood what you were getting at.

FWIW, i spent a bit more and got a better drive.
Not because i wanted the "better quality", but because i couldn't be arsed spending weeks ripping CDs at 12-16x speed.

So i got one that would do 64x speed. It's also quieter than the one i had in the previous computer.
Which is nice.

How long is it taking to rip a CD with the new drive ? I am using an old external USB one that is a bit temperamental.

What does exact copy do that windows media player doesn't ?

Just ripping my CD collection (again) to FLAC to try and run on a NAS so any tips appreciated to make it less painful.

CDs will get boxed up to and stored in the loft ,.

Personally if I wanted CD rips I’d just torrent it. It’s not the 1990s any more.

You assume most torrents are labelled right, in the correct format and the version the user wants.

If I've learned anything over the years it's that you're lucky to hit 2/3 of those conditions (if it ever actually downloads because there are 4 people leeching/seeding stuck at 89%). Set it all up, let the encoder do all the work and you only have to swap discs ensuring you get the exact copy you want.

Just ripping my CD collection (again) to FLAC to try and run on a NAS so any tips appreciated to make it less painful.

again? Why? This is definitely a case of ‘get it right first time’ to avoid the tedium of swapping discs and checking tags and artwork. If you have the files, just copy them to the NAS.

The last disc I backed up was a copy of NIN Pretty Hate Machine. It took barely any time using an LG CD/DVD/BD USB drive plugged into my Mac. 🤷🏻‍♂️ maybe a couple of minutes? Less than 5.

I did it to determine if the magic of CD and lossless was any better than AAC from a download. It wasn’t. CD off to the charity shop now. Where most of my old ones went back in the day.

My question is that as my laptop doesn’t have a CD drive, will any cheapo external USB drive work (amazon @£20) or will a more expensive ‘audiophile drive’ yield noticably better results?

It likely will work just fine. There are however some drives which do have problems ripping because some truncate data on gapless CDs, are known to misread in some circumstances, handle errors incorrectly etc. The sound quality will likely be just fine, but you'd get a click at the start or end of a track (for example).

EAC has a feature called AccurateRip which compares your rip to other peoples.
As long as AccurateRip comes back with confidence score of 5, then you can be confident that the file is perfect.
You need to follow the instructions here to set it up:
https://www.exactaudiocopy.de/en/index.php/overview/basic-technology/accurate-rip/

I did it to determine if the magic of CD and lossless was any better than AAC from a download. It wasn’t. CD off to the charity shop now. Where most of my old ones went back in the day.

Surely that only depends on the quality of your source? I can definitely tell the difference between stuff I've ripped before at "good" quality in both MP3 and OGG formats and an original CD and that's not even going near the shite that Spotify push out.

I mean, yeah, I'm sure there are plenty of places you could download decent lossless copies as long as you don't mind paying for it again.

Just bought an Asus Zendrive for less than £35. At least its a proper make and has USB-C connector.

And better still its in audiophile grade gold colour!

As far as sound quality goes, I can clearly hear the difference between CD quality lossless (or a CD) and a lower bitrate AAC file or MP3 on my stereo system which is not even very expensive - its harder to make the distinction on the soundbar in the lounge or a bluetooth speaker. However through even cheap but reasonable headphones like the Grado 80X its very obvious.

How long is it taking to rip a CD with the new drive ?

Been a while since i did it (Everything is already ripped now, has been for several years) but it was around a minute for an album. Ripping directly to FLAC, gave enough time to check the labelling and then set it going to rip to a lossy format and to back up as well.

Did the same with all my movies (BD/DVD) too.

Personally if I wanted CD rips I’d just torrent it. It’s not the 1990s any more.

Depends if it's even available. I know about 20% of what i ripped wasn't on Spotify (at the time, 5-6 years ago) and any other "official" source would have cost me an ongoing fee. A good chunk of it still isn't available. Acoustic sets, or recordings from concerts/gigs etc. Or stuff they've only performed once or twice.

The stuff i could find and torrent wasn't up to much quality wise (probably torrented from a tape recording of the track on the radio...)

And it's done now. So i'm not going to stress about it.