Best program to rip CD's to FLAC files?

LOL! Well you can rest easy because the kind of audio work I do doesn't involve extracting audio from CDs (my job doesn't depend on it). It's rare that I have to deliver finalized albums to clients on CD-R these days, but when I did, Plextor drives and Plextools Professional were "it" when it came to burning CD-Rs for their reliability and ability to check for C1/C2/CU errors. EAC is not useful at all for this purpose. These days we use bit-perfect DDP most of the time (ever heard of that?) Much more reliable than burned CD-R media.

EDIT: I was asking if anyone was familiar with Plextools and if the other software mentioned was better than it at extracting audio (and if so, how?) I wasn't looking for career advice. Wow, you're a moderator??

 

EAC with windows.

I just tried the RipIt script (CDparanoia)/CDDB_get) and i like it a lot. One less thing to rely on windows.

 

I'm a big fan of dBPowerAmp CD Ripper - used to use EAC religiously, but I find the alternative faster, easier and generally better with metadata.

 

EAC does the job for me, on my last computer I had it set to rip to WAV then encode copies in OGG for portable use.

 

I prefer DBPoweramp. It gets the metadata and cover art correct more of the time. EAC can be unreliable depending which databases you use.

 

Another vote for dbpoweramp, especially as I was able to batch rip using 4 drives in my pc at the same time - got through 2000cds a lot quicker than I would have using EAC (although I did try it out first). I think it is the other features that come with dbPoweramp, such as the convertor and DSP functions that add to its value.

 

On the Mac, I recommend XLD. CLI and GUI are both supported. Great for converting audio files too. I use it to convert from FLAC to ALAC all the time.

Oh, free and open source too!

http://tmkk.undo.jp/xld/index_e.html

 

On Linux, Sound Juicer which is a GUI for the library cdparanoia using MusicBrainz for the tagging or Asunder based on cdparanoia too and using CDDB for the tagging. I use one or the other based on the tagging found and hab them configured to produce the same FLAC files. Both are based on GTK so Gnome-friendly.

 

Got questions for the more experienced people here. I use to do my CD to FLAC rips via JRiver, but been reading too much into dBpoweramp being the more accurate ripper. So did a quick test by ripping CD to 16/44.1 FLAC rips on both programs. Noticed the bitrate of songs were different for each track by only single digits (according to JRiver). Listening to the different rips, I swear that the dBpoweramp's FLACs sounded as if the mids were clearer but lacking in sub-bass when compared to JRiver's FLACs. This different is very subtle though so I thought the nervosa is getting to me.

So after reading that EAC is the other best ripper, I did an EAC rip, noticed the FLAC's bitrate was much lower compared to the others (probably 100 bitrate difference) but upon listening sounded more like JRiver's FLACs rather than dBpoweramps.

I assume that there should not be any difference between EAC and dBPoweramp considering they are use secure ripping and verify the rips via accuraterip, so I figure the differences I am hearing should be a settings difference in either ripper-programs. Or is it just JRiver not decoding dBpoweramp's rips correctly. I am wondering if anyone have encountered this before and know what the programs are doing for this difference, or does anyone know if there has been previous measurements on eAC/dBpoweramp FLAC rips and compared to the CD versions that can link for reference?

 

Have you tried taking the difference the tracks in audio editing software?

 

Cheers, SSL. I downloaded Audacity and started playing around with the plot spectrum analysis. No differences in volume within frequencies and no high frequency cutoff in all FLACs.

Downloaded bit-compare plug-in for foobar2000. Plugin found no differences in bitrate between the FLAC files and CD, except for the sample offset that is applied on EAC/dBpoweramp FLACs.

So assuming that the conversion is 100% lossless, probably differences must be found in the FLAC encoding between the programs. Probably going to pick the program that makes FLACs sounds most like the CD before doing mass archiving.

 

All programs basically use the same FLAC encoder, possibly in different release versions. However the FLAC encoder can be run at different compression levels, which affects the final bitrate. Probably EAC chooses maximum compression by default whereas Jriver and dbPoweramp do not. All of the compression levels are lossless, it's just that the highest compression level is much slower to encode. In principle the higher compression levels are also slightly slower to decode but I can't think of a practical situation where this would make a difference (even with a restricted system like a DAP I think the difference would be extremely marginal).

Since everything is lossless, none of this should make a difference to the sound. My general yardstick these days is that, if you can't quite tell if a difference is real or not, it's probably not real. I've done tests of different digital volume controls and different players and so on and on occasions managed to convince myself there might be a tiny difference, but on trying again found the results completely unreproducible. But this is not to say that for some curious reason you might not be hearing an actual difference. If you think it is real, I suggest ripping two or three albums both ways and listening to one set of rips all the way through and then the other, and seeing if you still have a clear preference. If you don't, it's probably not worth worrying about.

 

Have used EAC, dBpoweramp and a couple I can't remember. Have settled on Foobar 2000 with FLAC plugin, and error correction. They all seem to sound the same. I use Foobar as it works for my needs.

 

EAC uses the FLAC command line tool do do all encoding, so if there were a difference it is likely that you could compensate for it by adjusting the options passed to the encoder. Mine is set to level 6 compression IIRC.

 

I really wouldn't worry about how long compression takes. EAC does it while it's ripping the next track, and it only takes a few seconds, even on level 8. Here's how it runs on my fairly ancient PC, using the FLAC executable recommended by EAC.

The test file, a wav of "Snow" by The Chemical Brothers", as redbook:

$ ls -alh /cygdrive/c/snow.wav
-rwxrwx---+ 1 Administrators None 52M Feb 26 15:48 /cygdrive/c/snow.wav


Level 8:

$ time ./flac.exe c:\\snow.wav -8 -o c:\\snow.flac -f

flac 1.3.1, Copyright (C) 2000-2009 Josh Coalson, 2011-2014 Xiph.Org Foundation
flac comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. This is free software, and you are
welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions. Type `flac' for details.

snow.wav: wrote 31630212 bytes, ratio=0.584

real 0m2.390s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.000s

Level 6:

$ time ./flac.exe c:\\snow.wav -6 -o c:\\snow.flac -f

flac 1.3.1, Copyright (C) 2000-2009 Josh Coalson, 2011-2014 Xiph.Org Foundation
flac comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. This is free software, and you are
welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions. Type `flac' for details.

snow.wav: wrote 31711131 bytes, ratio=0.585

real 0m1.340s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.000s

As for decompression- it's a total non-issue. FLAC is very asymetric- that is to say that most of the work is the compression, and the decompression is almost trivially light. Players don't unpack the whole thing at once, but a bit at a time, as they go. Even a fairly cheap and puny DAP using a reference decoder shouldn't find it too computationally expensive and thus battery hogging.

Just for completeness, here's unpacking of a -8 flac:

$ time ./flac.exe c:\\snow.flac -d -o c:\\snowunpacked.flac -f

flac 1.3.1, Copyright (C) 2000-2009 Josh Coalson, 2011-2014 Xiph.Org Foundation
flac comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. This is free software, and you are
welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions. Type `flac' for details.

snow.flac: done

real 0m0.598s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.000s

..and a -6

$ time ./flac.exe c:\\snow.flac -d -o c:\\snowunpacked.flac -f

flac 1.3.1, Copyright (C) 2000-2009 Josh Coalson, 2011-2014 Xiph.Org Foundation
flac comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. This is free software, and you are
welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions. Type `flac' for details.

snow.flac: done

real 0m0.576s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.015s

It looks like the it's probably more i/o bound than anything, as it goes.

Compression of audio on a modern desktop, or even modest laptop, is trivial. Given that rippers like EAC can do it in the background while they are ripping the next track, don't worry. Pick whatever you prefer. Also, don't sweat the decoding. Things that can decode FLAC shouldn't care which level you used, even an M1 should be able to keep up with realtime decompression without needing to work hard.

 

Even an ancient low power Sansa Clip can decode FLAC level 8, it really shouldn't be an issue with modern DAPs. If it's an issue then it's the DAP.

 

I've always used dbPoweramp, never used EAC. Does EAC have same Accurate Rip type indicator to determine if you got an accurate copy?

I also like the tagging feature in dbPoweramp that finds the album and let's you choose from 4 sources prior to ripping. Can EAC do that?

Thanks!

 

Yes, EAC has a configurable error correction function that will show you how many times it attempts to re-read a given sector and how likely it is that is was successful. It also provides an overall Track Quality, which is an indicator of the read ratio required to get a 100% correct track. Finally, it reports "supsicious reads" which may indicate a bad sector that was not read correctly regardless of error correction efforts.

The configuration allows you to choose how many times EAC attempts to correct a potential read error. It will also perform a setup process to ensure that it is using the most accurate settings for a given drive.

EAC can be configured with custom database sources. I've only ever used one, I think it is called FreeDB.

 

dbPoweramp uses EAC for ripping FLACs.

 

Why would it need to do that? The FLAC encoder is a standalone program.