An introduction to computer audio
Ripping
Ripping is transferring the content of a CD to a hard disk.
The true audiophile worries ‘is the rip bit perfect?’
I have the feeling that the average optical drive of the average PC is more than apt to do a reliable ripping.
An impressive comparison between various rips has been made by Kent Poon.
Comparing rips made on PC and MAC using iTunes, Wavelab and EAC didn’t show any difference.
The funny thing is, that the low cost CD723 player is able to read any CD or CD-R that is not severely scratched without any interpolation or hold. You can even put it upside down, there will be zero interpolation /hold.
Uncorrected samples could only be generated by dropping the player (5cm) or by extremely scratched CDs.
Source: http://www.jitter.de
But if you want to make sure, there are two powerful rippers Exact Audio Copy (EAC for short) and dbPoweramp. Both employ all the tricks to get a bit perfect copy.
Both can be combined with AccurateRip to verify the results.
In secure mode this program either reads every audio sector at least twice or rely on extended error information that some drives are able to return with the audio data. That is one reason why the program is slower than other rippers. But by using this technique non-identical sectors are detected. If an error occurs (read or sync error), the program keeps on reading this sector, until eight of 16 retries are identical, but at maximum one, three or five times (according to the selected error recovery quality) these 16 retries are read. So, in the worst case, bad sectors are read up to 82 times! But this effort will help the program to obtain the best result by comparing all of the retries.
dbPoweramp
Nicknamed the Swiss army knife of audio, it is considered to be as good as EAC.
The philosophy behind AccurateRip is quite simple - each time an audio track is ripped (recorded by computer) it is compared with rips from other people, this allows a confidence report to be generated. The report might say that 4 other people had exactly the same results, this would guarantee your rip was without error, or the report could say that 3 other people disagree with your rip, the likely hood is that your CD has a scratch and should be cleaned.