Best way to preserve audio fidelity when ripping?
 

Hi all

Which ways do you use and on what settings do you rip audio cd's to preserve the best fidelity?

I installed rubyripper but the multitude of options and formats is a bit baffling for a noob. Basically I want a rip thats closest to the actual CD and not a wav file.

For lossless ripping use flac.

For lossy ripping use aac or vorbis.

+1.

If you want the closest to CD, lossless is the way to go. Its exactly the same quality as the CD-DA original.

*edit- compression level doesnt matter with losselss as far as quality goes, all that higher compression will do to a lossless file is increase the CPU cycles required to decode the file.

Flac is the best of the lossless codecs IMO- wavpack is pretty good but the main 'advantage' wavpack has over flac is 'hybrid ripping'. Hybrid ripping ijust creates a small losy file and a 'correction' file that can be combined with the lossy file to recreate the original file (BTW, OptimFROG and MPEG4-SLS can also do hybrid ripping).

Monkeys audio (.ape) is another lossless codec that is farily popular, but its got the most stupid licence ever, and is outclassed in general by flac and wavpack.

The other lossless codecs are either closed source from companies your shouldnt trust (eg wma 'lossless' from MS, alac from apple, realaudio lossless from realnetworks, etc.), or ancient and lacking in features/performance compared to newer codecs (eg shorten), or have limited development and support (eg true audio).

Ogg vorbis is good, but I wouldnt touch aac with a bargepole.

http://www.vialicensing.com/licensing/aac-faq.aspx

Thanks, it seems flac is way to go. In rubyripper the parameters passed to the flac encoder is: will this suffice?

Thats fine.

By the way, "--best" is the compression level, set in levels from 1 to 8 (1 being the least compressed, 8 being the most compressed). "--best -V" is the same as "-8 -V".

Yeah, but software patents are only valid in the US, and anyone can claim that vorbis is violating their patent and they may even win.

Uhm, wav files are lossless. A wav file rip would therefore be identical to what's on the CD.

Personally, I use either LAME at -V0 or oggenc at -q 6. Both sound identical to the CD if you're human.

Way to go for research. Software patents are not 'only valid in the US'-

http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Software_pa...iki:_home_page

It not just patents, copyright is just as effective.

As for somebody accusing vorbis of violating a patent and shutting them down- unlikely to happen, and if it did it wont shut down the whole project. Just because it is possible that it could happen is not a good reason to use patented software with restictive licencing anyway.

Wav.....OK, I'll leave out the funny technical details (like you can have compressed data in a wav file).It might be 'lossless' but a .wav file is going to be about 50% bigger than a .flac encoded copy of the same file. Flac also has the advantage of having an internal checksum, proper tagging support, etc..

Odd that you are using -V0, which is targeted at aprox 245k (220-260 is the normal range of bitrates) and -q 6, which is targeted at aprox 192k. I would have thought that you would use -q 7 (224k target) or -q 8 (256k target).

I wont even go into the 'can you hear the difference' debate (well, unless things move there anyway). I will say that if you have a flac copy, I consier that a playable backup. Ripping a lossy copy, you can always convert back to CD-DA but you will never get the quality back.

In these days of cheap 1TB+ HDDs, its not like sorage space is a problem.

True, but it would be preferable to save between 30 to 50 percent size wise per CD ;)

Sorry, misread the sentence.

Anyway, if you just want to listen to it then either MP3 or Ogg Vorbis (with the settings above) are the way to go.

Please consider this also:

There are programs that you can use to test whether you can perceive the difference between the lossy file and the wav file. This is one, although installing it on Slackware might be a problem (I haven't tried). Ideally, the settings you would actually want are the worst (and least space-consuming) ones that produce files that you can't distinguish from the WAV.

the commonly accepted form when looking for the absolute best (at least on most music sharing sites would rip the audio to FLAC format with EAC http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/, and include a log file with the directory. a lot of places wont accept an album as being truly lossless without the log file.

non-Linux software >.<

Like I said above, with huge HDDs cheap I dont see much advantage to ripping to lossy formats. Or trying to get the smallest possible lossy file.

The ABX idea is good, but I'd be careful of that as well. If you tested using crappy speakers, like most computers have, you could think that bitrate XXX is as good as you need. If you upgrade sound card and/or speakers, or convert to a CD to play on a stero you might find that bitrate XXX is actually less than you want.

I'm not saying that you shouldnt rip to MP3 or Ogg, but whats good for you is not everyones choice. ;)

Rubyripper is near as it gets with linux to EAC IMO. 2 pass ripping, and log file creation like EAC.

i might have to check it out then. ive been running a vm of XP with EAC in it to do my rips, but if i can have one less reason to have that vm around, ill take it :P

Must admit I use audacity and record to flac, then I can listen to all those cherished pops, hiss and cracks. Modify the levels if necessary and cut into individual tracks. A the joys of digitizing LP's and VCR tapes.

samac