I'm using abcde (which itself uses cdparanoia) to rip cds. I'm using it on two different computers and I have created flac, mp3, ogg, etc. formats.

Whenever I rip cds the quality and sound is altered from the original. Why is this happening and where should I look to change this? my abcde.conf doesn't have anything radical in it and I can't find anything there that looks like the problem.

I can hear a MUCH higher quality when playing cds from the computer as opposed to listening to the files that I have ripped and created from them with abcde.

thanks for any help

Determining when exactly the quality is lost seems like a good start for solving your problem. I'd recommend to invoke cdparanoia from the CLI and rip one track to wav. Keep an eye on console to see if cdparanoia issues any error messages, use -v to make it more verbose. Then listen that wav you just created, does it sound worse than CD?

thanks Emerson,

I found that alsamixer was only allowing my cds to play at a certain volume.
At a higher volume, my ripped music tracks didn't sound too good because my laptop's amplifier and speakers can't produce good sound at high volume, not because of anything abcde or cdparanoia were doing