Comments on: CD Audio Extraction

By: Marko Zavodjenje

Marko Zavodjenje — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 10:24:55 +0000

Very informative. Thanx

By: Mike Brown

Mike Brown — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 09:42:29 +0000

By design (after a 'manual TOC detection' feature was removed), EAC can only read pre-emphasis flags from the disc's TOC, not the subcode, so on some discs it will erroneously report no pre-emphasis (certain very old Pink Floyd CDs, for example, only have the flags in subcode). However, even when the flags are set in the TOC, EAC only uses this info to know whether to put PRE flags in a cue sheet, if you choose to generate one. The extracted audio is not modified in any way. As for how to apply de-emphasis, you can use EQ or filters, but in my experience, even the good ones can be noisy and/or inaccurate. Convolution with the proper impulse works better, as does software specially written to apply de-emphasis to the extracted WAVs. The pre-emphasis article in the Hydrogenaudio Wiki will get you going in the right direction.

By: Carlton Bale

Carlton Bale — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 16:03:03 +0000

Thanks Marty. Great point about compilations and the confusion that can cause. That is something I need to fix as I have way too many one-song-wonders showing up in my artist list. I didn’t realize Sonos had added the feature to display either album artist or artist – nice feature and I’ll definitely be using it.

By: Marty

Marty — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 14:50:50 +0000

This is all very helpful and is consistent with my experience. I have a Ready NAS NV, Sonos and used dbpoweramp with power pack to rip to FLAC. I happen to use tag and rename for cleaning up tags.

I do want to point out one caveat to the idea that “artist” and “album artist” should always be the same.

If you have compilation albums, you will get what is often referred to as “one hit clutter” in your artist list in sonos or other players. Every artist, even if they have one song in your collection, will show up in your artist list making it hard to find what you want. SONOS has a great feature that allow you to view your artists by looking at the artist tag or the album artist tag and to choose whether you want to see these so called contributing artists in a list.

If you want to keep down the clutter, for compilations, such as a blues collection where every song is by a different artist, you mark the album as a compilation in the ripper, keep each song artist in the artist tag, and then name the “album artist” tag “various blues”, for example. With this approach in sonos you have the option of seeing all the artists names or a narrower list. By setting compilation albums to (use album artists),in the artist view, you will have an artist called “various blues.” Under that artist you will find album names and then see individual artist names associated with the individual tracks. In the contributing artist view, you’ll see all the artists. I also had a lot of kids cds too and some of them were compilations. Making them findable w/o clutter was a trick.

You need to play around to see how it works for you. There is also some good advice on the SONOS forums.

By: Carlton Bale

Carlton Bale — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 12:14:55 +0000

William,

If you are using FLAC, this setting shouldn’t matter as FLAC retains the original bitrate. But just because I’m paranoid, I set it to the maximum value. 320 kbps was the highest and it appears 1024 now is, so put that value in, just in case.

By: William Trotter

William Trotter — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 20:56:33 +0000

I just installed EACh V0.99 prebeta 5
and walked through your very informative
tutorial. Everything more or less made
sense except the bit rate setting on
the EAC –> Compression options –> External compression
page. Your tutorial shows setting this to 320 kBit/s
when as much as 1024 kBit/s is available. A prompt
says only that 128 kBit/s is recommended.

Is it better to use the higher setting? Or is 320 kBit/s
optimal?

For what it’s worth, my goal is make very accurate
rips.

Thanks for answering what may well be a dumb
question.

Tom Trotter

By: Keith

Keith — Sun, 30 May 2010 06:29:40 +0000

Thanks again Carlton for your help. I think it is an issue wuth the NAS or Sonos because I did as you said and mapped a drive but am still getting error message,so I’m just burning to computer and then drag and dropping in NAS till I sort it out . I will let you know what the end result is BTY Thanks for the excellant DbPoweramp tutorial

Keith

By: How to Configure dBpoweramp for Bit-Perfect CD Audio Ripping | CarltonBale.com

Fri, 28 May 2010 02:03:06 +0000

[...] It is possible to achieve the same results using the free software Exact Audio Copy (see this post for configuration details), but I find dBpoweramp to be easier to configure, easier to use, has a fantastic file format [...]

By: Carlton Bale

Carlton Bale — Thu, 27 May 2010 20:29:23 +0000

Not sure this is a dBpoweramp issue, probably has something to do with the NAS and network shares. Your best best is to map a drive letter to that shared folder and see if that works.

By: Keith

Keith — Thu, 27 May 2010 19:08:48 +0000

Hi Carlton
Ran into snall proplem and was hoping for some guidance. I have been using DbPoweamp and ripping in flac format to a western digital external harddrive just as a temp situation till I had set up my ReadyNas Duo for networking thru the house. I set up the ReadyNas and it come with some presetup folders one of which was Media, which had pictures Etc as a sub folders.I set up a folder under Media called music and was able to drag and drop my ripped files to it from my other hard drive and also able to access them from my Sonos music system. The problem is when I try to rip directly to Nas clicking on the file music under the Nas directory and setting it as the file destination I get an error message on DpPoweramp saying failed because path Music cannot be found. Any insight you might have would be really appreciated,

Thanks Again

Keith

By: Keith

Keith — Mon, 24 May 2010 19:00:35 +0000

Hi Kurt

Thanks for your input .I already got started with DbPoweramp and am pretty happy with the results and ease of use. I will take a look into EAC and check it out.

Thanks
Keith

By: Kurt

Kurt — Sat, 22 May 2010 07:39:06 +0000

Hi Keith,

Concerning the choice of software: I use Exact Audio Copy to put CD’s on hard disk. EAC incoporates FLAC, so the compression in done within EAC. For Playback, I find MediaMonkey truly wonderful, and it will also handle the Flac files made by EAC. Quality wise, there is no loss here.

Greetings, Kurt

By: Keith

Keith — Fri, 21 May 2010 17:31:10 +0000

Thanks very much Carlton and thanks for your advice on dbpoweramp I am learning my way around it but am already enjoying the product alot Gonna spend the weekend going thru my CD’s and ripping.

Thanks this site is great

Keith

By: Carlton Bale

Carlton Bale — Fri, 21 May 2010 13:32:46 +0000

Keith, Sonos only uses Track Gain for Replay Gain, but it won’t hurt to select both. Track Gain sets the volume offset based on the peak sound level within a single track; album gain sets it for all songs on the album based on the peak sound level for the loudest track on album. Typically, there is not much difference between the two.

By: Keith

Keith — Fri, 21 May 2010 09:25:49 +0000

Okay guy’s i am trying to keep questions to a minimum but I’m stuck on one of the options in dbpoweramp and that is should I have Replay gain checked as both calculate track gain and album gain when ripping to flac I don’t seem to understand the differance so I’m wondering if I should have both checked if using on a Sonos system I apoligize for the newbie questions Just want to get it right

Thanks again for your patience

Keith

By: Keith

Keith — Wed, 19 May 2010 15:39:11 +0000

Thanks very much for the input. dbpoweramp is the way I’m gonna go so that I end up with the most accurate rips. I apoligize in advance for what I know will be several more questions Will try to keep it to a miniumum Thanks very much again

Keith

By: Carlton Bale

Carlton Bale — Wed, 19 May 2010 12:55:00 +0000

If you want the most accurate rips possible, you need a program that supports AccurateRip and lossless codecs. Your only two options are Exact Audio Copy and dBpoweramp Music Converter. Of the two, dBMC is the easiest to use. I use the PowerPack version, which supports secure ripping (go to options and enable Secure Ripping and AccurateRip – it takes care of the rest.) There is also the Reference Version with Ultra Secure ripping, which is better at recovering from heavily damaged CDs.

If you are more concerned about ease-of-use, MediaMonkey is a great all-in-one program and will give high quality rips using lossless codes, but will not be bit-perfect to the original CD as AccurateRip is not supported.

By: Keith

Keith — Wed, 19 May 2010 08:01:05 +0000

Hi firedog I have a followup question before embarking on this task as a newbie Any thoughts on media monkey as a way to an easier interface for me as I’m new to this or even Easy cd-da coverter or am i gonna miss out on something. Only asking cos media monkey seems like an easy solution without the knowledge curve BUT if you feel dbpoweramp is the way to go I will spend the time for a superior product

Thanks for your impuit on this and tomorrow I will imbark on whatever you think is a better and secuirer way to go

only asking cos Media Monkey seems like a easier interface being new to this but if poweramp is the most accurate then thats the way to go

Thank you so much

Keith

By: Keith

Keith — Mon, 17 May 2010 17:35:56 +0000

Thanks again firedog I hope I don’t drive you guys crazy with questions once I get up and running but it’s great to know that thers a place for answers where people are knowledgable and patient Will let you know how I make out

Thanks again

Keith

By: firedog

firedog — Mon, 17 May 2010 17:22:09 +0000

Sorry for the confusion, the program will do the offset itself,I think it does it when you check the various options.

Every disc player has its own unique bit of delay, that’s what setting the offset is. It allows rips from different machines to be compared.