[nickoconnor]

Hello,

I am new to your site so please forgive me if if am asking a simple question in the wrong place..

I am considering buying a PC sound card like the ASUS Xonar Essence STX in order to listen to music that I have 'ripped' ? from my CD's.

My question is that I am using mediamonkey to convert the CD music to FLAC and storing on a hard drive, but I am doing this on a PC so the CD drive is just a PC drive and probably poor quality.

Please tell me if I am wasting time and money if I think the PC CD-ROM drive is doing a good job of copying the contents of the CD in high quality. I suppose I mean that I assume the copying is digital, meaning bit for bit, that the result is digitally perfect...

What difference is there in having a hi fi quality CD drive if the result is surely digital ie bit for bit?

Am I not copying the 'data' perfectly? Or, am I being stupid? I really don't know... be gentle with me...

Kind regards,

Nick.

[Mr_Orange]

It's not the CD drive you need to worry about it's the software you use to do it. Exact Audio Copy is the de-facto standard, and happens to be free. Once you have downloaded, have a look at this guide to set it up: A Perfectionist's Guide to Audio CD Extraction and Lossless Compression.

HTH.

[BlueWizard]

The CD drive in the computer doesn't care what is on the disk because the CD drive doesn't have to process it. It just take digital data and transfers it into the computer.

You question whether you can trust the CD drive with your music, but you trust that same CD drive with your digital computer data. You install programs from the CD with no problems. You run games from the CD.

Keep in mind, that for what you are doing, there is no conversion to audio, it simply takes raw digital data from the CD drive, and the computer software converts it to another digital format.

Also, consider that this is not real-time playback of the audio. The computer can read and re-read the CD drive many times if it encounters a read error, and it shouldn't affect the resulting file in any way. You are not playing the data on the CD, you are simply transferring it into the computer so the software can reformat it.

I think it would be a pretty safe process.

Steve/bluewizard

[TheBlueFalcon]

Originally Posted by Mr_Orange

It's not the CD drive you need to worry about it's the software you use to do it. Exact Audio Copy is the de-facto standard, and happens to be free. Once you have downloaded, have a look at this guide to set it up: A Perfectionist's Guide to Audio CD Extraction and Lossless Compression.

HTH.

+1 to the above. I've used EAC with Accurate Rip for ripping CD to FLAC in the past and it gives excellent results. Certainly the best way to do it for the highest quality possible.

[nickoconnor]

Thank you. So I should feel happy knowing that (OK, it's Mediamonkey) is doing the conversion to flac, that something like the ASUS Xonar Essence STX will be quite good at delivering good sound to my headphones which are Sennheiser 595's - I actually bought these because I read positive comments on this site and they cost me less than £100. I currently have a creative audigy card and though I love the sound, this site says I can do so much better... I am 50 in a week so I wont have perfect sound but am I being sensible with this ASUS card and these Headphones? And... do I need to re-record in Exact Audio Copy instead of mediamonkey becaues it is much better?

[Autopilot]

Originally Posted by BlueWizard

The CD drive in the computer doesn't care what is on the disk because the CD drive doesn't have to process it. It just take digital data and transfers it into the computer.

You question whether you can trust the CD drive with your music, but you trust that same CD drive with your digital computer data. You install programs from the CD with no problems. You run games from the CD.

Keep in mind, that for what you are doing, there is no conversion to audio, it simply takes raw digital data from the CD drive, and the computer software converts it to another digital format.

Also, consider that this is not real-time playback of the audio. The computer can read and re-read the CD drive many times if it encounters a read error, and it shouldn't affect the resulting file in any way. You are not playing the data on the CD, you are simply transferring it into the computer so the software can reformat it.

I think it would be a pretty safe process.

Steve/bluewizard

Unfortunately, thats not actually true when ripping audio. Errors can, and will, be introduced. Its not the same as copying data files from say a game CD, it works differently. Without getting too technical, the error detection and correction with the audio CD standard is very limited, they dont have the file structure of a 'data' CD or error correction. To get the best rip you really want to be using a decent program and one that uses Accuratrip(tm) - such as EAC mentioned above, but i personally recommend DBpowerAMP almost every time. The quality of the rips are proven to be just as good the vast majority of the time, plus its much easier to use, more flexible and does album art too.

Sorry, Steve. I feel like i am picking on you sometimes!

[BlueWizard]

No problem AutoPilot, I might have over generalized the point I was making.

One additional suggestion, if you want fast clean rips, then kill all the unnecessary software that is running during the rips. All those unnecessary programs that auto start, like chat programs, pre-loads for programs you not using, auto-updates, and other misc stuff. Kill all these, as they are stealing computer time that could be dedicated to reading the CD and making the file conversion. Best, not to be surfing the web during rips or watching YouTube videos.

Let the computer dedicate all its power to one primary task, making clean rips.

Just a thought.

Steve/bluewizard

[nickoconnor]

Thank you all for advice, much appreciated!

Nick.

[andy1249]

EAC when set up for really accurate ripping will do the job at 1x , that means it takes as long to rip the CD as it does to play it.

Other programs will rip at anything up to 40x and more , ripping at such speeds is just asking for errors and indeed I have some tracks ripped at this speed that sound like they were taken from a battered up Vinyl record.
There are audible pops and clicks in the track where there should be none.

For me , the fastest speed I would allow is EAC set up as per the link above and set to burst mode , which will rip at approx 4x .

This really is as fast as you should go if you want CD quality rips.

[TheBlueFalcon]

There are a lot of settings to play with in the FLAC command line. I did some testing a few years back to work out what worked best for me and have it saved somewhere (but can't find it at the moment). I believe you can use basic compression settings to first rip everything to your hard drive relatively quickly and then run a batch process to further reduce the total storage size without any difference to quality. Is that correct?

[guest2]

I use easy cd-da extractor to convert my cds to FLAC. Seems pretty good quality through my Xonar Essence ST. I use NS1000 headphones and B&W 603 speakers.

[nickoconnor]

Just a quick update for everyone that kindly responded to my questions.

I have just bought a Xonar Essence STX. It took me a while to save up for it hence the long time to update you all...

I have to say that I am completely staggered by the sound that this card reproduces, it's simply incredible!

All this time I have been listening to music I love via my old Creative Audigy 4 and thinking that's what it just sounds like (I don't have a Hi Fi system), pretty much the same through my Creative Zen portable player.

Ripping my CDs using EAC (as advised) and playing the results through this card is, well, almost like a religeous experience!

Sounds I never heard, tiny bits of detail, just fantastic. I would say it is about the same change as when I changed from Video tape to DVD.

Thank you so much for your help and advice!

Nick

[Euphonious]

Originally Posted by andy1249

EAC when set up for really accurate ripping will do the job at 1x , that means it takes as long to rip the CD as it does to play it.

Other programs will rip at anything up to 40x and more , ripping at such speeds is just asking for errors and indeed I have some tracks ripped at this speed that sound like they were taken from a battered up Vinyl record.
There are audible pops and clicks in the track where there should be none.

For me , the fastest speed I would allow is EAC set up as per the link above and set to burst mode , which will rip at approx 4x .

This really is as fast as you should go if you want CD quality rips.

Not necessarily. The best way to tell if your system is capable of ripping a disc at high speeds is to use the AccurateRip feature that's in EAC and dbPowerAmp. That creates a checksum of the ripped data and compares it to one in the AccurateRip database, which is built up by hundreds of people who have ripped the same disc. If the checksum matches, then you can be positive that your rip of the CD is a faithful one, irrespective of the speed you used.

It's pointless ripping discs at 1x or 4x when you can get a provably accurate result at a higher speed.

Originally Posted by RobertPaulson

There are a lot of settings to play with in the FLAC command line. I did some testing a few years back to work out what worked best for me and have it saved somewhere (but can't find it at the moment). I believe you can use basic compression settings to first rip everything to your hard drive relatively quickly and then run a batch process to further reduce the total storage size without any difference to quality. Is that correct?

Basically, yes. The 'quality' setting in FLAC is a bit misleading - it doesn't affect the sound quality, because FLAC is a lossless format and hence always preserves the input audio exactly. The higher quality settings just produce a smaller file at the expense of longer encoding time. They keep the same data but compress it more efficiently using a more CPU-intensive process.

[Mr_Orange]

Originally Posted by nickoconnor

Just a quick update for everyone that kindly responded to my questions.

Good stuff. Glad to hear you're all sorted and enjoying the fruits of your labour. EAC can seem a bit daunting at first but once set up properly, it's a piece of cake.