BBC MM CD Bruckner 3

[Dave2002]

I unwrapped the BBC MM CD number CD MM 335 with Andris Nelsons and the CBSO - Bruckner 3rd Symphony yesterday. Put it into my iMac and ripped the tracks - since I tend to listen to most CDs that way these days, either on the computer or via an external system with a DAC.

Then I tried to listen. Not quite white noise, very distorted, sounded like a corrupted digital channel.

I tried listening directly to the CD in the iMac - same result.

I've not tried it with my CD player yet. The iMac is still working fine with other CDs AFAIK.
Maybe I can get it ripped if I use a much slower reading rate - maybe have to use EAC on another machine. I'll try it later in other machines.

Has anyone else had such a bad experience with a CD? It doesn't look faulty, but it doesn't play well.

[Roehre]

My copy plays well in CD-players - haven't ripped it, so no comment about that.

[salymap]

Mine sounds much better than the latest Respighi and Prokofiev one Dave. Ordinary little CD player.

[Flosshilde]

Dave, what do you do with the CDs afterwards? Do you ever listen to them on a CD player, or do you throw/give them away? I'm just wondering why anyone would go to all that bother when it's so simple to pop the CD into a player & listen to it.

[Bryn]

Dave, are you using iTunes, and if so, have you updated to the most recent version (at the weekend, IIRC)? I have no problems playing or ripping with the disc on a Windoze machine.

[Dave2002]

Dave, what do you do with the CDs afterwards? Do you ever listen to them on a CD player, or do you throw/give them away? I'm just wondering why anyone would go to all that bother when it's so simple to pop the CD into a player & listen to it.

The theory is that doing this will reduce storage needs.

At present I have a number (maybe 10 - I've lost count!) of IKEA CD storage units. Each holds 180 CDs. There is an overflow of CDs and quite a number of boxes containing CDs lying around.

The IKEA units aren't too expensive - typically between £15 and £20 - as I recall they are Benno CD towers (they may also be called DVD towers), so that works out at approximately 10p per CD. The storage units themselves also take up space - maybe not a lot, but overall it's more than the CDs by themselves.

Using a modern hard drive, costs are around 10p per Gbyte (depends on model, obviously) - and with lossless compression you can get 3-4 CDs per Gbyte. Thus the cost of storing a CD on a hard drive is approx 3p. This doubles if a back up hard drive is used for safety purposes. A modern hard drive (or several, if needed) can easily fit in a space the size of a shoe box.

Once the CDs have been ripped, they do not need to be played again, unless they are needed for mobile devices, playing in the car etc. Many can be put in boxes, and stored. The potential for this pleases some other occupants of our house.

For playback the route is via a computer network to one of several devices, including a Logitech Squeezebox fed into a DAC. This device can be controlled quite effectively using a cheapie program running on an iPad.

The end result is that I can type in a search term, such as Shostakovich, and almost immediately get access to all the Shostakovich CDs which have been ripped. Playback of any track is almost immediate.

Another option is to use an iPod to store some of the CDs, and this gives mobile access - though having said that I don't do much that way because of the very, very (shall I go on? ... very, very ......) irritating way that iTunes/Apple insists on linking iPods to a single device, and the threats to delete all data if sync to a new device is attempted.

It's still too early to tell whether this is a good approach, as I've not put all the collection on to hard drives yet. The time taken to rip each CD could be considered a disadvantage, but as I've discovered that I can do that in the background on my computer while I do other things, and that seems usually to have minimal impact on the speed of the computer, then it's perfectly feasible to do maybe 10 CDs/hour, while also carrying on with other work.

One other reason is that this approach may also provide better sound quality. As it happens my CD player is very good, but the route through the Squeezebox and DAC is also very good. I can also listen via other more portable Squeezebox devices.

To summarise then, the main reasons for me are: 1. storage convenience, 2. ability to access music very quickly, 3. possibly better sound quality, together with 4. flexibility. Re 4., once the CDs have been ripped, it's very quick and easy to transfer the files to other devices, though it is of course essential to back up the files, to avoid having to repeat the ripping process.

There are some disadvantages, which may be CD dependent. I'll not address these now.

[Dave2002]

Thanks to those who've commented on the problems with this CD so far.
The problem has now arisen again, with another CD - the Mahler 1 from the CFM magazine.
It seems a bit hit and miss right now, as one of the charity shop CDs (strange CD of Kletzmer with Itzhak Perlman) I had from a week ago went straight in without problems when I did a test a few minutes ago, but with two failures it's beginning to look like a drive problem.

I tried ripping "hands off" - not trying to do anything else at the same time, but that didn't seem to solve the problem.

I hope that my Applecare package is still active - I might have to call on it to get the drive fixed, cleaned or replaced.
Boring, as I was just getting the hang of this.

I'll see if I can find my cleaning CD - maybe there's dirt on the lens which can be flicked off.

Oh - the BBC MM Bruckner 3 CD seems OK in my CD player, and I've just listened to it right through.

Very odd though, I tried another of the charity shop CDs - Amanda Roocroft - ripped fine, so seems to be an intermittent problem, but the two CDs so far which didn't work have failed repeatedly. The charity shop ones are both EMI - don't know if that's significant. The two failures are both magazine issues - though I'm sure I've had magazine CDs working before now.

[barber olly]

Just tried, both CDs rip OK on Windows Media player.

[Dave2002]

May have solved it - but a pain ...

I tried various things with iTunes, including using a totally different machine. Same result - very distorted sound. I also tried using a different codec in case it could have been a codec issue, but same result with MP3 as ALAC. It is starting to look like a software issue, rather than a hardware one.

Finally switched to PC and used EAC, which took some time, then copied the file back to iTunes via a USB stick. Now works and quality is really quite good.

I'm apparently not the only one to have had problems - see http://www.hifiwigwam.com/showthread.....any-idea-why

There are several possible reasons why these problems have occurred. One is that the discs are just not very good. My experience if that is the reason is that usually switching drives makes a difference, but I'm now suspecting that isn't the reason. Another reason is that they might have extra coding, or DRM embedded, which causes problems with iTunes.

Now I need to find a quick way to generate the appropriately encoded tracks. Using EAC seems just a little tedious, and it might be quicker to use other tools, as long as the problem isn't to do with the discs actually being faulty and needing the full blooded error detection and correction which I think EAC uses.

[johnb]

EAC and dbpoweramp are the two ripping programmes that are standard recommendations for bit-perfect rips. (CD players tolerate a certain amount of faulty data from the disc.)

From what I remember, EAC works by making multiple rips of a sector until two are identical. At the end of the rip it also compares the checksums of the tracks with data in AccurateRip to ensure it is ripped accurately (though different issues of the 'same' CD can have different checksums). Using EAC, the total time to rip a CD to Flac is about 6 to 8 minutes on my PC and I certainly don't find it tedious.

Having said that, the HP drive in my five month old HP computer is appallingly slow with EAC so I use either a 10 year old LaCie external DVD drive or a more recent LiteOn external DVD drive - both of which take about 6 to 8 minutes.

[Dave2002]

john

I thought I was doing really well with iTunes until I hit this problem with just these most recent CDs. If I'm going to have to use other tools it'll slow me up a lot, and I'll start to wonder if it's worth it. Currently just testing out Foobar, though so far I think it's going for WAV, and I'll need to run the output through another processing step to get FLAC or ALAC.

Problems like this also make me wonder whether everything else has worked OK, though most ripped CDs do sound OK. So far I couldn't say that I've noticed any improvement when using EAC - these latest CDs excepted of course.

[johnb]

Dave,

I really don't understand why anyone would rip CDs with Foobar when they have EAC, especially as it will automatically rip to flac, saving the tags, if you set it up properly.

Just use the Configuration Wizard (EAC/Configuration Wizard) to set the software up for your system and for the drive you want to use.

When it prompts: "Besides the possibility of uncompressed extraction, I would like to be able to compress my files"

Choose "FLAC".


The process I use when ripping a CD using EAC is:

1) Action/Detect Gaps

2) Database/Get Information from/Remote freedb
(This gets the track and album info - not always 100% correct and it might not be in the format you prefer but it is, at the very least, a good starting point.)

3) If necessary - edit the track and album information

4) Select all the tracks

5) Action/Copy Selected Tracks/Compressed
(This will save the tracks in the format you chose in the configuration wizard, i.e. FLAC, and set the FLAC tags according to the data. If you want to edit the tags or set ones that EAC doesn't cater for, such as Composer, you need to use other software. Many people recommend mp3tag but I often use Foobar.)

It might seem a bit complicated at first, but after doing it a couple of times it becomes second nature.