CD rippers

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 23 May 2013 06:39:37 R Kimber did opine:

> I have experienced problems with rippers that use cdparanoia in that
> with some CDs I cannot get a consistent rip - i.e. the md5sum is
> different each time I try to rip the same track, even though the
> ripping program reports a successful rip.
> 
> Is there an alternative to using cdparanoia?  Or, at least, is there a
> ripping program that will report that cdparanoia may not have made an
> accurate rip?
> 
> I've tried rubyripper, audex, k3b, and ripoff.
> 
> - Richard.

1. cdparanoia has some switches that can make it more verbose.

2. If the errors are effecting the md5sum (it only takes one bit flip to do 
that!) then either the drives lens is dirty, or, far more likely, the disk 
is scratched and cdparanoia is guessing.

3. Lens cleaners are sold at Walmart etc.

4. Scratch fillers are too.  One emergency scratch filler is the grease 
from the side of ones nose, we've been using that to reduce negative 
scratches in the darkroom when developing and printing photographic films 
since the time of Mathew Brady if not before.  I once used it to fill in 
some of the deeper scratches on a CD I loaned out that came back trashed.  
It made it playable, where before I greased it, it wasn't.  Smear it on the 
worst damaged area, and polish gently with a cotton swab.  Vaselene works 
too, and is probably cleaner yet. It doesn't usually take very much, if the 
disk actually looks greasy, waste 2 or 3 cotton balls to clean off the 
surplus, all you want is what fills the scratch(es).

5. Basing a good rip on the md5sum's consistency is probably being too 
paranoid, the ear is quite capable of ignoring a flipped bit 99.9% of the 
time.  Data disks are another, completely different horse, with all sorts 
of error corrections built into the encoding, so they are much better 
equipt to tolerate a flipped bit than a music disk will ever be.  We are so 
used to data being read flawlessly that we think a music disk should be 
too.  Tain't so.

Cheers, Gene
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
My web page: <http://coyoteden.dyndns-free.com:85/gene> is up!
My views 
<http://www.armchairpatriot.com/What%20Has%20America%20Become.shtml>
A woman can never be too rich or too thin.
A pen in the hand of this president is far more
dangerous than 200 million guns in the hands of
         law-abiding citizens.