Comment by Lammy

Comment by Lammy 2 days ago

If you just want to rip audio CDs, pretty much any USB drive ever made will be fine. If you want a drive that can do everything up to and including UHD BD, try a Pioneer BDR-XS07UHD if you like slot loading or a Pioneer BDR-XD07B if you need a top-loader with snap-spindle for mini CDs or oddly-shaped CDs. These will cost way more than an old USB2-era drive but will be brand new.

You might be able to trawl your local thrift store and walk out with a $5 external drive from the 2000s, but a drive like that should be opened, dusted out, lens cleaned, and rails lubricated with some PTFE grease: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0081JE0OO

Exact Audio Copy is still the gold standard for ripping software, and here's how to configure it: https://zexwoo.blog/en/posts/tutorials/eac-ripping/

Or XLD if you're on Mac: https://zexwoo.blog/en/posts/tutorials/xld-ripping/

amiga386 2 days ago

> pretty much any USB drive ever made will be fine.

This is not the case. Most of the cheap drives on Amazon sold by random capital letters people are complete shit. As an example, the "CB31005" drive doesn't fucking work. It often gets hung up on reading the TOC and won't even admit there is a CD in the drive. If it doesn't hang there, it reads fine for a while, then at some random point (possibly the first point of error) just gives up and fails to read sectors, forevermore, until you unplug and replug the drive.

Even with EAC (which is indeed very good), it just spends hours re-reading sectors up to its maximum number of retries, giving up, and inserting silence. Do not buy a CB31005.

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Lammy 2 days ago

Drat, I didn't realize the six-letter people had gotten to optical drives. The cheapest (materially and monetarily) I'd previously encountered was like a very very cost-reduced LG SATA drive which was $20 but still worked perfectly.

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GTP 2 days ago

> Exact Audio Copy is still the gold standard for ripping software

What makes it the best? I assumed that, since you're just reading digital data, any ripping software would do the same job in terms of quality, and the only differences would mostly be about having some convenient features or a better UI.

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amiga386 2 days ago

CD audio data is indeed lossless data, and has some form of spreading the data physically (CIRC), but has limited error correction. Data CDs have more error correction data than audio CDs, so are more resilient to media degradation, scratches, etc.
When CD audio has errors, more often than not, the CD drive conceals the error -- it interpolates for this unreadable data and doesn't tell the host. Some drives do report C2 errors, but many lie about their capabilities, or have poor implementations.
Secondly, when you ask for CD audio, you can't say "give me the samples from 00:01:23.567 to 00:49:20.211". You can say "seek to 00:01:23.567; start playing; give me the audio samples over ATA as you read them". You can also say "tell me where you think you are on the disc right now". CD drives do not do this reliably, or give reliable answers. Exact Audio Copy is looking to detect this and account for it.
EAC is best used with drives which reliably report wrong locations, i.e. are always wrong by a fixed amount, and EAC can learn by how much by comparing how your drive reports known discs to what's in the AccurateRip database.... but EAC can also work with drives that are unreliably wrong as well, it just has to read the same audio data multiple times over to get a good fix on where that audio really is on the CD.
See https://www.accuraterip.com/ for more details of how CD drives lie to you and let you down

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timcobb 2 days ago

XLD is one of my favorite pieces of software, +1.

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