Fast ripping of CDs (and storage)

[dave2010]

Sorry Dave, I'm a little confused cos I don't have all the info.

Are you saying you have FLAC files that are, say, 50 mins long, and that you want to add 'chapters' for want of a better word, to break them into smaller parts?

Is this to aid navigation, or playback, so that you can skip to a particular section?

If so, you can actually do this in iTunes, but it is a little convoluted, but if you were only doing it a few times or so it wouldn't be too bad.

Lee

Sorry - very long delay between your post and this reply! Work and other things have been distracting me.

Actually the FLAC files could be several hours long, which is part of the problem. I have some which are a few hours long, and I've tried (and failed) to generate files which would have been perhaps 10 hours long. The reason is that I have tried to record unattended, when I might have been out for at least five hours. I didn't particularly want to do this, but it seemed the only way to (try to) get the material, not having software which could be configured and scheduled to turn on/off at the appropriate times.

It's not immediately high priority, though it would be good to know how to split long FLAC or ALAC files - preferably without having to spend a lot on software. I always try free software first!

It wouldn't be necessary to do this too often, though I'd hope it wouldn't take more than (say) 15 mins per large file, or maybe it could be done as a batch process so that I wouldn't have to monitor it.

[webby]

Dave, may I ask how the recording is done in the first place? Is it an Internet radio recording? If so what software do you use to record?

[dave2010]

Latest problem is with ripping with iTunes on a Mac. Twice in the last few days I've had CDs which wouldn't rip well at all - the sounds produced are truly abominable.

I suspected my CD drive, but actually it does seem a bit random. The two CDs which have failed to rip properly are both from magazines. One is of Bruckner 3rd Symphony, from the BBC Music Magazine, while the other is of Mahler's 1st Symphony, from the Classic FM Magazine (which is very good, btw, and a bargain at under £5 - Horenstein and the LSO). These CDs play in CD players, but won't rip on the Apple. I thought this fault was going to go hard, but when I put in a couple of EMI CDs bought in a charity shop, they went in without a murmur - and the results are good.

Maybe the freebie magazine CDs really aren't made on such good plastics.

[Stratmangler]

Latest problem is with ripping with iTunes on a Mac. Twice in the last few days I've had CDs which wouldn't rip well at all - the sounds produced are truly abominable.

I suspected my CD drive, but actually it does seem a bit random. The two CDs which have failed to rip properly are both from magazines. One is of Bruckner 3rd Symphony, from the BBC Music Magazine, while the other is of Mahler's 1st Symphony, from the Classic FM Magazine (which is very good, btw, and a bargain at under £5 - Horenstein and the LSO). These CDs play in CD players, but won't rip on the Apple. I thought this fault was going to go hard, but when I put in a couple of EMI CDs bought in a charity shop, they went in without a murmur - and the results are good.

Maybe the freebie magazine CDs really aren't made on such good plastics.

I'd almost bet cash that the format of the discs that do not rip properly is non standard.

[dave2010]

I'd almost bet cash that the format of the discs that do not rip properly is non standard.

Chris

You may be right. I've now checked these discs on a different machine. They don't rip in iTunes on that either, so probably not a hardware issue at all.

Total pain though. I think there's a route using EAC on PCs - which might give acceptable results, but I hate having to turn a PC on, and then I've got to transfer the data back to Mac OS anyway. I tried EAC and got one track converted, but it was a slow business. The sound quality seemed OK.

I tried Foobar, but although the results were better than the Mac rips, the overall sound was still dreadful when I put the files back on to Mac OS X. Sounded like overload distortion on loud passages, and both of the CDs mentioned have quite a few of those.

I still wonder if something significant has changed in iTunes recently (Mac OS version).

I shall now investigate other ways of ripping on the Macs, to avoid having to have anything to do with PCs (though currently typing this on a PC laptop). Max and XLD maybe?

[webby]

I've lost track of how often I've mentioned XLD. I'm not saying it'll work, but it deserves a chance.

[Lodgesound]

Try Exact Audio Copy (EAC).

Very quick and accurate (and free) - it will even compare extracted errors with an online database to varify data transfers. Needless to say it puts in all track titles and artists etc..

Also try ripping to WAV files - using FLAC is all well and good but you actually save very little in terms of space and in any case harddrives of large capacity are so cheap now. Couple this with the fact that WAV's are what the industry uses and can be relatively easily track marked in software as they are completely uncompressed.

[Stratmangler]

Chris

You may be right. I've now checked these discs on a different machine. They don't rip in iTunes on that either, so probably not a hardware issue at all.

Total pain though. I think there's a route using EAC on PCs - which might give acceptable results, but I hate having to turn a PC on, and then I've got to transfer the data back to Mac OS anyway. I tried EAC and got one track converted, but it was a slow business. The sound quality seemed OK.

I tried Foobar, but although the results were better than the Mac rips, the overall sound was still dreadful when I put the files back on to Mac OS X. Sounded like overload distortion on loud passages, and both of the CDs mentioned have quite a few of those.

I still wonder if something significant has changed in iTunes recently (Mac OS version).

I shall now investigate other ways of ripping on the Macs, to avoid having to have anything to do with PCs (though currently typing this on a PC laptop). Max and XLD maybe?

Have you tried exploring the discs?
I remember that the Prince freebie a couple of years had something like 99 tracks on it, most of 'em being silence, and a few at the beginning containing the actual music files.

[dave2010]

I've encountered yet more discs which won't rip properly on Macs using iTunes, and it is repeatable across different machines. Someone else who has been "on the case" has detected that in some cases these are CDs which have pre-emphasis, though apparently in theory iTunes should be able to deal with these.

As yet this hasn't been singled out as the reason, or even the only reason, but it does seem that some CDs will almost certainly cause problems for iTunes rips.

One example is this CD set from Brilliant, which originates from BIS - http://www.selections.com/AH736/mart...chtext=Martinu (Amazon have this too, but this supplier sometimes has very low prices). From this set, the first two discs will not rip acceptably, but disc three, which has Symphonies 5 and 6 will. It'd be interesting to know if the original BIS set also has this problem.

Although issues might be due to the CD material, this seems unlikely. In this case it's probable that all the CDs are physically made using the same materials, so it's a coding issue. One possibility is that because of licensing issues Brilliant has deliberately put some form of spoiling code into the data, to prevent the disc from being copied, but it seems unlikely, as anyone who really wanted this would copy from the BIS discs. I'm not sure if I can check this, or find a copy of a BIS original disc to check, though I do have other BIS discs, and it might be that the problems are associated with them.

BIS discs often have a pretty amazing dynamic range, so that might have something to do with it - maybe they always use pre-emphasis and/or other techniques. For example, could they have used HDCD plus pre-emphasis? I don't know if that's actually possible - maybe HDCD does that anyway.

I don't know an easy way to check for pre-emphasis or special formats when a CD is put into a computer drive. I think possibly dBPoweramp might do this, but as it's a Windows program I'm not over keen to use that. Maybe there are Mac programs which can check formats?

[dave2010]

Maybe this post elsewhere will have some effect - https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3472347 or not, as the case may be!