Tips for a Personal Music Archive

[Nicholas Leippe]

On Tuesday 04 March 2008, Mike Lovell wrote:
> Nicholas Leippe wrote:
> > I have my own custom script for ripping & encoding.
> > I rip each cd twice, once each from two different drives, and compare
> > them. I have calculated the offsets of each drive and use the -O flag on
> > cdparanoia. Since I have two drives, and two cpus, I wrote it to do all
> > five tasks at once in a pipeline fashion--2 ripping, 1 diffing, and 2
> > encoding simultaneously.
>
> I must say I think that is the most through audio ripping I have ever
> heard of anyone doing. Can I ask why you do this for ripping your CDs?
> Is it just to make sure you get an exact copy? Is there a benefit in the
> quality of the audio? I am impressed. But still wondering why.

Well, if you're gonna archive, better archive every last, pristine bit, IMO.
You're only gonna archive it once, then use it many times, so it's worth it up 
front to me. If you just wanna rip to mp3 to listen to, then you don't need 
to go through such lengths. But, depending on the offset of your drive, you 
may miss half a second or so if you don't at least use the correct offset 
when ripping. That can make a difference on some albums that have no pause 
between tracks (such as live recordings).

On the acuraterip forums, you'll find droves of people that are this 'picky' 
about ripping their data. So, I don't think its totally uncommon, although 
it's definitely a minority.

Most people just stick in their disc and let itunes, wmp, or real jukebox rip 
it for them, with default settings, and they are happy with it. Play any of 
those on a decent set of speakers and you can hear all the horrible 
artifacts. But, the masses just don't really seem to care. I've often heard 
people play music tracks that had a horrible skip or static in the middle-- 
they just tolerate it, kind of in the same manner that they just tolerate 
windows crashes...


Nick