audio-talk

Why not?

Indeed, you would expect nothing less ! Well.. the treble seems to lose some tone and detail compared to CD. Things like bells, triangles, wood blocks on what I've checked so far ( eg. tracks 6 & 7 on the Eno/Byrne album ) sound a bit less real. There's a bit of compression of overall dynamics too, I think.
I suppose the files are about 0.4x to 0.45x the size of a full CD even if they are referred to as 'uncompressed'.
Maybe there are some gains to be had from swapping USB cable - silly as it sounds. I bought a QED one for about £15. I wouldn't even raise this issue with digital except for the fact James reported a worrying experience of changing his USB cable on something recently and finding a significant improvement in sound ( OK, his existing one was old & slightly damaged ) .

I suppose the files are about 0.4x to 0.45x the size of a full CD even if they are referred to as 'uncompressed'.

Check that the files are flac, and that you are using the correct compression. Its not the fact its compressed thats important, its the fact they should be lossless.

OK here : I looked under 'Advanced > Compress or encrypt attributes' and neither box was ticked.
Anything else I should check ?

Have you tried Foobar 2000 to play your digital files Mark ?

I believe it's still free to download.

IslandPink wrote: ↑Fri Sep 01, 2017 12:55 pm OK here :
Capture9.PNG
I looked under 'Advanced > Compress or encrypt attributes' and neither box was ticked.
Anything else I should check ?

Thats fine.

pre65 wrote: ↑Fri Sep 01, 2017 1:08 pm Have you tried Foobar 2000 to play your digital files Mark ?
I believe it's still free to download.

I'm leaving Nick in charge of all this side, Phil, thanks.

IslandPink wrote: ↑Fri Sep 01, 2017 11:44 am Indeed, you would expect nothing less ! Well.. the treble seems to lose some tone and detail compared to CD. Things like bells, triangles, wood blocks on what I've checked so far ( eg. tracks 6 & 7 on the Eno/Byrne album ) sound a bit less real. There's a bit of compression of overall dynamics too, I think.
I suppose the files are about 0.4x to 0.45x the size of a full CD even if they are referred to as 'uncompressed'.
Maybe there are some gains to be had from swapping USB cable - silly as it sounds. I bought a QED one for about £15. I wouldn't even raise this issue with digital except for the fact James reported a worrying experience of changing his USB cable on something recently and finding a significant improvement in sound ( OK, his existing one was old & slightly damaged ) .

I've experienced the same with USB cables Mark, tried four different ones at a do, there were fairly obvious differences..

pre65 wrote: ↑Tue Aug 29, 2017 8:41 am I have trouble with EAC.

Some years ago, Chris (Stratmangler) did me a set of written instructions (with diagrams) and only by referring to them do I complete the process.

They are rather worn and dog eared now, so another set would be nice.

This any use?
It's how I set up the directory structure and tagging in EAC.
You also need to install flac.exe on the machine, and point EAC at it for the post rip compression stage. EAC rips everything to WAV, and the rest is post rip processing.



You can tidy up the tagging using Mp3tag (remember that FLAC supports tags, whereas WAV does not).
I also use Foobar2000 to scan the album for Replaygain values, which can be useful if you want to play random tracks on your Squeezebox/LMS. It's possible to set things to play at normalised levels, which means not having to go leaping across the room to turn something down when something really loud comes on.

The thing with using EAC for ripping is that it's rather laborious - I use dBPoweramp, because it's possible tp set it to do everything that I want to do with a rip in one hit.
It's a nice interface, and on top of all that it's quicker than EAC.
It can cope quite happily with content protection encryption in most cases too.

EAC is great for the money (ie gratis), but dBPoweramp is much nicer to use, and is also worth its asking price.

EAC harks back to an era when CD drives where not always equal and DAE not fully implemented like supporting C2 error correction. It's a bit of a dinosaur. As Chris points out there are neater ways to rip CD's these days IMHO....heck even iTunes does a perfectly good job!

Neal wrote: ↑Thu Nov 09, 2017 12:23 pm....heck even iTunes does a perfectly good job!

Anyone fancy testing this one out ?

I have just ripped a CD twice, once using iTunes, and once using EAC.

With iTunes I ripped to WAV.
With EAC I ripped straight to compressed, which in this case is FLAC. You have to bear in mind that EAC rips to WAV, and then follows this up with post rip compression. In my case EAC is pointed at flac.exe, which performs the post rip compression.
So to level the playing field I used flac.exe to compress the iTunes derived WAV files to FLAC.
As both sets of files were compressed with the same tool, is it not reasonable to assume that they should sound the same?

I could stick the files in Dropbox and provide links on request if anyone is interested ....

I think there is a difference, but it's a subtle one.

Put them where I can get them and I will compare the checksums to see if there is any difference.

Done.
You have PM.

So, that’s interesting. For each track, the files are different. But converting from flac to plain data files, it becomes clear the difference is that the A version has a extra 100 or so empty (0,0) samples at the front and end. But when I strip these out, the two files are numerically identical. And I converted back from the dat file to a wav and listened to them to make sure I wasn’t breaking something.

So from that sample, I would say that iTunes and EAC are doing a identical job converting the data on the CD to a file.

I can't say its a 100% accurate rip, as both methods could be making the same mistakes. Repeating on a different machine with the same CD would be the next step and comparing the results between two machines.

OK - that's interesting.
I'll repeat the exercise using another machine.